After battling academic challenges as a child, he went on to graduate from Warren G. Harding High School in 1991, and then from Central State University in 1997 with a bachelor of science degree in business management.

[4] Prior to his conversion to Catholicism, Gray was a Freemason,[5] and, as such, he authored the book Inside Prince Hall[6] and had become District Deputy Grand Lecturer of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio, an appointed officer in the Ohio Lodge of Research of the Grand Lodge of Ohio, the 2002 Australian & New Zealand Masonic Research Council touring lecturer,[7] elected a Fellow in the Phylaxis Society, co-founder and first editor-in-chief of the Dr. Charles H. Wesley Masonic Research Society, and elected to the Brotherhood of the Blue Forget Me Not, a mainstream US based organization, for his contributions to Masonic education.

After growing up nominally Protestant and frequenting the African Methodist Episcopal Church,[1] Gray has stated he owes his conversion to Catholicism through an encounter in 2004 with Jesus Christ who audibly spoke to him while he was in the process of attempting suicide, and then later attending a Catholic Mass, which eventually lead him to enter the Catholic Church in 2006, while still incarcerated (2004 - 2010) on charges related to embezzlement.

[1][3] From January 13, 2021, to early 2022, the David L. Gray Show - Voicing Truth and Reason was added to the Guadalupe Radio Network lineup.

This weekly talk format program consisted of monologues and guest interviews on various aspects of the Catholic faith, with a politically-right perspective on social topics.