MELTON, Gene

Queering the Celebrity Couple: John Barrowman and Scott Gill

 

An openly gay man, self-proclaimed “entertainer” John Barrowman has been romantically involved with architect Scott Gill since 1993; they entered into an official civil partnership in 2006.  In his two autobiographies, Barrowman wrote extensively about his relationship with Gill, whom he characterized as bookish, reserved, and having little interest in the entertainment business; because of this publicity, and other public appearances, however, Gill has developed a fan following, and celebrity status, of his own.  Indeed, Barrowman and Gill have increasingly appeared in public as a celebrated gay couple:  they kissed at the 2007 London Gay Pride festivities, they competed as domestic partners on the television game show Family Fortunes, and they were shown as a devoted couple in The Making of Me episode that followed Barrowman on a quest to understand the origins of his homosexuality; feature articles on Barrowman now routinely include interviews with Gill and often focus on the couple’s private home life; and Gill has also made impromptu appearances at Barrowman’s concerts, book signings, and press junkets, often emerging from the audience or from behind the scenes in order to show loving support for his partner.  In this paper, I will argue that Barrowman and Gill have queered the notion of the celebrity couple—not only by virtue of their being a pair of famous gay men, but also by the powerful ways in which they have blurred the boundary between publicity and privacy in their individual and paired identities.  I argue that they have created a public personal narrative that, ironically, both exoticizes and domesticates their love story for fan consumption, negotiation, and (re)interpretation within a variety of normative and non-normative paradigms.

Dr. Gene Melton II, North Carolina State University.