John Waters: my family values

John Waters in The Guardian:

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, “What? That’s your son.” I was really creating a character for myself and I always had a secret world. When the song I Ain’t Got No Home by Clarence Frogman Henry came out, he sang like a girl and a frog and I thought, “God, I’m trisexual.” But hey; I was a premature baby. I was overly baptised. That’s what happened.

All a parent has to do is make their kid feel safe and mine did. I heard my parents talking about me one day when I was at the top of the steps listening, like all children do, and my mother just said, “Yeah, he’s an odd duck” and then I thought, “OK, all right; they did their best to understand.” My father was horrified by my movies yet he lent me the money to make the early ones. And I paid him back with interest.

My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an Aids benefit we had for the Serial Mom premiere.

More here.