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

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.4 Can we have a drink when this is going on?5

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.6 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.7

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 monkeys8 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.9

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!10

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,11 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