Cook, her son, and his lover: legendary singer Barbara Cook opens up about one of her life's lasting pleasures--her warm relationship with her gay son and his partner. (performance).

To gay and lesbian aficionados of musical theater, cabaret, and flat-out superb singing, Tony- and Grammy-award winner Barbara Cook has given at least two lifetimes' worth of joy. In the 1950s she originated the leading roles in such musicals as Candide and The Music Man. Today, among many other achievements, she is a premier interpreter of the music of Stephen Sondheim and will be delighting Los Angeles audiences with her acclaimed solo concert, "Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim," at the Ahmanson Theatre from February 28 through March 9.

What Cook's gay fans may not know is that she is also the mother of an out gay son, 42-year-old Los Angeles--based actor and entrepreneur Adam LeGrant. She speaks of their emotional journey together with the same warmth and clarity she brings to her art.

In her soft Atlanta drawl, Cook recalls the shock of her son's coming-out a decade ago. "Adam was living with a young woman, and I thought--and I think her family thought--they might get married," she says. "He told me that he needed to talk about something, that they were having a problem. I thought he was going to tell me they were going to break up."

Then came the news. "When he told me he was gay, I laughed," Cook exclaims. "I laughed! Because it was the farthest thing from my mind. He said, `Mom, I'm not kidding.' It was like a thunderbolt, and I was very upset. The family and the grandchildren and all that stuff bothered me. But more than that, here was this person whom I thought I knew so well, and here was this enormous part of his life that I knew nothing about. I felt as if I didn't know my own son."

Cook pauses at the memory. "I was very upset," she says. "Not so much at the time, because I was in shock, and I also didn't want to make Adam feel bad. And then I went into a kind of depression--and really, really cried for five days and mourned the son I thought I'd had. On about the fifth day of that, I said to myself, What the hell is going on?"

Cook, who has been candid in the past about her struggles with weight and alcohol, analyzes it this way: "I've always felt that I was not a part of the mainstream of life. I don't know what the hell I mean by that, but it's the only way I know how to put it. When I had a son, that seemed to connect me more to the stream of life. When Adam told me that [he was gay], I felt, I'm no longer a part of the mainstream. And then my next thought was, My son is not here to make me feel comfortable. He's here to be the fullest person he can be, and what I have to do is help him fulfill himself as much as I can. And when that came to me, the whole thing lifted. I love him so much. I loved him then, and I love him now." She smiles. "And I like him," she adds. "That's the thing."

For his part, LeGrant is good-humored about his mother's fame, especially among gay fans. "My mom, the gay icon," he jokes. "Will you get fuckin' real?" After his coming-out, LeGrant remembers, he reassured his mother about AIDS: "I told her that to the best of my ability I was not going to do anything dangerous but that I wasn't going to live in a cave."

While Adam worked on his own life, Cook became involved in Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and while nobody would confuse her with the Sharon Gless character on Queer as Folk, she does admit to administering a friendly maternal nudge here and there. "It got to the point with Adam where I was saying to him, `Aren't you going to find somebody?' I was worried." LeGrant did settle down three years ago with toy designer and licenser Bruce Aquilar, now 30.

Despite her own family's happy ending, Cook hesitates to offer advice to other parents, seeing each situation as "unique" in which "personalities are different." But then, in a voice suddenly unequivocal and impassioned, she adds, "What I will never, never be able to understand is how a family or a mother or father could ever be able to turn their backs on a child because of homosexuality or AIDS. And do that to themselves, much less to their children. I can't understand how anyone could come to that."

Velez writes for AIDSmeds.com and Time Out New York.