Paul Winfield

Paul Winfield was an African-American actor known for Sounder (1972, Academy Award nomination for Best Actor -- one of the first Black men nominated in that category in decades), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Terminator (1984), and extensive television work including Roots: The Next Generations (1979). He was gay, and after living with his Sounder co-star Cicely Tyson for about eighteen months in the early 1970s, he relocated to San Francisco, where he met architect and set designer Charles Gillan Jr.; the two were partners for roughly 30 years, though like virtually all gay Black public figures of his era, Winfield never publicly disclosed his identity. Gillan died of bone cancer in 2002; Winfield, distraught in the years that followed, died of a heart attack in 2004, and the two are interred together at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. His story is part of the larger history of LGBTQ+ African-American performers navigating the compounded oppressions of both racism and homophobia in Hollywood.