When Joel Grey came out to his mom as a teen she said: “You disgust me. Don’t ever talk to me again”

When Joel Grey was a teenager, he was sexually involved a cantor at his temple – a guy about 10 years older than him.

Grey says it would be called ‘abuse’ now but at the time he did not see it that way. He fell for the guy who broke his heart when he married a woman in the congregation.

This resulted in Grey coming out to his parents.

When he told his mother about it, her reaction was about as bad as it could be short of kicking the future Oscar winner out of the house: “You disgust me. Don’t ever talk to me again.”

And she left the room.

‘And that was that beginning of the end of that. I made all kinds of adjustments as the years went by.’ But he forgave his mom: ‘She herself was not very sophisticated and had kind of a brutal family that she came from. … I totally forgive her and think she’s kind of marvelous. And she gave me my love of art.

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