The Making of Me |
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John's Exploration Of The Origins Of His Own Sexuality |
The Making of Me was a documentary broadcast on July 25th, 2008 on BBC1. It was John’s personal quest to find out if there was any scientific proof of his own personal belief that he was born gay, and that it was not a personal lifestyle choice or a result of his environment. Homosexuality is the archetypical nature versus nurture debate. Many people, including some sociologists and apologists for religious groups, in particular the Catholic Truth Society, claim that homosexuality is something people choose and can, conversely, reject. Others, including some of the scientists seen in this documentary, believe that homosexuality is genetic.
This programme was never meant to be a balanced scientific debate. It is one man’s exploration of his own homosexuality. He is not looking for both sides of the story. He wants to prove that he is what he is by birth, not because of anything that shaped him since he was born. As such, it lacks objectivity. The scientific theories presented are not tested as they should be tested by putting the opposing arguments and seeing if they stand up to those arguments. And when all is said and done, John, for all his talents, is not a scientist. His presentation of the science is on a very personal level.
But those limitations notwithstanding, this is an interesting documentary that opens up one or two cans of worms.
Contestant Number One, Please! He starts with a trip to Liverpool to see radio presenter Pete Price. Pete’s experience of receiving treatment in the 1970s intended to cure him of being gay is a horror story that visibly upsets John and makes him determined to get to the bottom of the nurture versus nature debate.
Pete Tells His Story
John is Visibly shocked.
His next port of call is the USA, and ironically, the Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, the state where he grew up from the age of eight to eighteen. There he meets with two guys who, presumably, have government grants to do research involving fastening a sensor around a man’s penis before showing him erotic images and measuring which ones excite him. The machine that does this is called a Penile Plethysmograph. Don't try to say that after a couple of pints.
John, shook up by the MRI It was apparently invented to catch out people dodging the draft by claiming to be gay! Make of that what you will! Anyway, John passes both the Plethysmograph and a test using a cat scan to look at his brain’s reaction to sexual stimuli. The cat scan reveals a vulnerable side to John. He hates being in the machine so much it actually seems to shake his confidence for a while. It is just another occasion when the self-assurance that John usually exudes gets a knock in the course of this documentary, which is nothing if not candid. But I do seriously wonder what Allen and Dave are actually doing. All they seem to be able to prove is that John is 100% gay. I really wonder how they get funding for their project. It doesn’t actually seem to do very much.
You're Gay. It's Official
John is Relieved. It certainly can’t establish if John was born gay or became gay because of his upbringing.
So he goes home to see his parents who still live in the USA. His parents are a very nice couple who obviously adore their youngest son and miss him now he lives permanently in Britain. The whole family got around the table to discuss whether there was anything about John’s childhood that might have turned him gay. They conclude that even dressing him in a bikini for a fancy dress competition didn’t do it. John shows us his collection of Barbie dolls and other toys usually found in the girls’ toys aisle at Toys’r’us.
Dad
Mum There is a very nice bit here, too, where he meets his best friend from his youth. And there may well be a clue to his psychology in the fact that it’s a girl, Laura Mickie, with whom he used to play when he was a boy. They played with dolls, including styling the doll’s hair. This definitely isn’t ‘normal’ for a boy. But I don’t actually think it was what made John gay. And nor does he. He actually suggests that it’s coincidence that he played with dolls and is gay.
John and his Bionic Man Doll
Laura, John's Best Friend
John and Laura Looked Like Two All American Kids In any case, all of this is just gender stereotyping. Boys are conditioned by parental and peer pressure to play with boy toys – most typically guns, GI Joe dolls, toy cars, trains, etc. Girls play with dolls, teddy bears, and anything that comes in pink. And there is no sign in a so-called age of equality of anything being done about this obvious sociological issue. Parents, pre-school, school, separate boys from girls and give them different toys.
John was a healthy, active boy! So the next segment is with a man called Gerulf Rieger, another man using public money in an American university to study gender conformity and non-conformity in children. His method seems to be very subjective in my opinion. He has studied old home movies of people who are now adults to see how they behaved as children. Now, one or two things strike me here about his samples. Not everyone has home movies. Working class people tend not to have things like that, because even in the 1980s, video cameras were expensive. So he probably has a collection of middle class family home movies. And frankly, I don’t think his findings are conclusive. He showed a little girl of about six playing with a toy truck and then becoming aggressive and throwing the truck away. This, he concluded was an example of gender non-comformity, because little girls are never aggressive! He then went on to show the girl as an adult, and she dresses in a masculine way, sits in a masculine manner, and is, in fact a lesbian. Another example was a boy from the early 1980s, dressed in sloppy jumper and slacks and dancing in his bedroom in what does appear to be an effeminate way. But in that era, with Wham and Culture Club and various New Romantics as the musical influences, boys and girls were becoming quite androgynous anyway.
It proves nothing. Dr Rieger’s findings, as far as they were explained in this segment are very suspect in my opinion, and I’m not sure John was convinced. I’m definitely not. I bought my toys from the boys toy section of Woolworths when I was a child, and I still do, as a lifelong Doctor Who fan. I follow football, and own several replica shirts, all in man’s sizes, because that’s who they’re made for. But I am not a lesbian. This idea of gender conformity or non-conformity is just the way western society habitually separates boys from girls and that’s all. I don’t think it had anything to do with whether they grow up gay or straight.
John then goes on to meet an absolutely charming family who are an entire sociological project on their own. Now, I’m not sure, but it seems to be a single parent family. We only see Dannielle, the mother of the twin boys, twelve year old Adam and Jared. And some people might make a meal out of the lack of a father figure. Anyway, Adam and Jared are identical twins, but while Jared is ‘gender conforming’, with GI Joe figures, toy guns and aeroplanes, Adam has a collection of soft toys in pastel colours and a collection of Barbie dolls and Bratz dolls.
Adam and Jared His mother explained that at an early age Adam insisted he was a girl and wanted pink pyjamas. Danielle has obviously allowed her son his own choices and not put pressure on him to conform, which is fantastic. People tend to panic at the first sign of effeminacy in boys and push them towards conforming behaviour. She hasn’t done that at all. But even these two terrific, happy kids and their obviously loving mother still don’t provide an answer to the question of nature versus nature. For one thing, why did Adam, as young as eighteen months, know that pink pyjamas were for girls? Did he choose the colour because it appealed to him? But even so, pink is feminine and blue masculine only because our society accepts them as such. Care Bears and Bratz are feminine because they’re marketed that way. All Adam is really doing is exerting a wonderful individuality that other children aren’t allowed to express because their parents don’t allow them the choice. But is Adam necessarily gay? I’m not sure. He might grow up to have a perfectly happy heterosexual life. He might well grow up and decide he really should be a woman and go for a sex change, and then be a perfectly happy heterosexual woman. For all anyone can tell, Jared with the GI Joe dolls might turn out to be gay. I seriously don’t think you can pigeon hole somebody at the age of twelve and say he is gay because he likes Care Bears.
Whichever way his life turns, Adam is a terrific, happy child who enjoyed showing the guest in their home, John, his toy collection. Jared was, too. I just hope the pressure to conform that will come more and more as they get older doesn’t harm either of them and they grow up as happy as they seem to be now, and make their own choices in life based on what they feel is right for them. I do wonder if they will be able to do so in America where they have straight camps and where Adam’s so-called gender-non-conformity might lead to him being bullied or hurt.
Mother of the Twins. Danielle Alexander was sure her son’s behaviour is something he was born with, not anything in his upbringing. The fact that his twin brother is ‘straight’ would seem to prove her right.
But there is an argument that being gay is a choice, and a corresponding one that gays can choose not to be gay and live a ‘normal’ straight life without being unhappy. John goes on to try to find somebody who has stopped being gay.
Ron Gave Up Being Gay To Be a Christian And so he meets Ron Woolsey, who was openly gay for seventeen years, and then completely changed his life, becoming straight, marrying, and having children. Now, John, bless him, was perfectly polite and respectful to Ron, as I would fully expect him to be. John is not a man who would be rude to anyone. But I really wonder what was in his mind when he talked to a man who claimed he had stopped being gay because his parents and his church minister pressed him to change his life? What a contrast to John’s own family who accepted him for what he was and love him unconditionally. And is Ron really happy? He says he is. But I don’t really believe him. He changed his life to satisfy other people, not because he himself felt that being gay wasn’t working for him. Peer pressure, social pressure to conform. I just don't buy it. And I’m not sure if John did, either. The argument that turning from being gay was the same as giving up chocolate or cigarettes certainly didn’t seem to wash with him.
Gay Ron Ron Woolsey, it seems, is denying his real nature, the nature he was born with if John’s theory is correct, which I think it is. What a contrast with young Adam who was able to live comfortably with himself, or John himself who is openly and happily gay. This meeting, though, makes him determined to find out for definite if he was really born gay.
Straight Ron
Back in London, he meets another bunch of people doing research with public money. They seem to have concluded that gay and straight men really do have different brains. Psychologist Dr. Qazi Rahman secretly observed John as a passenger on the way to the university and noted that he handles a map in a feminine way rather than a masculine one. Moving a map around to orientate it with the real world is apparently a feminine thing. Not sure about that, but interestingly, the aptitude tests all point to a feminine side to John. His results in verbal fluency for instance, suggest that he has a female-typical brain pattern. This, of course, assumes that there is a difference between male and female brains. It could be argued that this in itself is just a way of enforcing gender stereotypes and worse, gender inequality.
But it does seem to prove that John’s brain is different to that of straight men, and this would not be the case if homosexuality was merely a lifestyle choice.
John is off the Scale! So the trail goes back to the USA, and Los Angeles, where yet another bunch of people at a university are spending money. The Department of Human Genetics at UCLA are actually searching for the gay gene! Sven Bocklandt heads the search and explains about the x and y chromosomes and postulates that there may be a gay x chromosome and a straight one, and that either the gay or straight chromosome could be passed on from the mother’s side when a boy is conceived. This, of course, doesn’t explain lesbians. But in any case, when John’s DNA and that of his straight brother are tested there is no significant difference. There is no obvious genetic reason for John’s homosexuality.
Gay Gene/Straight Gene
And frankly, I think that’s a good thing. I really wonder why the Department of Genetic is looking for the gay gene. I strongly suspect that the only reason they’re being given money to do such research is so that it can be ‘cured’. Two science fiction films came to mind while I was watching this section of the documentary. One was Gattica, a film about a future dystopia where all children were born by IVF, after screening for genetic abnormalities. A gay gene would certainly be eliminated in such a future. The other was X-Men III when it was announced that there was a cure for the mutations that created the ‘X-Men’. Most of them don’t want to be cured. And I don’t think the vast majority of gay people want to be cured, either. John Barrowman certainly doesn’t. He is a happy man in a loving relationship with Scott. I am glad that this was a blind alley.
So John moves on to Cambridge – I presume the one in Massachusetts, not England – where Professor of Psychology Mellisa Hines has come up with a theory about the levels of testosterone in the womb during pregnancy. Less testosterone and a male foetus might be a factor. But the problem is how to prove that, since John left the womb some 42 years ago.
And at this point, the research gets a bit strange, because Professor Hines sends John to see one Richard Lippa, who he meets in Long Beach, California, at the 25th Gay Pride festival. He has a theory about men’s hands. He postulates that there is a connection between testosterone in the womb and the length of the index finger compared to the ring finger. In most men – in other words, straight men – the ring finger is longer than the index finger. In women it is more or less the same length. Men with ‘feminine’ fingers therefore, may have had less testosterone in the womb and are therefore more likely to be gay.
But John has a ring finger that is considerably longer than his index finger, so by this reckoning he should be straight. He obviously isn’t. So yet again a theory falls apart.
This doesn’t entirely surprise me, actually, because although John is very definitely gay, he doesn’t act feminine. He doesn’t walk or stand in a typically gay way. He isn’t, in short, ‘camp’. He is masculine in every way that masculinity is defined except that his personal sexual preference is for men. That is what makes him so popular as an actor and entertainer. He is everything women find attractive, but isn’t going to spoil their fantasies by turning up in Hello magazine with a leggy blonde that makes them feel inadequate.
But there is another strange bit of research that Lippa has been involved in, that suggests that gay men tend to be younger sons with at least two older brothers. This has to do with there being less testosterone with each successive pregnancy. John has one older brother, Andrew, but he knows that his mother had a miscarriage some time before he was born and that could have been a male child. It puts him in another oddly vulnerable position. To prove that he was born gay due to levels of testosterone in the womb, he has to ask his mother what is a very difficult and personal question and he obviously feels awkward about it. He is very bothered about appearing pleased when his mum confirms that she lost a boy child, making him her third son. But if the theory is at all valid, it is confirmation that his homosexuality is a result of hormonal effects on him while he was in the womb – and that he was, therefore, born gay.
But while he is coming to terms with that idea, I can’t help wondering if there is any real scientific sense to this theory. And if there is, the same people who would like to find a gay gene in order to eradicate it would probably want to prevent women having more than two boy children in order to avoid potentially gay men being born. But it seems just a bit too hit and miss. In any case, within an hour of the broadcast the internet wa full of blogs where straight third and fourth sons debunked the theory completely.
But for John, it seems to have been a straw to cling to. He wanted to find some evidence that he was born gay, and flimsy as it is, this is it. He can, as he said, embrace his homosexuality because it was the way he was born and not merely a lifestyle choice. As he explained to Scott, back home in England, that was what he went to find and he seems happy with that.
As I said earlier, this was far from a balanced debate. It opened some interesting questions about gender conformity and how that relates to homosexuality. It showed that an awful lot of people get paid to carry out some very strange research with no obvious purpose. Universities have always carried out abstract scientific research in the expectation that it will have long term results, but if what we saw here is the best of it, they’re a long way from coming up with a definitive answer to the nature versus nurture debate. And it’s probably just as well, since I seriously worry about the purpose the definitive result might be put to. I don’t want John cured of anything. I think he’s terrific just the way he is.
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