In 2005, when a documentary on his life, “Ring of Fire,” appeared on USA Network, Griffith discussed his sexual orientation with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.
Herbert, who said he’d watched Griffith-Paret III on ABC as a child in 1962, wrote:
I asked Mr. Griffith if he was gay, and he told me no. But he looked as if he wanted to say more. He told me he had struggled his entire life with his sexuality, and agonized over what he could say about it. He said he knew it was impossible in the early 1960’s for an athlete in an ultramacho sport like boxing to say, “Oh, yeah, I’m gay.”
But after all these years, he wanted to tell the truth. He’d had relations, he said, with men and women. He no longer wanted to hide. He hoped to ride this year in New York’s Gay Pride Parade.
Griffith, who was viciously attacked by a gang of men after leaving a gay bar in New York in 1992, suffered from dementia. In a gripping 2005 piece by Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated, Griffith talks about the difficulty he had overcoming Paret’s death and about his dementia.