Free I Am What I Am by John Barrowman

something was wrong as soon as he opened the front door. His first clue? The three dogs were apoplectic – especially Tiger, who was virtually folded in a knot against the bedroom door, thumping his behind against it. The second clue was the stench. Think about it. You’re a scared cat and you’ve been locked in a strange room for well over six hours with three very angry dogs barking and tearing at the door trying to get at you. You’d wet yourself too. More than once, I bet.
    To this day, the memory of the moment when he unlocked the bedroom door and confronted the chaos in the room can start Scott shaking all over again. Thank God I’d hidden his sledgehammer.
    But that wasn’t the worst part of the situation.
    The worst part was that in my rush to leave the house, I’d forgotten to tell Scott anything about a rescued cat locked inside our bedroom.At some point in the day, the cat had actually squeezed itself out through the open window and fled for its life. When Scott unlocked the bedroom door, he and the dogs burst into a completely empty but totally destroyed bedroom, with initially no clue as to what had caused it.
    Not only were the duvet and the pillows soaked in cat pee, but also the cat had clearly been so terrified that he’d torn at sections of the sheet and pissed through to the mattress. Books and clocks had been knocked off our bedside tables and the family pictures we have on our bedroom’s mantel were smashed on the floor. There were even scratch marks gouged into the plaster above the bed. 8 It was as if the cat had circled the room at 90 miles an hour, banking the walls at every turn, while spraying shit out of its arse like exhaust fumes.
    There are obviously a few lessons to be drawn from this story, not the least of which is that I am not Noah and our house is not the Ark, and animals should only be brought home under mutual agreement. The other, and more important, one is that in Scott and my relationship, sometimes our freedom and independence can get in the way of clear communication between us. Scott and I are used to a freedom of movement and a level of personal and financial independence that can sometimes result in minor amnesia about our responsibilities to each other as a couple.
    We live in a world where there is a kind of accepted narrative for how non-gay couples should live and behave. Although that narrative may be full of stereotypes and clichés – notions like the wife is in charge of the house and children; the husband, the finances and the lawn – there’s a narrative nonetheless, and it’s one full of anecdotes and advice for guidance and support for straight couples. Women may be from Venus and men from Mars, but at least the heterosexual couple’s solar system has books and articles and talk shows and lots and lots of country songs to describe it.
    They also have mums, and aunties, and grans, who have no qualms about taking a married son or daughter aside and giving them a verbalslap upside the head, telling them to shape up. For the families of many gay couples, they may be too busy coming to terms with the issue of their child being homosexual to be offering advice about whether or not their son (or his partner) is pulling his weight in the relationship. Plus, since many parents of gay men are themselves not gay, there’s a real fear of the unknown that makes these kinds of conversations even more difficult.
    In my family, we’ve been lucky that from the beginning of my relationship with Scott, we have been as visible in our family’s life as any of my siblings and their partners. This has meant, for example, that for most of Clare and Turner’s lives, they have grown up knowing Uncle John and Uncle Scott as a couple and they see few fundamental differences between us in that role and their parents. They’ve seen us argue and squabble, yell and scream, laugh and kiss and make up. They can tell you which one of us has more patience than the other. 9 They can