I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

as any of my siblings and their partners. This has meant, for example, that for most of Clare and Turner’s lives, they have grown up knowing Uncle John and Uncle Scott as a couple and they see few fundamental differences between us in that role and their parents. They’ve seen us argue and squabble, yell and scream, laugh and kiss and make up. They can tell you which one of us has more patience than the other.9 They can tell you which one of us is aggressive-aggressive and which one of us is passive-aggressive. They can tell you which one of us talks in specifics and is very pragmatic, and which one is more vague and much less decisive. They know which one remembers every birthday and anniversary because of a nudge from the other one. They know which one is more likely to take them to the museum and which one to the mall. They know which one loves to cook and which one is always willing to clean up after. They know which one is rarely late and which one needs backup alarms. They know which one takes ten minutes in the shower and which one takes an hour. They know which one can scarf down five bags of Frazzles until he’s frazzled,10 and, most importantly, they know how much we love each one of them, and how much we love each other.

Carole and Kevin, Andrew and Dot, Scott and I, and my mum and dad are all as different as couples in any family can be, and we’re also exactly the same. In each coupling, we’re continually working out the balance and the choices that make the relationship work.

Only a few chapters in the public narrative for gay men and women have been written, and I’ve made a conscious decision as a gay man that I want to be part of shaping it. Given my visibility in the media and in the arts, I believe I have a responsibility to help other gay men see what’s possible in their own lives or even what’s possible for the lives of their brothers and sons. Our rules of engagement may not always be as clear as we’d like them to be, but whose really are when you get past the surface stereotypes and false perceptions of what it means to be in a relationship – gay or not?

That said, though, there is one big difference between Scott and me and, say, Carole and Kevin. Scott and I are a couple made up of two males of the species. This means that not only do we love differently, but also there’s a different emotional balance in our relationship. For the most part, on any given day, Scott and I are on the same wavelength. Our hormone levels tend to run on a similar monthly path. With two men in a hurry in a relationship, it’s not surprising that one might find a demented cat has trashed the bedroom.

In the middle of the night, the odd noises continued, and, for a second, I thought the aforementioned stray cat may have crawled back in through the open window and got caught under our bed,11 or, in my half-asleep head, that Dylan Thomas’s ghost was refusing to go quietly into the good night.

I turned onto my side, trying hard to ignore the hacking sound that was now accompanying the moaning and the weird tapping, which, in fact, was suddenly much louder.

‘John, wake up!’

‘What?’

Scott was standing naked in front of me – and not buried deep in the duvet as I’d first thought.

‘I think I have Lyme disease,’ he said.

Oh, dear God, it wasn’t a cat or a poet, there was actually a monster in the room: the Gillus hypochondriacus. This creature is a beast – albeit a strikingly handsome one and in the middle of the night usually a naked one – but a monster nonetheless. The Gillus hypochondriacus suffers from multiple ailments, physical and psychological: all the result of way too much self-taught medical knowledge. Yet this beast insists on self-medicating and generally avoiding anything with the label ‘organic’, ‘for your health’ or even ‘may be just a little bit good for you if you’ll go ahead and try it’.

Not me. I’ll happily take a pill if the pain demands it and I’m thoroughly convinced of the benefits of massive doses of vitamin B, C and broccoli.

‘Say again?’ I faced him, realizing that not to could result in prolonging my torment.

‘I think I have Lyme disease.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

‘Definitely Lyme disease.’

‘You had one vodka tonic last night and it was with a lemon.’

‘I ache all over.’

‘Take two Nurofen and talk to me in the morning.’

I burrowed deeper under the duvet.

The moaning continued.

‘Please, stop that noise. Trust me. You can only get Lyme disease from an infected tic bite and only deer carry infected tics. Where the hell did you encounter a deer in the middle of Chelsea?’

‘Maybe it’s lead poisoning? Or lupus?’

Ah ha! A pattern was emerging. I sat up and turned on the light on my nightstand. Lyme disease, lead poisoning, and lupus. Scott had been wandering around the online medical encyclopaedia in the ‘L’s. The weird clicking sound I’d been hearing was the computer keys, with his moaning coming through the wall from his office.

Scott was like the main character in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat,12 who walks into the British Library to check on some mild symptoms he’s experiencing. He makes the mistake of flipping forward in the medical dictionary, and discovers that his symptoms are multiplying with each page he turns. He walked into the library ‘a happy healthy man’ and, hours later, he walks outside a ‘decrepit wreck’. The only thing he doesn’t have is ‘housemaid’s knee’.13 I was pretty sure Scott didn’t have that either. The last time he was on his hands and knees … well, none of your business.

I grabbed my extra pillows, stacked them behind my head, and