Steve Grand says, “Just the hundreds of people who have said, ‘Your story is my story. Thank you for this,’ is enough for me.”
Steve Grand’s “All-American Boy” has become an overnight sensation on YouTube, but there is real pain in the gay country singer-songwriter’s past. The video has received almost 650,000 views since it was posted on July, 2, and is still being shared on social media daily.
The video portrays a young gay man who misreads signals from an apparently straight “all-American” male friend, and is drawn from Grand’s own past. He said:
I was a 13-year-old boy (at camp). One of my counselors was warm and strong and he took an interest in me—not sexually, but as a friend, and it really moved me. I remember leaving with a horrible ache in my heart.
Although the song “All-American Boy” is told from the perspective of a gay man, Grand said he wrote the song from “the purest, most genuine place in my soul,” adding that “It’s not about being gay; it’s about that longing for someone.”
Grand also explained how, when his parents discovered he was gay at the age of 13, they sent him to conversion therapy for 5 years. It didn’t work, but as he told ABC, “I felt like I really was a shame to my parents. I felt like there was no way I could ever make them proud.” However, with this new found success Grand says, “I would die a happy man today. And it’s the first time in my entire life I can say that.”
Watch the video below: