We've gotten responses from people all over the world who
have talked about how encouraged they are to see an actual gay
older couple demonstrating how as role of role models of how
they can actively grow older and don't have to be afraid of being
old. Or that they can be gay and
still have a long term relationship, have a family in
the traditional sense. I'm thrilled to have with us
today the 2 Gay Grandpas of YouTube fame, Grandpa Bobby and
Grandpa Scott. They're known around the world
for their heart warming travel videos and their inspiring
journey as a married couple. Their YouTube channel is 2 Gay
Grandpas Travel. Today we'll be diving into their
personal experiences as gay men, their marriage, their journey.
Welcome Grandpa Bobby and Grandpa Scott Well.
Thank you, Elton. Thank you for inviting.
Us my my pleasure. I originally heard you on a
Rotary podcast talking about your Travel Channel, and I kept
wanting to ask you all these other questions about your life
and how you met and how you had children and how much resistance
you ran into in society and worked with the extended family
and everything. So let me turn the mic over to
you, Grandpa Scott, and tell us a bit of your story.
Oh, thank you. Well, I am the oldest of the
two. I'll be turning 75 in December.
And as our oldest granddaughter says, Gee, Grandpa, you were
born in the first half of the last century.
Thank you very much, honey. So I I was born in a small
mining town in Utah. My dad was a coal miner and
organizer for the 9 mine workers.
And one of the questions I'm asked a lot.
Well, are you LDS? No, I'm actually a baptized
Methodist and at one time I wanted to go into the ministry
and that that of course did change.
I'm one of nine children and, you know, I had a really nice
childhood. It's just I was born in an area
that, you know, I wanted, I wanted to leave.
I, I wanted to go see the world and I, I couldn't wait to have
that experience of going out and, and seeing what all life
had to offer. And as far as my coming out
experience, it was very late in life.
I was married to a really wonderful woman for several
years. We had two, two daughters and it
wasn't until after our marriage ended, which did not end because
I came out. I didn't come out until several
years after the divorce. We had just married very young
and we found our lives kind of separating our interests and and
our friends, but we stayed together up until her her recent
death. In fact, in the family, Bobby
and I and Laura, they called us a sister wives.
So my coming out story is it was a little later in life, which is
different from from Bobby's. I did, I learned and experienced
that I was a gay man in my late 30s.
And so I didn't have any of those kind of issues growing up
as a child that many young people do.
And I guess I was quite fortunate for that.
And I, I had a family on the whole that was really supportive
when I finally did it. My mom and dad, they spent a lot
of time in the South. My mother was born in the South.
So they had a whole lot of the kind of that evangelical
Southern Bible Belt kind of background.
But through getting to know Bobby and falling in love with
him just like I did, it pretty much was a smooth ride for my
mom and dad, a little roughly for several of my brothers.
But they did come around. So I didn't have any of that
kind of angst within my family that many, many of people who
had that coming out experience go through.
And my situation was a little different.
I'm eight years, seven years younger than Scott.
I grew up in upstate New York in a very large Italian family.
So I was always in the cluster of this family.
And we were very Roman Catholic. I used to go to Mass twice on
Sundays. I sang in both church choirs.
I even knew the the the Mass in Latin.
So for me, even at a very, very young age, by age 5 or 6, I was
aware that there was something different.
I didn't have the ability to put a name to it.
I knew I was attracted to other boys and young men growing up,
but because of my religion and because my family was very
traditional Italian, you just didn't bring it up.
You didn't admit it to yourself. I think the only role model that
I could visibly see growing up was Liberace, and I knew I
wasn't Liberace, so I suppressed that.
So I was fortunate, though, that I came to my awareness of my
gayness when I was in college. I went away to college, met a
lot of friends, and two close friends of mine came out and I
realized this was OK, that these were normal people.
And so I made the determination to come out in College in my
final, final year. And I remember coming home for
Christmas that final year saying, OK, you're going to come
out to your family. And of course I was home for
over 3 weeks and waiting for that right time to come out and
have that conversation. Well, finally, by the last night
before my plane had to leave, I said, OK, I've got to have this
conversation because it's never going to work its way around the
dinner table. My father had passed away when I
was a young person, so it was only my mother that I came out
to, and we had that conversation.
And like many parents, my mother said, well, I kind of always had
a suspicion about this. But then she expressed her
concern that, you know, I'd be happy in my life.
And the one thing that she had to start understanding was I
explained to her that there is a difference between being
homosexual and being gay. My mother couldn't quite
understand how I could be proud to be gay.
So when you could be proud to be Italian, a proud but proud to be
gay, she didn't quite understand that.
But she was accepting as long as I was happy, etcetera.
I'm on my way back to college. I stopped in to see my two older
sisters, came out to them and they said, duh, Well, of course
you are. We've known for years.
And I was like, like many people, why didn't you tell me?
So it was, you know, it was very accepting.
My mom then to help herself along joint PFLAG and she became
a very active member of PFLAG. And then a few years later, my
mom joined the Boulder County AIDS Project and she donated her
time, dedicated her life to that organization for 26 years, to
the point now where I still have people up to me telling me how
my mom was like a mother to them when they had no family to turn
to. When she was 70 years old, my
mother wrote the Pope and told him that she had to leave the
church because the church was not accepting of her gay son.
And she became a Methodist. Go mom.
Yeah. Which is interesting because it
may be a little controversial with people, but I still regard
myself as a Catholic. My feeling is I was born, I was
baptized, I was confirmed a Catholic.
I will be a Catholic until the day I die, but I'm not a
practicing Catholic. Of course, I don't agree with
everything my faith teaches me, but I'll still tell you when,
say, we're traveling and around the world and we're in Europe
and we're in a cathedral. I still get those wonderful
feelings of peace and intimacy when I'm in a beautiful stained
glass cathedral. But I just can't accept being an
active part of that religion anymore.
The Church, The church has wandered astray.
Yes, yeah, it was. I always like to say that I
didn't leave the church, the church left me.
Well, even the Methodist Church, you know, it's sad to see how it
has split over the issue and and you, you go, guys, if you say
you have this Jesus centered life, It's about the love that
he spoke about. And it just I may be digressing
you a little bit, but it's just so sad to see the issue of faith
become so riddled with, well, I don't like you because of this.
And you cherry pick out of the the Bible what you want that
kind of fits your own values. Particularly Old Testament,
Yeah. And so that's you're still
feeling very much like, you know, Roman Catholic.
I have kind of gone the other road L tonight of pretty much
just, you know, there's there isn't anything I feel in it for
me in terms of kind of institutionalized religion.
It's not that I don't have a spiritual side, but it just,
it's not within the confines of, let's say a denomination, if you
would. I guess both of us feel that
regarding the mystery of what's beyond life, well, no one is
ever going to fully know it completely.
We'll get there eventually, and that we both feel that as long
as we lead a good life, live by the Golden Rule, doing unto
others as we would have them do unto us, that that is a form of
faith. That is faith in mankind, faith,
respect for our planet, caring for our friends and family, and
that's what guides us through. It's we've been together, now
we're going into our 46 year together. 4640.
Six. Yes.
We met in San Francisco in well after college.
I moved to San Francisco. Scott had moved the year before.
And we met in 1979. And as Scott had mentioned, he
had two children with Laura and the children were five and six
when they came into my life. So they don't remember a time
that I wasn't a part of their life to the point where they
call us both. Dad, Scott is dead.
One, I'm dead too. And our grandchildren, of
course, have only ever known us both as grandkids.
And I think sometimes they're pressed to know which one's
biologically connected, which one's not.
I love that. OK, I love that.
Because there and a lot of times people have trouble.
Well, I mean, isn't there really a difference?
No, no. Both the girls, our daughters
and our grandkids, there's there's no difference.
Yeah, especially when they zealous for ask us for money.
There's there's absolutely no difference.
I don't care. When we were let, let me
interrupt before I forget a couple things.
You know, I see many Catholic adults go to Catholic churches
and are very conflicted. I think it's real challenge.
Yeah. I wanted to comment on two other
things. One was both of you had and a
spiritual sense at a young age. Scott, you said you thought
maybe even of going into the ministry.
That's a story I hear over and over again.
And I think that's why a young queer people often struggle even
more because they're true believers.
They really can sense the spirit.
They're they're gung ho for for Jesus.
They're in the choir and then at some point in their life this
tremendous slap down happens and it just sends them into a
tailspin. The other thing that I smiled, I
didn't interrupt. I almost did that the women in
her life, Bobby knew what was going on before you did and
never said anything. I've certainly experienced that.
Not on the same issue, but other issues where my mother would
sell. I I realized that years ago and
I look at her and I said that would have been nice if you
could have just maybe given me a clue.
Well, also it would have been nice to know that they
understood and accepted because, you know, growing up I felt that
there was no one like me. Now years later, I find out how
many friends in high school actually were gay.
For me, I was the fortunate type.
I was not an isolated recluse or and didn't withdraw and I was
not one of the very challenged mentally young adult.
What I did is the exact opposite is I called what I hid in plain
sight. I was the joiner.
I joined every school club, every activity, every play,
musical. As I said, I was in two church
choirs. I was going, going, going, and
for me what that did is I didn't have to confront that
traditional boy dating girl activity.
I was too busy for that. And I kept involved with theater
and drama folk, which were, as I found out years later, many
other gay students. We contrast that with now the
experience we've had with our grandchildren, which has been so
entirely different. We have 6 grandchildren.
They now range in age from age 10 to 30.
Three of them are LGBTQ, of which one is transgender.
And sharing those experiences with them growing up.
Now, mind you, they had the benefit and I'll say frankly of
growing up in Southern California, which is a more
accepting environment. And, and we were talking about
the generational change, how I came out much younger than
Scott. Our grandkids came out so much
younger. Our eldest came out in high
school. Our grandson started
transitioning in junior high to the point where his teachers
were aware of his new name before he even had the courage
to tell his own father and they would allow him to use the
teacher restroom. The nurses are then she he could
change about the time hadn't totally transitioned.
That's why I said she, but he could he could go in and use the
nurses restroom to change for gym.
The teachers were supportive and and this was in Southern
California and in a very Republican area.
So that was beautiful to see that there was this level of
support from the teachers, from the principal.
And we know that a lot of trans kids and trans adults, they
don't have that support where they are.
You know, if they're, if they're in a deep red state in a rural
area, they don't have that. So I think that's why I love the
idea of your podcast. I love the idea of the podcast
from trans people who, who give access to kids and adults who,
who don't have that support system.
It's so important because when you don't have it, that's when
you get the issue, the suicide ideation, suicidal ideations,
That's when you do get. That sense of isolation.
Oh yeah, it's it can be horrible for you.
Our and our youngest granddaughter.
I swear she came out of the womb as a lesbian.
She was a flower girl or a bring bear at our wedding.
She was six years old at the time.
She was in a long dress. We were getting ready to go down
the aisle. She walked in, she came up to me
and said, grandpa, this is the last time I'm wearing a dress.
And that was and that was, that was it.
She's never worn a dress since. She never even came out.
She just always was her son. She.
Was there? And, and she's the one most,
she's in college now and she's the one most wonderful old soul.
So and it's just so joyful that we are fortunate.
We have a very accepting family, very close family.
As Scott had mentioned, we hope to raise our kids with his
former wife, Laura. We were so close, Laura, Gabe,
Scott away at our wedding. So our kids have had the benefit
and our grandkids have had the benefit of growing up in a very
accepting family community that I know a lot of kids don't have
that ability. We're keenly aware that that
doesn't all. That isn't always the case for a
lot of wonderful. People out there, but we are
seeing, I mean, we see the trends from when Scott, you
know, grew up. He had the role models of his
older brothers getting married and they all got married and
Scott kind of followed suit. My generation changed to we were
the ones that came out in college.
And now we see it translating all the way down to our
grandkids are expressing themselves in elementary school,
in junior high, and that's so much more helpful.
Yeah, there were a lot of there was a lot of roles as a child of
the late 40s and 50s, you know, Missus Cleaver, the woman wear
the necklace and stayed at the kitchen.
Dad went out and came back in at 5 O clock or whatever.
And so many of us in this country, you know, that was what
you saw. That's what you bought into.
And what I think is very dynamic now, both in, in, in media and,
and, and the social platforms, those roles have frequently been
challenged. They're not as set anymore.
We don't hear this anymore. Or which one is the woman in our
relationship. And, and you know, a lot of the
times in the early days that we were together, we get asked that
a lot, you know, and we're not hearing that anymore.
And I, I hope that the young people are not having to
experience that anymore because I think it frees them up to be
who they are, be their authentic selves and just enjoy life as
the people who they are. And it's also now we've had the
opposite extreme. Through our our Travel Channel
and through our podcast Travel Your Heart, we've gotten
responses from people all over the world who have talked about
how encouraged they are to see an actual gay older couple
demonstrating how as role of role models of how they can
actively grow older and don't have to be afraid of being old.
Or that they can be gay and still have a long term
relationship, have a family in the traditional sense.
That was from the first half of my interview with Grandpa Scott
and Grandpa Bobby of the hit YouTube Channel 2 Gay Grandpas
Travel. They also have a podcast called
Travel Your Heart. Next episode, the second-half of
this interview when we discuss parenting, teen suicide and
more. This is Elton Sherwin.
Stay safe, be brave, and God bless.