It's a strange situation, feeling remotely sad when a celebrity dies. Cory Monteith, Karen Black; their passings mark significant cultural moments in our lives.
Even the death of "minor" celebrities bring on a wistfulness, like that of Munchkin Margaret Pelligrini, and Cosmo Allegretti, who created and performed the Mister Moose and Bunny Rabbit puppet characters on Captain Kangaroo, as well as the oddly endearing Dancing Bear.
But the death of Sean Sasser denotes a different sort of celebrity. As the real-life boyfriend of Pedro Zamora on the first season of the MTV show The Real World, Sean and Pedro provided viewers with a pair of young, handsome and understated examples of gay men in a media world at the time still rife with stereotypes and homophobia. While Pedro brought a face to youth in the midst of a pandemic, Sasser's supportive nature supplemented that realistic media image with a hope that PWAs weren't always alone.
