In a series of interviews, Josh Elliott
of ABC's Good Morning America is speaking out about his gay
dad.
He first publicly discussed his
father's sexual orientation in his acceptance speech for the 2012
GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Journalism Segment. He received
the recognition for his ABC News segment on the life of Jamey
Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old Buffalo, New York-area high school student
who killed himself after being bullied by classmates for coming out
gay.
“When I was 13-years-old, my dad came
out, and he died when I was 15,” Elliott said in his speech. “But
for two years, I got to see him as a man fulfilled and a man in
full.”
Elliott told In Touch Weekly
that his father died suddenly of cardiomyopathy.
He said that he asked his father, who
was in the process of divorcing his mother, whether he was gay. He
answered, “Yes.”
“Looking back now, I'm happy I got to
see my father living his life in full, as a gay man,” Elliott told
the magazine. “He was a crusader. My father stuck up for the
little guy. He made me the man I am today.”
In an appearance Thursday on CNN's
Piers
Morgan Tonight, he explained why he's talking about his
father now: “It just occurred to me that it had been a huge part of
my life that I hadn't really had a chance to sort of completely own,
and it was just one of those moments … It was great to be able to
remember him like that, and to think how proud he would've been to
have been in that audience that night.”