I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

evenings at 5 p.m., and figuring that there was a chance other couples had had the same problem, I immediately rang the restaurant – and I got a slot for the following evening.

When Scott and I arrived, the manager greeted us at the door. He said he was so happy to see my name22 on his list for the evening, and that he was a huge fan of Doctor Who and Torchwood. He escorted us to – drum roll – Table #1. We ate an amazing meal, sitting out over the ocean in the soft glow of black coral candelabra and my own contentment.

Have I mentioned how much I love being Captain Jack?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘I AM WHAT I AM’

★

‘I believe in doing what I can, in crying when I must, in laughing when I choose.’

Noël Coward, ‘If Love Were All’

Eleven things you may not know about me

1 I shop at Costco (sometimes daily).

2 I have an obsession with flossing my teeth (sometimes ten times daily).

3 I love kitchen gadgets (size doesn’t matter).

4 I love ‘Swedish Fish’ (a delicious gummy candy my family brings me by the ton).

5 I’m allergic to shellfish (everything swells).

6 I’d love to own my own hotel and spa some day.

7 I have a room full of shoes (organized in plastic containers from … Costco).

8 I put on a massive fireworks display for my friends in July.

9 I get bored quickly.

10 I love a scary read and a frightening film.

11 I’ll watch anything about a crash, cyclone, tornado or hurricane (can’t help myself).

‘Mornin’, dear!’

‘Lovely day.’

‘Hmm, yes.’

‘What’ll you have for your brekkie?’

‘Toast, strawberry jam and black coffee, please, love. Oh, and today, I think I’ll be gay!’

My family tree is a long and ancient one, with branches stretching from the north-eastern coast of Northern Ireland to the midlands of Scotland. The Barrowman name, as with many of all our names, is a derivation of a medieval profession – just like Carpenter, Cooper, Miller, Potter, Reeve, or my personal favourite, Rimmer.1 The Barrowmans were highly skilled and very spiritual workers. I kid you not. Barrow men were paid to guard ancient burial mounds, called barrows, and their duty was to make sure the grave mound wasn’t robbed or desecrated before, I’m guessing, the soul had a chance to ascend to the afterlife. Of course, it’s possible that my ancestors just spent a lot of time in the fields shovelling shit and pushing a wheelbarrow, but I prefer my first version.

When I was asked to participate in the BBC documentary series The Making of Me, one of the things that attracted me to the project was that the documentary would trace my roots in a different way from a traditional family history. Instead of genealogy and lineage, the show explored biology and genetics to help me understand one of my most defining characteristics – being gay.

Since my career began, I’ve always been open about my sexuality, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have questions about it. I was lucky enough to be raised in a family where sex was not a four-letter word. I’m a very curious person. I love the kind of television show where things or events or even people are taken apart to see what makes them tick. Whether it’s a brand-new car or a plane crash,2 I’m intrigued about how and why things work the way they do, myself included.

The producers of the series explained to me that this documentary was going to explore current medical facts, scientific knowledge and psychological tests, many of which they’d apply to me, all with a mind to answer the question: what shapes a person’s sexuality? Or, in my mind, what makes me gay?

Although I think the numbers are shrinking, there are still people who believe that being gay is a lifestyle choice, and that one morning I woke up and decided to be gay. I knew that participating in The Making of Me was a risk because, from the beginning, I agreed that I would go wherever the science, the tests and their conclusions took me. This meant that I had to be open to discovering things about myself that I didn’t already know. The big question the show was exploring through my journey was one of the most interesting questions human beings ask: is our sexuality a product of our nature, or the result of how we’ve been nurtured?

My answer before the show? I was born gay. Homosexuality is part of my nature; it’s as much a part of who I am as the colour of my eyes, the size of my feet and the fact that I can roll my tongue. But my agreement with the producers was that, no matter what happened, I would take the risk of learning something I might not want or like to know.

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.3 Oh, so gay. No. None of that was the least