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

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,12 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.13

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.14

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