Anything Goes (9 page)

At that very moment, a song broke into my head: ‘Up the park, there was a dog, and his name was Pagan The Swimming Pup.’ Whistling the same tune as Andrew’s song, I turned from the panic on the lake and followed Pagan The Transatlantic Pup home.

A few years later, when I was about thirteen, my dad accepted a promotion to become Plant Manager of Caterpillar in Joliet, and we were on the move again. He and my mum tried hard for my sake to find a neighbourhood that matched Prestbury. The closest they could find was Timber Estates, which was lovely, but it lacked any private neighbourhood water amenities. To make up for this, my parents joined a club that had a pool. In Prestbury, my circle of friends had always included a fairly even mix of boys and girls, and in Joliet the same was true. Our escapades at the club were limited only by my dad’s charge account – and even then, not until the damage had been done.

My friends and I would hang out at the pool all day, swimming, diving and sunbathing, and I would order vodka tonics for the entire group; our age didn’t seem to be a great concern. I was signing
for lavish lunches and decadent desserts … until my dad cottoned on to this, which wasn’t hard for him to do since one week I charged over $1,000 on lunches alone. My dad’s charge number at the club was 007 and, man, did he use his licence to kill that day.

It was the summer before we moved to Joliet when I realized for sure I was gay – although I’d really known I was in my gut, or thereabouts, since the age of nine, when I’d seen my first girly magazine and been more interested in the male bits than the female bobs. I’m not saying that coming of age as a gay male in the late twentieth century wasn’t difficult for many boys, but, honestly, at least for me, it was no big deal. I’d grown up with parents who were sure of themselves as individuals, very comfortable in their own sexuality, and open and frank in how they approached the issue with their children. They raised Carole, Andrew and me with the knowledge that we were valued human beings, loved completely and unconditionally, and nothing we’d do would ever be so bad that we couldn’t come home. When the time came and I needed to say the words ‘I’m gay’ aloud, I flew home to my family to say them.

It was 1992 and I was playing Raoul in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
The Phantom of the Opera
in London’s West End. I was ill. I had a persistent cough, a low-grade fever, and stomach cramps twisting my gut every few hours. I’d been sexually active. I panicked and feared the worst. I headed home to America to face up to the truth. My parents and I sat at the kitchen table and with very little preamble I said, ‘I’m gay and I need an HIV test.’

I then told them that no matter what happened, I knew I was going to do great things with my life and I hoped they’d continue to be an important part of the journey I was on. However, if they couldn’t accept that I was gay, I would leave and do it all without them.

My dad was quiet for barely a beat. He looked at my mum, who was still reeling a bit from the HIV part of the statement, and then
he leaned forward and said, ‘John, honestly, it’s none of my business what you do in your bedroom, just as it’s none of yours what we do in ours, but I have to say that we’re hurt you’d think that because you’re gay we’d not want to be part of your life anymore.’

That night, we went out to dinner and they both admitted that my news had not really been a revelation. The next day, I had an HIV test. As the doctor was a family friend, he put a rush on the results. Nonetheless, the wait was interminable. Sheer panic kept me from sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time and dread was a brick sitting in the pit of my stomach.

While I waited for news, I travelled north to Milwaukee to visit Carole and Kevin, and to spend some time with Clare and Turner, then aged five and two. They had just moved house and the rooms were filled more with boxes than with furniture. I stayed the whole day and played hide-and-seek and kick the can, then Clare, Turner and I made forts with the boxes, and to round off the fun we ate pizza sitting on the floor.

I briefly explained to Carole and Kevin that I was home because I was sick. I told them I was having some tests, although I didn’t elaborate as to what kind of tests or why. I withheld this information, in part, because it was clear to me that they really already knew. The other reason was that Clare and Turner wouldn’t leave my side for a minute and there was no opportunity for any real discussion. When I left, I promised to call with the results.

During the long wait, I also phoned my brother, who was at a business seminar, and had a similar conversation with him to the one I’d had with my mum and dad. Like them, Andrew’s response was very much: ‘It doesn’t change anything.’

Ultimately, the test came back negative for HIV. I did, though, have a gastric infection and a chest infection, and both were working together to create my general exhaustion. I called Carole and told
her I was going to be fine. Then I admitted what the test had really been for, and the reason I’d been so worried about contracting the virus. Her response was pretty much, ‘Ho hum – and what else is new?’ It seems all my family knew I was gay before I told them – so much for my bombshell news.

The next day, I flew back to London in time for the following evening’s performance of
Phantom.
Those few days of sheer panic taught me a tough but valuable lesson – and not just about practising safe sex. It was one of those moments in my life when I realized information and awareness can save lives, and everyone should have equal access. I began my association with a number of AIDS/HIV charities at that time, and I continue to be an advocate for Theatre Cares, the Terrence Higgins Trust, Stonewall’s education campaigns and others.

Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong self-worth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It’s not a choice I – or anyone else who is gay – made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?

Happily, during my childhood years in Prestbury, when I first realized my sexuality, my being gay was no more an issue for my friends Laura and Mike than Laura and Mike not being gay was an issue for me. I didn’t act on my newfound awareness in any way that was different from how Mike and Laura were responding to their emerging sexuality. We were all equally confused, equally goofy and equally self-conscious about that aspect of development. I was a child and I was still doing pretty childish things.

So what’s changed? You ask. Not much, except now my toys are bigger.

Of course, in adolescence, there’s a fine line between ignorance and innocence. Did Mike and Laura know I was gay? I don’t think so. Did my other high-school friends? Perhaps. Does it matter? Probably not. Laura is now a lawyer for a firm in Chicago and Mike lives in South Carolina with his daughters and his dogs. I still consider them to be friends and I know that if I’d felt it necessary to say openly to them when I was young that I was gay, nothing would have changed in our friendship.

The only incident I remember from those summers, when I made a decision to do something because I was gay, was when I agreed to crew for a neighbour and his wife in their sailboat because I thought the husband was hot. On the other hand, Mike was interested in the crewing job because to him the wife was equally gorgeous.

Gay or straight, our dicks were driving both of us.

‘New Ways to Dream’

N
oël Coward once told an interviewer that a person could learn as much about acting from ‘a bad matinee in Hull’ as a West End show. Beverly Holt, who was the musical accompanist for Joliet West High School when I was a student there and who has since become my close friend and musical director, once said something of similar pithiness
¹    
to me. ‘Listen, bozo,’ she said, ‘sometimes you need to play crap theatre to know good theatre, and you can learn a lot from both.’

At the time Bev made this pronouncement, it was 1984 and she was trying to cajole this bozo into trying out for the Joliet Drama Guild’s Bicentennial Park production of
Anything Goes.
I was a senior in high school and I was resisting her urges to audition for this community theatre production. However, like most of Bev’s advice to me then and now, it was advice worth following, and so, almost six years before my big break in the West End production of the same show, I ended up auditioning for and getting the part of Billy Crocker.

A number of teachers have been, in the words of Cole Porter, ‘the purple light of a summer night’ in my life and, as the saying
goes, if you can read these pages, you should thank a teacher too. Along with Bev, Mark Wilson, my English teacher at Joliet West High School, was inspirational. He was responsible for putting me in the gifted English class and introducing me to Forensic Competition.
²    
I also owe a huge debt to David Dankwart, who was my high-school choir director – and the first professional to recognize I had a ‘voice’.

I was in a music practice room at high school one afternoon, struggling with a piece of flute music I needed to learn for the school band. I began to sing the piece aloud to help me get a grip on it, when David walked past the room. He knocked and stuck his head inside.

‘Was that you singing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you have talent?’

‘Yes.’
³    

‘Are you arrogant?’

I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by this, but I said ‘yes’ anyway.

‘Good. Those are both qualities I like in my performers. Come to the theatre and try out for the school musical.’

Not only did I audition, but – much to the chagrin of the juniors and seniors who also tried out – I got one of the lead roles in my freshman year, at the tender age of fourteen. It was my first real part in a musical, playing Barnaby in
Hello Dolly!
This high-school
production was my first time singing to a real, live, sitting-in-seats-in-front-of-the-stage audience.

It was during this production that I first met Bev, who, along with her husband Jim, from that moment on became a second family to me. She’d sometimes bring her children, Jennifer and Michael (both now adults with their own families), to rehearsals and when I wasn’t on stage, I’d babysit them. I recorded my first solo album in Bev’s living room, on a borrowed soundboard with two duct-taped mikes. Given its amateur quality, it’s probably just as well that we made only enough copies for family and a handful of friends. Bev has since worked with me on most of my subsequent albums. She also accompanied (in a musical sense) my parents and me when we performed at several Burns Suppers in Chicago.

These annual celebrations to the Scottish Bard are held on the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, 25 January, in Scotland and in every country with populations of transplanted Scots. Typically, the evening is organized around a number of traditional performances of Burns’s poems and songs, with lots of bawdy stories about his exploits thrown in for good measure, all washed down with a dram or two of whisky. Dressed in our kilts, my mum and I would each sing one or two songs, while my dad would present a tribute to the poet himself, called ‘The Immortal Memory’, which – next to the whisky and the Toast to the Haggis – is the most important part of the traditional Burns Supper.

When I started attending Joliet West High School in 1981, I’d been living in America for about five years. Although the transition had been a bit bumpy at times, for the most part I was settling into my new life pretty comfortably. However, it was during that freshman year in high school that I first came face to face with what I like to
call the ‘Dues and Don’t Syndrome’,
⁴    
which generally seems to have affected groups of my fellow performers, but not casting directors with any talent. Later, this syndrome followed me into my early experiences at college, but by that time I was prepared for it.

During my high-school freshman year, I kept up with my flute and I continued to enjoy playing in the band, but after getting a taste of performing in
Hello Dolly!,
I knew I wanted to join in the school’s swing choir. Under Bev’s guidance and encouragement, I was now singing regularly for any organization or church in Joliet that needed a soloist, so I was increasingly experienced. Regardless, it seemed there was a pecking order at school that needed to be followed, and I was told my talents wouldn’t be considered. I hadn’t been forgiven for disrupting the hierarchy by landing the part of Barnaby, and so I was to pay the price in harassment from a few of my peers for a long time.

After a school assembly concert one afternoon, Bev found me backstage, alone and close to tears.

‘What’s up, John?’ she asked, sitting down next to me.

‘Why are some of these choir kids mean to me all the time?’

A few of them had taunted me in the wings that day, as they often did before or after concerts.

‘John,’ she said, ‘they’re jealous of you, and you may not believe this right now, but some day you’ll get the last laugh.’

Bev’s response to me that afternoon was not the first time I’d heard those words; my mum and dad had certainly said them to me many times since I’d started high school, as I’d shared some of the choir incidents with them. For some reason, though, that afternoon Bev’s words sank in. It was one of the first times that I can remember
thinking to myself: ‘She’s right. This is what you love. Get the last laugh.’ It fuelled me with determination.

Despite the initial obstacles, the following year I did become a member of the school swing choir. I loved everything about the experience; the combination of choreography and choral singing was simply irresistible. With persistence and – I’d like to think – charm, I even managed to win round a few of my detractors in the group … eventually.