John Barrowman: 'Why am I gay?'

Torchwood star John Barrowman has known he was gay since he was nine. But was he born that way or did his upbringing have something to do with it? Here, he explains why he set out to try to solve this mystery, for the BBC One show The Making of Me.

I was in the closet for three hours once in 1972. It was dark, uncomfortable, and really cramped. Plus, I was convinced I wasn't alone (a crumpled jacket lurking in the corner looked pretty dangerous). I was five and my brother, Andrew, then 10, and my sister, Carole, 13, had shoved me into the coat closet because, well, really for absolutely no good reason. I mean what baby brother has ever annoyed his siblings to the point of needing to be locked up or tied down?

This story still gets a laugh from my nieces and nephews. Depending on who's doing the telling, Uncle John was either locked up for 30 fleeting minutes or for three long, tortuous, oxygen-starved hours. As simple as the story is I think it's an apt metaphor for the way I've chosen to live my life - openly, honestly, with no regrets. And, whenever I can, I try to confront the monsters in the dark. As my favourite Jerry Herman song proclaims: "There's no return and no deposit. One life. So open up your closet."

My sexuality has never been deliberately hidden. I'm in a committed relationship with the love of my life, Scott Gill, and he is as much a part of the family as my sister's husband, Kevin, and my brother's wife, Dot. However, just because I'm comfortable with my sexuality doesn't mean that I'm not curious about it and that's one of the reasons I agreed to take this journey to discover the making of me.

I remember vividly when I first realised I was gay. I was nine and a few of my friends were looking at some mild porn in the playground during recess. While they were ogling the well-endowed female models, I couldn't take my eyes off the male members in the shot.

Growing up in the Barrowman household, conversations about sexuality were never taboo. Over the years, we've talked about many of the theories that may explain what makes a person gay. In fact, it's always been a bit of a joke in our family that my dad was responsible - he frequently dressed me up as a girl. In fact, he has some cross-dressing in his own past. He once dressed up as a tarty neighbour, pretended to crash his own party, and proceeded to flirt with the men in the room- all with my mum playing along for the laughs.

Nature or nurture?

The show actually gave me an opportunity to discover whether or not I had ancestors who were gay because years ago if you were in the closet you were so far in the closet you were in the house next door.

During the filming of the programme, I not only revisited my childhood, I was also subjected to a battery of psychological and physical tests, everything from comparing my DNA to that of my straight brother, Andrew's, to watching my brain light up like a fireworks display in response to certain erotic stimuli.

I've always been convinced I was born gay (and am happy that way). But over the years there are plenty of people who have argued the opposite - and some still do today. I really wanted to meet people like this, and the film gave me a chance to do so. In the unresolved argument about whether it is nature of nurture that makes us gay or straight, I was hoping for affirmation that nature decides. The risk I took in filming was that it would be disproved.

But in the end neither happened as the tests didn't provide that clarity. I learned that science has yet to find a fool-proof and definitive genetic test for gayness - at least in my case.

Hormonal explanation?

Yet I did find something unexpected and different. The latest science is concentrating on a whole new area of potential causality that I hadn't thought about at all. It's not genes, but it is biological, looking at hormonal effects in the womb.

Other psychological and physical tests told me more about my sexuality. Like whether I had any latent attraction to women at all. That one really caught me by surprise - at least for a moment. And in word association tests, men tend to be more factual and literal. But women and gay men tend to be much more descriptive and eloquent. I'm glad to say that was true for me as well.

Another test involved looking at moving images of different combinations of men and women. I had to press buttons to signal my reaction while lying in an MRI scanner which also measured my reaction so I couldn't lie.

I'm proud to say that in some of the tests I was totally off the scale.

So participating in this programme was exciting and provocative, but in the end, taking the personal risk to discover what makes me gay was worth it because on a daily basis I get letters from young men and women who are feeling the brunt of our culture's homophobia. If exploring this issue can bring comfort to some of these young people then I think the programme will have done a really wonderful thing.

Written by John Barrowman and Carole E Barrowman

Add your comments on this story, using the form below.

The only thing I'd like to discover about John Barrowman is why he talks with an American accent except when he's in Scotland - what is that about? Its ridiculous and patronising and I'd like to know why he does it?
Lisa G, Falkirk

Good for John. I think it's high time people accept others for who they are and not who they want them to be.
Jenny, Denver, Colorado

Much as I find John Barrowman hugely entertaining and genuinely I do, may I suggest that he is on TV far too much and is running the risk of over exposure. With regard to being out of the closet - he is now so far out that he must surely find it difficult to even see without the aid of a strong pair of binoculars. That said - I'll be there 9pm, BBC1.
Tim Holder, London

Many congratulations to the BBC for airing this programme, the subject matter of which is smart, dangerous, timely and strongly political. Would that it were compulsory viewing at the Lambeth conference...
Kathryn Whitney, Oxford

Can we have a John Barrowman amnesty? He's never off the tv and I'm not sure anyone really cares which side he plays for.
Gary P, West London

I'm glad there are people like him in the public eye that don't necessarily conform to stereotypes and help promote understanding and acceptance of people that don't necessarily fit to what society tells us in normal. And not just homophobia, there's other things that need combating and every single person that stands up against an issue close to them also stands up to all the issues!
Angel Cutsforth, Reading, England

What an amazing family John Barrowman's is. Sadly I don't think all families are as supportive about their children/brothers, sisters etc. being gay. I will look forward to watching this programme this evening.
Celia Proud, Oxford

Typical gay man, using his sexuality to boost his career. Lucky for some, my boss is female which means I can't follow suit.
Angel, Coventry, UK

I don't think that gayness has one simple cause. Rather, like intelligence, it is a subtle interaction of genetic inheritance, neonatal & juvenile development along with environmental factors (e.g. disease, schooling) and upbringing. All of these interplay to make a person more or less likely to be gay in a statistical sense. Nature, Nurture, Personal Choice: Some people want it to be one or the other or a combination to justify their own circumstances or beliefs. At the end it is natural: animals show homosexual tendencies. We should all get used to it. We have enough evidence that homosexuality has been part of humanity for thousands of years and we aren't going to change any time soon.
Sue, Staines, UK

It's really refreshing that the BBC is exploring this issue. So many narrow minded people today just believe blindly that gay is wrong just because that's what they've been told by their parents of friends. Very similar to religion, really - you believe something just because you couldn't be bothered to think about it. Gay people don't go about beating up straight people, yet straights who do so to gays don't think they're doing anything wrong (yet themselves indulge in back-slapping, hugging and touching during footie matches - go figure). Live and let live. In this day and age people really need to wake up and stop hating so much before finding out facts.
Bob, Oxford, UK

I am interested in why the BBC seems preoccupied with homosexuality or to be more precise it's promotion. Is it because according to Andrew Marr the BBC is disproportionately overrepresented by gays? And certainly in positions of influence to promote the gay agenda?
Dave Stevens, reading. UK

This sounds like a great project and it is my hope that it will be shown in Canada at some point. I recently interviewed your Torchwood romantic counterpart (Gareth David-Lloyd) and was pleased to note how he didn't over-react to his character's bisexuality nor did he feel the need to loudly declare his own heterosexuality, as so many other straight actors have. "The Making of Me" will hopefully put a dent in the homophobia and self-loathing.
Kristine Maitland, Toronto, Canada

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Diva: Tapes 'n Tapes

When the now-defunct United Artists Classics acquired the rights to Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981debut feature, do you suppose they had any idea of the tremendous success it would become – that a New York audience would take to it the way their Parisian counterparts did – or was it just dumb luck? The film opened in New York in April 1982 (about a year after its French debut) at the Plaza Theater to mixed reviews. The Times' Canby was all but dismissive of it ("empty though frightfully chic-looking"), but Kael ate it up, calling Beineix "Carol Reed reborn with a Mohawk haircut." Regardless, the film was a smash hit, with almost every show selling out.

I saw Diva for the first time in June of 82, waiting on line for over two hours with a bunch of other New Yorkers eager to see the film that was on everybody lips. Though I was only an impressionable high-school kid, I had seen a fair share of French films, but nothing at all like this. Sure, À bout de souffle was cool as fuck, but Diva was all about the here and now, and its mobylette-riding protagonist Jules became something of a role model for years to come. (I even bought a second-hand Malaguti. Yes, it's pathetic.) The film had a successful run in New York for over a year, and I must have seen it at least twenty times, dragging various friends (and girlfriends) whenever I could.

Diva is once again back in New York for its twenty-fifth anniversary, in a new print (with vastly improved subtitles) courtesy of Rialto. I went to see it a few weeks ago – on the morning of my birthday in fact – and I'll admit that I approached it with trepidation. Would the film hold up after all these years, or would it feel horribly dated? Would Jules, Gorodish and Alba still seem as cool now that my own mobylette years have long passed? The answer is a resounding...yes.

Based on one of Delacorta's Gorodish & Alba novels (which follow the adventures of a Zen-like French musician and his companion, a 14 year-old nymphet), Diva was the genesis of the Cinéma du look, that mini-movement in 80s French cinema that blended high-art with low, and favored the slick style of adverts and music videos, still in their infancy at the time. Though there's no denying that Diva is an incredibly stylized work, Beineix backs it up with enough substance to justify its gloss.

A tale of two tapes, as it were, the film finds our postal worker hero Jules (Frédéric Andréi) caught up in the underworld of both international music piracy and human trafficking. Living in an old garage amidst trashed luxury automobiles and pop-art murals, Jules' one passion is opera, particularly the voice of Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Fernandez), who has refused to commit her voice to record. Smuggling his Nagra reel-to-reel into the opera house, he makes a pristine recording that is of great interest to a couple of Taiwanese music pirates in black suits and mirror shades. A random encounter with a cassette-carrying escaped prostitute sets off a chain of events that includes several murders by awl, a suspenseful chase scene through Paris' streets and Metro, and a lesson in buttering bread.

What's most remarkable about watching Diva today is how much it is a product of its time. Today, Jules' bootleg tape would be available as a torrent within hours after the performance, and the prostitutes damning evidence would be a digital audio file attached to an email. There's something comforting in the limitations of the pre-Interweb all-analog world, where something physical, not virtual, is both the cause and solution to a series of problems.

What hasn't faded at all after all these years is that, beneath its multiple layers of intrigue and super-cool exterior, Diva is a film steeped in dreamy idealized cinematic romance. Jules' all-night dalliance with the diva still stands as one of the most romantic sequences ever, and their rainy dawn promenade through Paris to the Satie-esque theme by Vladimir Cosma will melt all but the hardest of hearts. (Jules' hesitant hand as he reaches to touch her shoulder is pure magic.)

At 17 I believed that Beineix's Paris – where a simple postman can have a platonic romance with an opera star, befriend a roller-skating thieving Vietnamese beauty, be chased by trench coat wearing assassins, and be rescued by a Gitanes-smoking, multiple Citroën Traction Avant owning cool guy – truly existed. Today I consider Diva to be a perfect bit of romantic escapist fantasy. Unlike many films from the 80s, Diva has only improved with age, and it's easy to see why the film had such long legs during its initial run. If you've never seen it, or haven't revisited it in years, don't miss this opportunity.


Diva is currently playing at Film Forum in New York. Afterwards, it is rolling out to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland etc. See Rialto's site for complete details.

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Norman Mailer on His Films

A feature story by Paul Brenner - Copyright © 2007 Filmcritic.com

The Film Society of Lincoln Center fired the opening salvo into the armies of the night for a retrospective of the film work of legendary author and Id Monster, Norman Mailer, in conjunction with a two-week long Anthology Film Archives' series The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.

What made this opening evening of the series the Mailer special was not just the sucker-punch juxtaposition of Mailer's underground Maidstone with above-ground Tough Guys Don't Dance, but the further enticement of a question and answer session with Mailer between films, Mailer having a lot to answer for.

First up was Mailer's 1987 neo-noir masterwork Tough Guys Don't Dance (), based upon Mailer's hardboiled novel of the same name. Saddled with a tone-deaf performance by Ryan O'Neal, the film overcomes O'Neal's obtuseness with John Bailey's atmospheric cinematography (perfectly capturing the dank, off-season emptiness of Provincetown), the thoroughly wacky supporting performances of John Bedford Lloyd, Isabella Rossellini, Debra Sandlund, and Penn Jillette, and great scenery-chewing by Wings Hauser and Lawrence Tierney. And, of course, Mailer's very own purple prose. The one-liners keep piling up like cars in a chain collision:

"Any guy that marries a rich dame deserves everything he gets."
"My blood itself was turning mean."
"It's a full moon tonight, and you know how disturbed you get when it's a full moon."
"Mr. Regency and I make love fives time a night -- that is why I call him Mr. Five Times."

And, of course, the elegantly timed remark by Lawrence Tierney after Isabella Rossellini cold-bloodedly shoots a stroke victim that calls her "small potatoes" -- "I could've told him. Never call an Italian small-potatoes."

Maidstone () is a psycho-dramatic mish-mash of direct cinema, home movie excess, and over inflated ego or, as Mailer called it, "a guerilla raid on the nature of reality." Mailer plays Norman T. Kingsley, a sexploitation film director, who lords it over some poor schmuck's mansion in the Hamptons, holding court while directing a skin flick and simultaneously receiving political delegations as he courts a bid for the Presidency. Mailer lumbers around the film barking and pontificating, most of the time donning a leather cap that makes him look like a backup singer for The Clancy Brothers. Rip Torn is on hand as Kingsley's half-brother Ray, who steals the film at the climactic moment by hauling off and physically attacking Kingsley, accusing him of being Norman Mailer. This remark leads to fisticuffs and the two he-men proceed to pound, kick, and pummel each other until Mailer finally draws blood by biting Torn's ear. Off-camera, Mailer's real life children scream in terror and his shocked then-wife bursts into the shot and separates the two pugilists. The film is, as a character in Maidstone describes Kingsley, "indigenous, original, and, some would say, a bit bizarre."

Between bouts, Mailer appeared onstage. Appearing very frail, he tottered out to his chair with the assistance of several canes but, once seated, his physical fragility disappeared, as he described his cinematic oeuvre ("A certain kind of bad movie has its own kind of logic"). Mailer spoke of his three underground films like a proud poppa, calling them a collection of "wonderful faults and startling successes." Wild 90 was "a guttural symphony." Beyond the Law was praised for being the most consistent ("There is such a thing as being too daring"). Maidstone was cited by Mailer as having the most depth of all three films, but he bemoaned his personal financial loss of $300,000 in making the film, reflecting "I may as well have bought a yacht, taken it out into the harbor, and sunk it." An audience member not too enamored of Tough Guys Don't Dance asked Mailer what was the purpose Mailer had in making the film and Mailer responded, "I made the movie to convince producers to give me money to make more movies." Tough Guys Don't Dance was the last film Mailer directed.

The zen moment of the evening came when Jerry Stiller arose from the audience and praised Tough Guys Don't Dance: "It's a film about violence and yet there's hardly any violence in it." The audience responded by awarding Mailer with a vigorous round of applause. Lucky for Mailer that Rip Torn wasn't in the room.

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