Meryl Streep opens up about how trans teacher opened her eyes to LGBT issues
Hollywood star Meryl Streep has opened up about how a gay and a trans and a gay teacher opened her eyes to LGBT+ acceptance and visibility.
Speaking at a press event for the Florence Foster Jenkins film, Streep spoke in awe of her sixth grade piano teacher who transitioned on summer.
“My music teacher in sixth grade in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, was named Paul Grossman… And the next year he came back, and he was Paula.”
“Who really did that then?… It was very, very unusual. And he came back to school. He had three kids and stayed married, but he was himself, and he led the chorus.”
But her LGBT+ influencers went further back, with an earlier piano teacher and his partner also opening her eyes to LGBT issues.
She said: “My piano teacher and his lover lived in a little house in Berkeley Heights, N.J.,”
“And I would go once a week to have my piano lesson,” going on to describe their house as “magical” and “an entry into exotica”.
Her mother, despite never discussing the men’s sexual orientation, quietly accepted the men, says Streep.
“My mother, who was born in 1915, never said — ‘the boys,’ she called them — she never said ‘the boys are gay,’ or that there was anything that she disapproved of. But it was just that this is a different life, and … they were living under the cover of the love of the people who loved them.”
“They were not acknowledged, and not free to be themselves”.
Streep earlier this year dragged up as Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump… and it was hysterical.
The 67-year-old strongly supports Trump’s rival to the white house, Hillary Clinton, and has spoken kindly about the Democrat front runner in the past.
The respect is shared between the two powerful ladies as Clinton recently revealed she would want Meryl Streep to play her if a film was ever made.
