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James
July 10, 1995
His Apartment (same as Tapestry’s) Lower Haight
MW: What were you thinking about when you got tested?
James: You know, it has only been recently that I even started to think about me. That's been a really big problem all my life. Even when I went to get tested, Andy was still on my mind. I always put him before me. I thought about how my mom was going to react. My mom is this melodramatic, blow-everything-out-of-proportion kind of woman. It broke my heart when my step-dad told her. I could hear her screaming. I had to leave the house.... She said, "Well, you're not the only one who's affected by it. We're going through it too!" It turned into this thing that didn't deal with me anymore, it was more about how they felt.
MW: Were your family the only people that you told after you tested?
James: I called my friend in LA, and I told him. He cried on the telephone and that hurt me. I hated telling people because they always cried, and I don't like to see people cry.
MW: You never cried?
James: I cry, but- only when I'm alone. I'll tell you something funny about me. Everything that I go through that's a struggle, I find some simple way to get me through it. Even when I wanted to kill myself, I just write a song. Whenever I need to hear something a little bit better than what I'm hearing, I sing.
My mom didn't want me to ever leave home, so she told me I wouldn't be anybody, I couldn't sing, I wouldn't make it. I believed her. And I still do to this day. There's this song, and one of the lines is: "I would have given everything I had, if someone would have said, 'You're not so bad.'" The first time I heard the song, it hit me like an anchor. I used to listen to it over and over.
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