Tommy Kirk

Tommy Kirk was an American actor known as a Disney child star for Old Yeller (1957), The Shaggy Dog (1959), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964). Disney dropped him when his homosexuality was discovered in 1964, and he was effectively erased from their promotional materials — an erasure he spoke about with bitterness in later years. He came out publicly as gay in 1973, one of the first Disney stars to do so, and reflected in numerous interviews on the cruelty of the experience of being expelled from his career for his identity. He died of a drug overdose in 2021.