Oscar-winning actress Sally Field was the recipient of the Human Rights Campaign’s Ally for Equality Award in Washington D.C. Saturday and gave a heartfelt, emotional speech about her openly gay son, Sam Greisman, who introduced her.  According to the Huffington Post, it was the first time Field had publicly addressed her son’s sexuality saying, “It’s Sam’s business not mine to talk about it.”   She went on to describe her son’s road of discovering himself:

“He grew up wanting to be just like his big brothers — athletic and rambunctious, not to mention a little bit macho.  But Sam was different, and his journey to allow himself what nature intended him to be was not an easy one. As his mother, I consider it one of the great privileges of my life to be part it.”

The “Steel Magnolias” star shared her views on today’s families with gay youth, saying that “there are so many children who struggle to understand and embrace their sexuality in families who do not welcome them, with parents that somehow find it acceptable to shut them out their hearts and their homes, and that I find unacceptable.”

Field received the biggest cheers after she told the HRC crowd, ”You’ve changed and are changing the lives of little boys and girls who realize somewhere along the way they’re just different from their other brothers and sisters…and so the fuck what?”

Greisman, an intern at Towelroad, claimed of his mom “that being gay was one more thing she loved about me.”  Field lives just a 10-minute walk away from Greisman in a new West Village apartment and he joked, “She couldn’t be more supportive of me…if anything I wish she was a little less supportive of me.”

You can view the entire speech along with Greisman’s introduction below.