‘Real World’ Icon Sasser Dead at 44

Published 5:00 pm Thursday, August 8, 2013

Friends will gather in Portland’s Terry Schrunk Plaza tonight to remember a man who played a part in television history. Sean Sasser died Wednesday of AIDS-related illness. His 1994 wedding on MTV’s “The Real World” is considered a milestone in the gay rights movement. Sasser’s partner, Pedro Zamora, was part of “The Real World” San Francisco cast.

He and Sasser exchanged vows in a first for reality TV and for mainstream channels.

Robert Goman, who’s on the board for the Cascade AIDS Project and knew Sasser, says he was taken aback at the show’s influence.

“I had friends in LA on Facebook, who said they knew of Sean from those days,” Goman said. “How important, and how vividly they remembered the Sean and Pedro Zamora relationship and seeing that on television as young people.”

Zamora, who was also HIV-positive, died shortly after the show ended.

Sasser came to Portland and found a new life as a pastry chef. In 2009 he married Michael Kaplan, the director of the Cascade AIDS Project. They left town earlier this year when Kaplan got a new job.

Gorman says Sasser was a as a quiet, gentle soul who rarely talked about his time under the lens in “The Real World.”

Sasser was 44.

This story originally appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting.