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How do you solve a problem like John Barrowman?
I've stated quite clearly in my userinfo that I'm not hugely keen on discussing actors' private lives in this journal, and I realise I'm breaking my own rules with this one, but I have some issues with John Barrowman that I'd like to get off my chest once and for all, and because they pertain loosely to characterisation in Torchwood, and Torchwood's depiction of homosexuality, I'm going to make an exception.
So, before I start bitching about Barrowman, in the interests of fairness, I decided to watch The Making of Me, just to study up on the man a bit. A few people asked me to tell them what I thought. Ummm.... well, yeah... First off, for something that had the opportunity to be a hugely interesting personal insight into the man, it fell flat for me. Really flat indeed. He has a tendency to talk about his life in anecdotes and quips, without ever really letting on what's going on inside his head. There was no real insight provided as to what it means to him to be gay, to have grown up gay in the American Midwest, and to be out and famous now. On the other hand, there seemed to be a real urgency and worry, even, to his desire to prove that he was born gay, and didn't have gayness thrust upon him at a later stage in his development. But again, why he felt this urgency never became quite clear. He mentioned once or twice that, as people on my friendslist have quite rightly noted, it's important to take away the ammunition used by the prop h8 factions in the world that "being gay" is something you can choose to stop doing, but coming from someone like John, who has on many occasions claimed not to want to be involved in "the cause" and not to be terribly interested in being any sort of activist, that didn't quite strike me as being an adequate explanation. And yet there it was, this fervent desire to prove his sexual orientation is not his fault, coupled with an undercurrent of what seemed like actual fear of being scientifically proven to be in any way slightly heterosexual. Why? It left me confused, more than anything. So, yeah, there's that.
It didn't in any way change the way I see the guy, or the way he views his sexuality. Here's John speaking about his relationship with Scott in The Observer:
We saw each other casually for about year but before it got serious, I had my fair share of wham-bam. One can never have enough wham-bam. When a guy strays and ends up with someone else, it's not a big deal. Sex for men is external. I think it's hard for women to realise this.
I would love to lecture to women on men. I'd tell them everything about men: gay, straight, bi, how we're all the same, how we're all bastards. Men know what men want. In and out of bed. Some women are afraid to go to regions that are especially sensitive to men because they think it's dirty. I'd love to be able to tell women this. I think it would open up their sex lives. Experimentation is incredibly healthy. Men love it when their partner dresses up. My mother even advocates it. Unless you are going to get physically hurt, you should give it a go. Before you start, you need a panic word in case you feel uncomfortable. Ours changes depending on the situation but you can't shout 'stop' because it might fit into the role-play situation a little too well.
Oh, John. For a start, as a heterosexual woman I'm mildly offended by your generalisational abilities. In fact, as a human being, I'm just offended, generally. You seem to be implying that women have a natural deficit when it comes to pleasing men, simply because they're not men. Whoa there, boy, I do just fine, thank you very much. In fact, your generalising goes so far as to imply that gay men, theoretically, make great lovers for other gay men solely by virtue of their being men. And there was me thinking that great lovers are great lovers by virtue of their being observant and attentive and all those sorts of things. I mean, surely, John, even as a gay man, you've had crap shags, right? Being a man and knowing what you like isn't enough, whatever sex you're trying to please. Don't talk down to me.
Apart from my mild offense at these statements, there's a different point I want to make, and it's one that isn't really stated outright here, but rather hinted at by John's unfortunate tendency towards generalisation. The way John talks about his life and his sexuality, the anecdotal approach he takes to talking about himself and his own relationship with his partner, has an unfortunate side effect of creating an impression that being gay, in and of itself, is slightly more hip and groovy and, dare I say, cool, than being straight. That gay (male) relationships are more open and relaxed and gay (male) people more into experimentation and innovative and avant-garde sex than straight people are. (I say (male) because I do get a general impression from Barrowman that he doesn't really take lesbianism into account when talking about "gay" to any great extent, ever.) That general vibe he gives off is the thing that really offends me about Barrowman. And not just because I'm an avant-garde straight person and I don't like being talked down to, but because it goes back to one of those things I mentioned before, and that is John's tendency to lump his homosexuality in with his lifestyle, his fairly open relationship, and his loudmouthed and in-your-face personality as just another one of those many facets that make up The Barrowman. And that makes it very hard to separate his sexuality from other aspects of his personality, when it is precisely those other aspects that offend those people who find Barrowman offensive. I'm one of those people, and I'm not saying that all gay men should be sensible and monogamous and wear suits and have meaningful sex with each other, but then I'm not saying that all straight people should do that either, and what I am saying is that someone with a personality as huge and imposing as Barrowman's, and with a tendency to come out with statements as confused and confusing as John's statement up there (because what are you saying in that article, John? You start off with veiled references to prostate stimulation before veering into dressing up and roleplaying and then you come out with a sudden refence to safewords and all that that implies on the BDSM front, you mention having slept around after having met your partner, who you claim is the love of your life, you generalise about all men being the same, but later claim that "gay men aren't all the same", MAKE YOUR MIND UP ALREADY!) perhaps is right to not throw himself into "the cause" to any great extent, because as far as role models go, he's not exactly the most articulate and unmuddled-in-the-head guy out there, and when it comes to separating his own experiences from those of the wider, more diverse, gay community, he doesn't really seem to do a very good job. Reading these interviews with him, hearing him talk on every morning tv show he pimps himself out on, I can fully understand those people who, lately, think that maybe he should stop talking now. Word to those people.
On to Torchwood, though, which is what I'm mostly concerned about, obviously. I'll take the opportunity for a quick aside about Jack and Ianto before I go into Barrowman's view on the subject. I have a great deal of respect for Gareth David-Lloyd, and I know from interviews and talks that he's done that he is a guy who thinks about his character a lot. He's very much a what's-my-motivation kind of guy, and I like that about him, and I believe that the freedom allowed to actors in Torchwood's no-bible, free-for-all approach is what lets someone like Gareth develop a character like Ianto, in the absence of any real external rules or guidance, into someone that fascinates quite a large proportion of fandom, without there really being any textual basis or storyline to make that character particularly interesting in and of himself. On the flipside, though, that absence of guidance doesn't really work very well when an actor doesn't exhibit that level of understanding as to what a character is all about. Which brings me to John. John has stated himself that he doesn't like to read scripts ahead of time and that he lets the director guide him as to Jack's motivation in any given scene, which results in a pretty haphazard character when it comes to continuity. I've said all that before and it's not really news, so let's just leave that point there and get back to what I'm actually talking about. A quite from John from Doctor Who Magazine:
...what helps me play Jack is the fact that he likes everybody, and his love for each person is different. For instance, in my eyes, he does fancy the Doctor, but he would never take that beyond infatuation. As he said to Martha, he would never let the Doctor know. On the other hand, Jack’s love for Ianto is almost...it’s kind of lustful. But I don’t think he’d settle down with Ianto. He might do, but he’d let Ianto know that he [Jack] has to play around on the side. If he’d commit to Gwen, however, he knows that he’d have to commit completely. That’s what makes him fearful of going there. She’d let him flirt, but he could never afford to do anything more with anybody else.
Now, keeping in mind the characterisation of Jack and Ianto, I can fully buy into the idea that Jack and Ianto's relationship is a bit of a no-strings, sexyfuntaim kind of relationship. After Ianto's experience with Lisa, it makes sense to me that Ianto wouldn't be looking for anything particularly serious, and Jack, being Jack, also isn't really the commitment type. It's a mutually beneficial, fun thing they're doing and that's cool. The fact that Ianto, being bisexual, had his BIG MEANINGFUL relationship with a woman, but has chosen a man to have his no-strings, transitional relationship with is perhaps slightly questionable when it comes to how the show portrays same sex relationships, but okay, I'll let them off on that one. What strikes me in this quote, though, is the following: Given the fact that John himself has stated he doesn't really think about his own characterisation much, which would lead me to conclude he certainly wouldn't give a lot of thought into what's going on in Ianto's head within this relationship (transitional, no-strings relationship due to character history, see above), I have to conclude that what John is saying here is that Jack's relationship with Ianto would be more open and less monogamous and include playing around on the side simply because it is a relationship between two men, and any relationship Jack would theoretically have with Gwen would have to be more monogamous and committed because it is a relationship between a man and a woman. Again, the overall vibe that is being given off is that same sex relationships are somehow more carefree and open and not-quite-so-big-on-that-whole-monogamy-thing-straight-people-are-always-on-about. And again, it would appear that John is generalising about the nature of same sex relationships based on his own. The implications of that, the fact that John is letting his own relationship be the guideline for how this on-screen relationship plays out, when it comes to the future of the Jack/Ianto relationship are pretty big, and on a larger scale, the fact that he so easily generalises about gay relationships, and by extension straight relationships, does indeed feed the "can we shut him up now?" brigade, and probably rightly so.
My conclusion? I don't really have one. Barrowman tends to think that everyone is like him, or everyone is not like him, depending on the circumstances. His relationship with Scott is what all gay relationships are like, except when they aren't, and straight people sit on the sofa every night not having sex and eating crisps or something, unless they start dressing up, in which case they'll need a safeword, or someone will end up getting hurt. Yeah, I make about as much sense as he does.
ETA: The reason I brought up The Making of Me and the reason I say I was confused by it, is that I find it odd that John would be so adamant about proving that his homosexuality is innate and genetically defined, while at the same time, aside from this show, he does a very good job of painting homosexuality as fun and exciting lifestyle choice, by virtue of his apparent inability to A) distinguish his own homosexual experiences and lifestyle from a broader experience of the gay community as a whole and B) separate his homosexuality from other aspects of his public persona and lifestyle, which are all things he chooses to be and do. I find that... kind of weird?
Ummm... nah, I got nothing. They were just a bunch of words I typed out. Feel free to go back your humdrum lives now.
So, before I start bitching about Barrowman, in the interests of fairness, I decided to watch The Making of Me, just to study up on the man a bit. A few people asked me to tell them what I thought. Ummm.... well, yeah... First off, for something that had the opportunity to be a hugely interesting personal insight into the man, it fell flat for me. Really flat indeed. He has a tendency to talk about his life in anecdotes and quips, without ever really letting on what's going on inside his head. There was no real insight provided as to what it means to him to be gay, to have grown up gay in the American Midwest, and to be out and famous now. On the other hand, there seemed to be a real urgency and worry, even, to his desire to prove that he was born gay, and didn't have gayness thrust upon him at a later stage in his development. But again, why he felt this urgency never became quite clear. He mentioned once or twice that, as people on my friendslist have quite rightly noted, it's important to take away the ammunition used by the prop h8 factions in the world that "being gay" is something you can choose to stop doing, but coming from someone like John, who has on many occasions claimed not to want to be involved in "the cause" and not to be terribly interested in being any sort of activist, that didn't quite strike me as being an adequate explanation. And yet there it was, this fervent desire to prove his sexual orientation is not his fault, coupled with an undercurrent of what seemed like actual fear of being scientifically proven to be in any way slightly heterosexual. Why? It left me confused, more than anything. So, yeah, there's that.
It didn't in any way change the way I see the guy, or the way he views his sexuality. Here's John speaking about his relationship with Scott in The Observer:
We saw each other casually for about year but before it got serious, I had my fair share of wham-bam. One can never have enough wham-bam. When a guy strays and ends up with someone else, it's not a big deal. Sex for men is external. I think it's hard for women to realise this.
I would love to lecture to women on men. I'd tell them everything about men: gay, straight, bi, how we're all the same, how we're all bastards. Men know what men want. In and out of bed. Some women are afraid to go to regions that are especially sensitive to men because they think it's dirty. I'd love to be able to tell women this. I think it would open up their sex lives. Experimentation is incredibly healthy. Men love it when their partner dresses up. My mother even advocates it. Unless you are going to get physically hurt, you should give it a go. Before you start, you need a panic word in case you feel uncomfortable. Ours changes depending on the situation but you can't shout 'stop' because it might fit into the role-play situation a little too well.
Oh, John. For a start, as a heterosexual woman I'm mildly offended by your generalisational abilities. In fact, as a human being, I'm just offended, generally. You seem to be implying that women have a natural deficit when it comes to pleasing men, simply because they're not men. Whoa there, boy, I do just fine, thank you very much. In fact, your generalising goes so far as to imply that gay men, theoretically, make great lovers for other gay men solely by virtue of their being men. And there was me thinking that great lovers are great lovers by virtue of their being observant and attentive and all those sorts of things. I mean, surely, John, even as a gay man, you've had crap shags, right? Being a man and knowing what you like isn't enough, whatever sex you're trying to please. Don't talk down to me.
Apart from my mild offense at these statements, there's a different point I want to make, and it's one that isn't really stated outright here, but rather hinted at by John's unfortunate tendency towards generalisation. The way John talks about his life and his sexuality, the anecdotal approach he takes to talking about himself and his own relationship with his partner, has an unfortunate side effect of creating an impression that being gay, in and of itself, is slightly more hip and groovy and, dare I say, cool, than being straight. That gay (male) relationships are more open and relaxed and gay (male) people more into experimentation and innovative and avant-garde sex than straight people are. (I say (male) because I do get a general impression from Barrowman that he doesn't really take lesbianism into account when talking about "gay" to any great extent, ever.) That general vibe he gives off is the thing that really offends me about Barrowman. And not just because I'm an avant-garde straight person and I don't like being talked down to, but because it goes back to one of those things I mentioned before, and that is John's tendency to lump his homosexuality in with his lifestyle, his fairly open relationship, and his loudmouthed and in-your-face personality as just another one of those many facets that make up The Barrowman. And that makes it very hard to separate his sexuality from other aspects of his personality, when it is precisely those other aspects that offend those people who find Barrowman offensive. I'm one of those people, and I'm not saying that all gay men should be sensible and monogamous and wear suits and have meaningful sex with each other, but then I'm not saying that all straight people should do that either, and what I am saying is that someone with a personality as huge and imposing as Barrowman's, and with a tendency to come out with statements as confused and confusing as John's statement up there (because what are you saying in that article, John? You start off with veiled references to prostate stimulation before veering into dressing up and roleplaying and then you come out with a sudden refence to safewords and all that that implies on the BDSM front, you mention having slept around after having met your partner, who you claim is the love of your life, you generalise about all men being the same, but later claim that "gay men aren't all the same", MAKE YOUR MIND UP ALREADY!) perhaps is right to not throw himself into "the cause" to any great extent, because as far as role models go, he's not exactly the most articulate and unmuddled-in-the-head guy out there, and when it comes to separating his own experiences from those of the wider, more diverse, gay community, he doesn't really seem to do a very good job. Reading these interviews with him, hearing him talk on every morning tv show he pimps himself out on, I can fully understand those people who, lately, think that maybe he should stop talking now. Word to those people.
On to Torchwood, though, which is what I'm mostly concerned about, obviously. I'll take the opportunity for a quick aside about Jack and Ianto before I go into Barrowman's view on the subject. I have a great deal of respect for Gareth David-Lloyd, and I know from interviews and talks that he's done that he is a guy who thinks about his character a lot. He's very much a what's-my-motivation kind of guy, and I like that about him, and I believe that the freedom allowed to actors in Torchwood's no-bible, free-for-all approach is what lets someone like Gareth develop a character like Ianto, in the absence of any real external rules or guidance, into someone that fascinates quite a large proportion of fandom, without there really being any textual basis or storyline to make that character particularly interesting in and of himself. On the flipside, though, that absence of guidance doesn't really work very well when an actor doesn't exhibit that level of understanding as to what a character is all about. Which brings me to John. John has stated himself that he doesn't like to read scripts ahead of time and that he lets the director guide him as to Jack's motivation in any given scene, which results in a pretty haphazard character when it comes to continuity. I've said all that before and it's not really news, so let's just leave that point there and get back to what I'm actually talking about. A quite from John from Doctor Who Magazine:
...what helps me play Jack is the fact that he likes everybody, and his love for each person is different. For instance, in my eyes, he does fancy the Doctor, but he would never take that beyond infatuation. As he said to Martha, he would never let the Doctor know. On the other hand, Jack’s love for Ianto is almost...it’s kind of lustful. But I don’t think he’d settle down with Ianto. He might do, but he’d let Ianto know that he [Jack] has to play around on the side. If he’d commit to Gwen, however, he knows that he’d have to commit completely. That’s what makes him fearful of going there. She’d let him flirt, but he could never afford to do anything more with anybody else.
Now, keeping in mind the characterisation of Jack and Ianto, I can fully buy into the idea that Jack and Ianto's relationship is a bit of a no-strings, sexyfuntaim kind of relationship. After Ianto's experience with Lisa, it makes sense to me that Ianto wouldn't be looking for anything particularly serious, and Jack, being Jack, also isn't really the commitment type. It's a mutually beneficial, fun thing they're doing and that's cool. The fact that Ianto, being bisexual, had his BIG MEANINGFUL relationship with a woman, but has chosen a man to have his no-strings, transitional relationship with is perhaps slightly questionable when it comes to how the show portrays same sex relationships, but okay, I'll let them off on that one. What strikes me in this quote, though, is the following: Given the fact that John himself has stated he doesn't really think about his own characterisation much, which would lead me to conclude he certainly wouldn't give a lot of thought into what's going on in Ianto's head within this relationship (transitional, no-strings relationship due to character history, see above), I have to conclude that what John is saying here is that Jack's relationship with Ianto would be more open and less monogamous and include playing around on the side simply because it is a relationship between two men, and any relationship Jack would theoretically have with Gwen would have to be more monogamous and committed because it is a relationship between a man and a woman. Again, the overall vibe that is being given off is that same sex relationships are somehow more carefree and open and not-quite-so-big-on-that-whole-monogamy-thing-straight-people-are-always-on-about. And again, it would appear that John is generalising about the nature of same sex relationships based on his own. The implications of that, the fact that John is letting his own relationship be the guideline for how this on-screen relationship plays out, when it comes to the future of the Jack/Ianto relationship are pretty big, and on a larger scale, the fact that he so easily generalises about gay relationships, and by extension straight relationships, does indeed feed the "can we shut him up now?" brigade, and probably rightly so.
My conclusion? I don't really have one. Barrowman tends to think that everyone is like him, or everyone is not like him, depending on the circumstances. His relationship with Scott is what all gay relationships are like, except when they aren't, and straight people sit on the sofa every night not having sex and eating crisps or something, unless they start dressing up, in which case they'll need a safeword, or someone will end up getting hurt. Yeah, I make about as much sense as he does.
ETA: The reason I brought up The Making of Me and the reason I say I was confused by it, is that I find it odd that John would be so adamant about proving that his homosexuality is innate and genetically defined, while at the same time, aside from this show, he does a very good job of painting homosexuality as fun and exciting lifestyle choice, by virtue of his apparent inability to A) distinguish his own homosexual experiences and lifestyle from a broader experience of the gay community as a whole and B) separate his homosexuality from other aspects of his public persona and lifestyle, which are all things he chooses to be and do. I find that... kind of weird?
Ummm... nah, I got nothing. They were just a bunch of words I typed out. Feel free to go back your humdrum lives now.
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