I Am What I Am (27 page)

The journey to answer the key question was an incredible one, and it started with a series of phone calls to my immediate family, who would have to be involved in the process, and who the producers needed to interview extensively. With Carole and my parents, they wanted to explore through stories and photographs the possibilities of relatives, distant and immediate, who might also have been gay; and as part of the investigation, they needed DNA samples from my mum
and Andrew. Carole and my parents spent hours with the producers, narrowing down images and telling tales that would become part of a filmed family dinner at my parents’ house in Brookfield, Wisconsin.

In typical Barrowman fashion, the major drama of this dinner was not whether we wanted to reveal that one of my mum’s great-uncles, a particularly dapper bachelor who always had lots of young, good-looking male friends surrounding him, was gay, or – and I love this one – that my dad’s great-uncle, also another lifelong bachelor, had frequent ‘hunting’ weekends ‘up north’ but, according to my parents, never seemed to come home with any game.
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Oh, so gay. No. None of that was the least bit controversial. The family drama involved food – as it so often does with us. How much and what should we have? What about dessert? Do we eat before we film? Should we use the good china? Who’s sitting where? We’re not using paper plates. We’re using my good dishes.
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Can we have a drink when this is going on?
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I’d arrived in Chicago from London the day before, and I’d driven up that morning to Brookfield, a suburb of Milwaukee, to film the family gathering. Because a number of the tests I’d be participating in were to be conducted at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, I was staying at a hotel in Chicago. The crew and producers for the documentary had already been in the States for a couple of days and they’d met with and interviewed my family beforehand.

Like many of our family dinners, this one started out relatively subdued – until I asked my mum a question that related to an avenue of enquiry the documentary was exploring: the role of a mother in shaping the sexual orientation of her children.
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I asked my mum if she thought she’d been a domineering mother, and, if so, might she have influenced my being gay?

The look on my mum’s face was a fierce combination of ‘how dare you’ and ‘he so came out that way’. It was also hilarious. Clare’s drink
shot out her nose, Kevin choked a bit on his beer, Carole had to leave the table, and my dad and I completely cracked up – and I mean side-splitting, wee-your-pants cracking up. After that, all professionalism, poise, and most of the script went right out the condo window.

Turner arrived late at the family dinner because of his work schedule. I greeted him at the door with the cameraman in tow. Like a typical Barrowman, Turner paid the camera no mind, sat down at the table, and, with very little prompting, gave his opinion on what he thought made his uncle gay.

‘I don’t care.’

Which, hurrah, is probably the answer you’d get from many in Turner and Clare’s generation.

Along with the Barrowman anecdotes from our family tree, this journey of discovery also involved a number of very intriguing scientific tests, including, at one point, a severe anxiety-causing one. The first assessment I was put through took place on the day following the family dinner, and was carried out at a lab at Northwestern University Hospital. These initial tests were designed to monitor my arousal response to a variety of erotic images.
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The room was like thousands of doctors’ offices around the world. I stripped to my skin, sat on the chair, and electrodes were placed around the tip, base and head of my penis, which was then draped with a towel. First, via a computer screen, the researchers showed me images of monkeys
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and lots of pretty landscapes. Then they transitioned to male nudes, female nudes, male-on-male sex, male-on-female sex, and female-on-female sex.

So there I was: completely naked in this sterile office, with a towel over my crotch, my willy completely covered in wires, watching all variety of porn known to man … and woman, while researchers outside were watching me watching all this stuff inside. I knew exactly what would happen. Nothing. No erection happening here. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. The test was all about blood flow.

The researchers told me that this was a test the US Army had used in the fifties – on men who refused to go into the military because they claimed they were gay. When I thought about it later, those test results must have been a bit of a double-edged sword for the person being examined. On the one hand, you’d get out of the army, but on the other, you’d be out of the closet … at a recruiting station in Alabama in the fifties.
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The researchers explained that they could see when blood started pumping into my penis before anything under the towel noticeably changed. I sat there concentrating on all those images and didn’t get an erection, but, according to the researchers, I reacted exactly the way a normal gay man should have reacted. The blood flow increased to my penis when I was shown the male-on-female erotica. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? There was a boy involved. Absolutely nothing stirred for the female-on-female images, but when I’d viewed the male-on-male porn, I was off the scale. Overall, I got an A+ in that exam.

Guess what? I’m Supergay!
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The test that caused me some distress was one that had to be done in an enclosed MRI machine. I’m claustrophobic when I’m in confined spaces – which is probably why I had to get out of the closet as soon as possible. This time, the electrodes were connected to my brain and my reaction was scanned while I watched similar pornographic images as before, only this time on a screen above my face. Same subject, different positions; plus this time they showed me pictures of male athletes and female athletes in their standard running, jumping and kicking poses. After I’d viewed each image, I had to press a button from one to four, with one being a turn-on and four being not so much.

I was fine inside the machine for the first couple of minutes, until I suddenly felt a panic attack coming on: dry mouth, pulse racing, stomach rolling, tingling in my arms. Most of the time when an attack like this happens, I use what I call ‘distraction therapy’, which means I force my brain to disconnect from the panic by reciting a song, or
imagining my happy place,
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or telling myself a very linear story in my head. If that doesn’t work, I do my best to let the attack run its course, reminding myself, as it does, that panic attacks are not fatal.

Panic attacks are not fatal. Panic attacks are not fatal.

Over the years, I’ve been onstage in the middle of a number and suffered a panic attack, been in the TARDIS with the Doctor and kept one at bay, and, most recently, during my show in Oxford on my concert tour, I let one charge through my system while I sang on.

I’ve been told that panic attacks are often triggered for no reason, but agoraphobia or, in my case, mild claustrophobia can be a catalyst. My mum suffers from panic attacks on occasion, as do Carole and Clare. Because Carole and I were aware of them when Clare had her first one as a child, we taught Clare our ‘distraction method’. Clare mastered this so well that she got to a point where she didn’t need to wake her parents every time she felt an attack coming in the middle of the night; instead, she’d read aloud to herself from Arnold Lobel’s
Frog and Toad are Friends
. Most of the time, this technique works for me too,
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but, ironically, watching porn wasn’t distracting enough.

At one point during the test, as I started to feel the anxiety growing, I realized I was hitting the buttons more slowly after each image. I pushed through the attack and eventually got myself back in control.

The next day, the researchers met with me to explain my test results. They projected the scan of my brain onto a large flat screen and amazingly, as I watched, I could see the panic attack occurring. For the first time I saw my brain in anxiety mode, which was riveting.

During the panic attack, the part of my brain tied to arousal continued to fire, despite my stress. In fact, on the screen it looked as if fireworks were going off in my head; yet my reactions and my hands had slowed down. Even during the panic attack, my brain continued to act homosexually.
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During
The Making of Me
, I also interviewed people, gay and not
gay, who had something to contribute to my investigation. One of the more fascinating, but ultimately more disturbing and sad, interviews was with a man who claimed he’d been cured of being gay.

This man, let’s call him Mike, was in his fifties, and he felt his life before he was cured of his homosexuality was dreadful. He explained to me that he was always getting laid, always hanging out in bars, and always doing the things his parents and his church had taught him were wrong. Eventually, he participated in a ‘cure’ sponsored by his church and now claimed he had everything he had ever wanted. He was married, had children, a nice house and a good job. And yet, to me, he seemed so unhappy, so very angry and so very gay.

Mike believed that, as a gay man, he could never settle down, never have children, and never live on his farm with his white picket fence. While we were talking, he was not really interested in listening. He didn’t want to hear that I had all the things he had, too – a loving family, a beautiful house, a successful and fulfilling career – and that I had achieved them without denying who I was.

I was really interested in Mike’s perspective, but his story profoundly bothered me. He admitted he was making a choice to live as a heterosexual because he felt his true self was ‘wrong’. He claimed he didn’t like himself when he was gay. His solution was to repress his true feelings. That’s all despairing enough, but what was especially perturbing was that he wanted to berate me for living my life openly and honestly as a gay man. I have no problems with others living in denial and being unhappy, but don’t spread your anguish around. I think Mike had scared himself straight by sacrificing his true feelings, and he was angry with me because I represented something he did not think was possible – that a person can be gay and happy.

Mike and I said our goodbyes and I wished him well. I thought a lot about him on the trip back to the hotel. Mike had grown up during the sexual revolution of the sixties, seventies and eighties, as many of us did, and I think he equated his extreme promiscuity with being gay, when, in fact, his promiscuity was a product of all sorts of other things. Gay men do not have a monopoly on sleeping around. Have you ever been in a straight club in London’s West End on a Saturday night?

One of the things I’ve learned over the years, and that I’ll stand up for much more now than ever before, is that I will not tolerate people telling me – either directly or indirectly – that the way I live as a gay man is wrong or, worse, immoral. And while I’m on the topic, I’m taking back the phrase ‘family values’ from fundamentalists and Christian conservatives. I have strong family values. I live according to those values and I share them with millions of other men and women who are living, loving, and creating families in non-traditional ways. End of rant.
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Admittedly, I agreed to
The Making of Me
with an agenda – to try to better understand my own sexuality, while at the same time presenting some understanding to others of what it means to be gay. The documentary succeeded in both of these areas as far as I’m concerned.

What was my answer at the end of the journey? I discovered that we are all complex and unique beings and that our DNA can’t be fully explained … yet. I also learned that our sexuality is decided long before we’re born, and whether or not we are gay is the result of the interaction of many related biological and hormonal factors. One day, scientists might find a ‘gay gene’, but that gene may hold such a myriad of branches that to pinpoint only one as a true ‘gay gene’ may be something for Captain Jack’s future, but I’m not sure it’s in mine.

As it turned out, Andrew and I share a similar genetic code; yet I’m gay and he’s not. What I learned from this was that even if they do discover that ‘gay gene’, it may still be only one of many elements that make a man gay. What made Scott gay may not be the same combination of factors that made me gay.

One of the most fascinating revelations presented to me during the filming was this: the more boys a woman carries in her womb, the more likely she is to have a son who is gay. I was the third boy to occupy my mother’s womb.
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A number of my gay friends are the third or fourth in a family of boys. This is not to say that men who are
the eldest and are gay can’t be explained. Their determining factors may just be a different mix.

I received lots of letters after
The Making of Me
aired in the UK and on BBC America, particularly from young men struggling with their sexuality and from parents of gay children, who were moved and pleased with the programme.

Simon from Leeds wrote a letter that was typical of the many I received from gay men. ‘I came out in 2003, and was basically snubbed by my family, who were unable to accept my sexuality. I was punished by parents who thought I was “making a choice” and intentionally trying to hurt them … I forced my mum to sit down with me and watch [
The Making of Me
]. Through tears and pain, we watched it, and slowly my mum has begun to accept that it is not embarrassing to have a gay son … Thank you for helping bring my family back together.’

And then a letter from April, who lives in Texas, and who sent this to me on Mother’s Day in 2009. April wrote that when her daughter was four, she had asked her, ‘What can I be when I grow up?’

April had replied, ‘Baby, you can be anything you want to be!’

‘Mommy, I want to be a boy.’

April told me that although she had accepted that she had a transgender daughter, she was having a difficult time understanding her daughter’s decision to begin the process of becoming a male. Then she came across
The Making of Me
on YouTube.
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April told me in her letter: ‘I was so moved and captivated that I asked my daughter to watch it with me. We would stop the video and laugh, then argue, then cry and hug.’