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

one point, I put on a crash helmet and the DJs wheeled me around the studio in a barrow, playing a ridiculous ‘grab and fill the bucket’ game. The studio had been decorated with copies of my CDs hanging from all the surfaces and this was the booty I had to snatch.2

From the moment the show went on the air, the DJs joked about my habit of mooning people,3 and asked if they should be worried about me taking ‘my willy out’. After they’d egged me on throughout most of the programme, in the spirit of the show’s shenanigans, I looked at the producer and pointed to the webcam. She nodded it was off, and it was, so I gave the DJs a quick flash of ‘my boys’.

Anyone who has been on set, backstage, or spent any time with me at home knows that I like a good laugh, love to pull outrageous pranks and that, if the circumstances are appropriate, I can be adult in my antics. An edgy radio show on BBC Radio 1 seemed, at the time, to be an appropriate forum. In my head, I remember thinking, ‘We’re on the radio, the cameras are off, so if I do what they’re encouraging me to do, only Scott and the DJs will see me.’ Of course, Scott had seen my boys before.4

I called Gavin immediately afterwards to ask if he’d heard the broadcast, as I usually do after I’ve been on the radio or on TV and he’s not been with me. His first words were, ‘Did you really have to take your dick out?’

‘I didn’t! It was just my balls,’ I said, and I added that I hadn’t really taken them out completely.5 The moment was but a brief flash in my palm.

If my antics had happened at any other time, I’m convinced everything would have been nothing by Monday morning, but, unfortunately, they occurred during what was a very sensitive period for the BBC. Some people – and when I say some people, I mean one newspaper and one public complaint during the show – interpreted my flash as one more black mark against the BBC and its talent, and the incident was quickly linked to the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand prank calls made a few weeks earlier.

For me, one of the consequences of the Ross/Brand incident, and ‘Ballgate’, was that it brought to light what I’ve always thought is an anti-BBC bias in a couple of the British tabloids; newspapers whose pump is always primed to flood their pages with any behaviour they perceive to cross their thin blue line of propriety. They’ll bend over backwards6 to expose BBC personalities in a dim light. Regardless, I issued a heartfelt apology first thing on Monday.

After the stories ran in the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail, I realized that their response was out of proportion to what had actually occurred in the studio. Tellingly, both articles failed to explain until past their leads that no members of the public had ‘seen’ anything because, as the Daily Mail admitted further down the story, ‘Barrowman’s genitalia were not actually shown.’

In the Daily Mail piece, my autobiography, Anything Goes, was raided, with details taken completely out of context to add to the paper’s litany of my ‘lewd behaviours’. For example, in one of the paragraphs, the Daily Mail described me as ‘a serial exhibitionist’, citing random examples from AG of times when I’ve bared my bum.

I have to say, this newspaper’s questionable journalistic practices were what angered me most about the incident’s aftermath. I couldn’t help wondering, even then, how much their continued attacks on the BBC and its personnel were, in part, because the Daily Mail is owned by the same company that has an interest in one of the BBC’s competing television networks.

However, what was truly appalling about the Mail’s article was that in the same paragraph it detailed my supposed ‘licentiousness’, it also noted that I had ‘married’ my ‘long-term partner’ in a civil ceremony; suggesting by association with the other examples that my civil ceremony was another example of my ‘lewd behaviour’.

And the Daily Mail called me outrageous!

Shame on the Daily Mail for equating being gay with being ‘lewd’, and shame on them for suggesting that a public expression of two people’s love for each other – something non-gays have been doing forever – is equally licentious. This is Britain in the twenty-first century, and yet this kind of bigotry can still find space in a national newspaper.

As if this association wasn’t awful enough, the newspaper’s story closed with the line that I once ‘kicked faeces into the audience’. Anyone who has read Anything Goes knows that this incident was neither premeditated, purposeful, or even my fault, and that the flying faeces happened while I was high-kicking during a dance routine onstage, after a rival performer spiked my water with a laxative.

This particular article really angered me, but I have to say that, for the most part, the response of the rest of the press was to see this for what it was.7 Friends who monitored bloggers on even the Daily Mail’s website explained to me – when I could handle hearing the details the following week – that most folks generally felt it was a stupid antic that went too far and nothing more. The day the story hit the front page of the Daily Mail, a close friend from television emailed me, sending his support. He added: ‘But a great pic of you, John.’ It really was.

Even after I released my apology on the Monday, the reporting of the incident kept spreading like a bad cold. By Tuesday, I had sunk into a deep funk that drove me into seclusion. By Wednesday, my body felt as if it had been pummelled and it simply shut down. I didn’t read emails, avoided the press, and couldn’t make myself answer my phone. Everything hurt. I don’t have these dark periods very often, but when I