I'm lively when I perform and I always put everything into a show, but when I get home I love lying down in front of the TV and relaxing.

I live my life openly and freely every day anyway, and do what I want to do, but I don't take any great risks.

Whenever I'm in Glasgow I go and stand outside the front of the house I grew up in, which is in Mount Vernon.

I don't call myself an actor, I call myself an entertainer, because I don't just do one thing.

Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong selfworth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It's not a choice I – or anyone else who is gay – made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?

Honestly, the world can be a dark enough place. Light it up.

When I was a kid growing up in the States in the late '70s and early '80s, as soon as 'Dallas' came on on a Friday night on CBS at 9 P.M., we stopped everything from that moment on as a family.