Tommy Kirk, a child actor who appeared in classic films such as Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, and Swiss Family Robinson, has died at the age of 79. Kirk’s death was confirmed by Paul Petersen, a friend and fellow Mickey Mouse Club alum, who stated the actor was found dead in his Las Vegas home.

“My friend of many decades, Tommy Kirk, was found dead last night,” said Petersen, whose organization A Minor Consideration has long advocated for child performers. “Tommy was intensely private. He lived alone in Las Vegas, close to his friend … and Ol Yeller co-star, Bev Washburn … and it was she who called me this morning. Tommy was gay and estranged from what remains of his blood-family. We in A Minor Consideration are Tommy’s family. Without apology. We will take care of this.”

Kirk came out as homosexual in a public interview in 1973. The actor said 20 years later that he discovered he was gay at the age of 17 or 18 and believed his sexual orientation damaged his career.

“Disney was a family film studio, and I was supposed to be their young leading man. After they found out I was involved with someone, that was the end of Disney.

“I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy,” Kirk added in the interview. “I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings. It was very hard to meet people and, at that time, there was no place to go to socialize. It wasn’t until the early ’60s that I began to hear of places where gays congregated. The lifestyle was not recognized, and I was very, very lonely. Oh, I had some brief, very passionate encounters and as a teenager I had some affairs, but they were always stolen, back-alley kind of things. They were desperate and miserable.

“When I was about 17 or 18 years old,” he continued, “I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to change. I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that it was going to wreck my Disney career and maybe my whole acting career. It was all going to come to an end.”

Kirk later suffered with addiction, which left him penniless. But, after ultimately abandoning acting, he turned his life around and managed a carpet and upholstery cleaning business for several years.

Kirk grew up in Los Angeles County after being born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1941. He began acting as a youngster and performed in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was noticed by an agent, who helped him land his first role on film in “The Last of the Old Time Shooting Sheriffs,” a 1955 episode of “TV Reader’s Digest.” From there, he featured in episodes of “The Loretta Young Show” and “Gunsmoke,” among others. In 1956-57, he rose to prominence as Joe Hardy in the “Hardy Boys” series “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” and “The Mystery of the Ghost Farm,” which were spinoffs of ABC’s The Mickey Mouse Club.

He also featured as the middle son, Ernst, in Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and in two more Disney films as college brainiac Merlin Jones alongside Annette Funicello.

Kirk starred as country kid Travis Coates in Old Yeller (1957), beside a heroic Labrador retriever, and then transformed into a canine himself — a sheepdog called Chiffonn — in The Shaggy Dog (1959), the first of four films he did with Fred MacMurray.

In 1964, he starred in The Misadventures of Merlin Jones as a bright college student with a penchant for bizarre mental experiments.

Kirk, then 21, began dating a 15-year-old kid he met in a swimming pool while filming the movie. Kirk was fired after Disney executives heard of the relationship through the boy’s mother, however he did return for one more film, the Merlin Jones sequel The Monkey’s Uncle (1965).

Kirk had cameo appearances in films such as “Billy Frankenstein” and “The Education of a Vampire,” his final picture, in the 1990s and 2000s.

His career problems were exacerbated by a couple of minor run-ins with the law over drug possession in the mid-1960s, with a marijuana arrest reportedly leading to his dismissal from the 1965 film How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, starring Annette Funicello and, in the role intended for Kirk, Dwayne Hickman.