Review of John Barrowman’s “Anything Goes”

Here are a few things you may not know about openly gay Torchwood and Doctor Who star John Barrowman. His friendship with Rob Lowe led to him initially being offered the Jason McCallister role in Brothers & Sisters that later went to Eric Winter - a role Barrowman had to turn down because his Torchwood schedule was so busy. He has never had sex with a woman. He and his friend Sir Ian McKellen have discussed the idea of hosting a dinner party to which they would invite all the closeted actors that they know, and Barrowman says that:

“When I was eighteen, I found myself in a compromising position on a bed in a New York loft with a man whom I would consider to be one of the finest actors of my generation. Nothing ended up happening, but over the years our paths have crossed at a distance, and I think this man would be a prime candidate for an invite to Ian’s imagined dinner party.”

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, a couple of chapters later he also mentions travelling to New York as a young man and meeting Kevin Spacey.

All of these anecdotes are to be found in Barrowman’s autobiography, Anything Goes, released today in the U.K. by Michael O’Mara books, and due out in the States on April 28th. Co-written with his sister, Carole E. Barrowman, an English professor, the book is in 19 chapters, each named after one of Barrowman’s favorite songs from musicals.

Moving back and forward in time, it recounts Barrowman’s Scottish-American upbringing, his relationships with his boisterous, prank-happy family, early success in musical theater, his first starring role in London’s West End at the age of 22, and his career since then, including U.K. children’s TV and the American soaps Titans and Central Park West, films such as De-Lovely and The Producers, leading up to his current success in Torchwood and Doctor Who.

For gay fans, the book may seem a refreshing change in the annals of books by openly gay stars in that it isn’t a coming-out story and wasn’t written at the tail end of a long career mostly lived in the closet. Now forty years old and at the height of his fame, Barrowman has been officially out to the public since 2004, but he has been out to family, friends and colleagues much longer (as well as being in a long-term relationship), and his sexuality is wound as a completely matter-of-fact strand through the story.

For those readers who have had a similarly easy journey, or who are simply tired of reading of coming out as a life-shattering, traumatic event, this sort of attitude may come as a relief. Those who are looking for coming-out angst to compare to their own, or for deep self-analysis, may feel less satisfied. They may also wonder, as I did, whether Barrowman is just failing, from his comfortable middle-aged viewpoint, to fully project himself back to the years of adolescence.

In an early chapter, he says that “I never felt as if I’d been ‘in the closet’ [...] those years of puberty and adolescence were never really years of keeping myself hidden.” Yet by his own account he didn’t actually tell his parents and siblings he was gay until the age of twenty-four or twenty-five.

Since they apparently all indicated that they’d known anyway, Barrowman may have felt in retrospect that nothing had been hidden. But to the reader, it feels as if perhaps the finer details of his coming-out process are getting blurred over by his current perspective.