Robert Reed

Robert Reed was an American actor beloved by generations as Mike Brady — the patient, loving architect father — on The Brady Bunch (ABC, 1969–1974). He was gay and deeply closeted throughout his career; the discovery of his homosexuality and his HIV status was made public only after his death from colon cancer — complications of HIV — in 1992. Biographers and colleagues later described a man who found the show's cheerful, wholesome heterosexual family values personally painful to perform given the life he was required to conceal, and who resented the show's creative limitations even as it made him famous.