Making Beds in Brothels

by Adam Brock

  It’s what I might leave behind here that powers me on, that I would miss something. Curiosity is my great drive that keeps me going when nothing else will. When I most feel like throwing in the towel, I remember the words Things will get better. Even though I feared I might already be too far down the rabbit hole to escape, I clung on to that promise and stood firm in my resolve to bear the brunt of my anguish.

  I started to question sin, my own wrongdoing. I had unquestionably sinned grievously in my life, there was no denying it. At times I revelled in it, shamelessly. I took great pleasure in excesses: of money, promiscuity, food, drugs and drink. I had indulged my every whim for years, and denied myself nothing, which was clearly part of what brought me to this state. That and my thoughtless, sometimes cruel treatment of others. I was vain, selfish and self-absorbed as if the world owed me something, which I made clear to everyone. I was angry and made the world feel my anger. Simply put, I was not a nice person to be around. I understood that clearly enough.

  Slowly, however, arrived more depth to my self-reflection. I started to understand that, while I had sinned greatly and that some responsibility lay with me, I had been badly impacted upon by the sins of others: my father’s terrible treatment of his children; his abuse, his sin inflicted upon us. I had been given a faulty foundation from the very beginning. Secondly, there was the support workers Mavis and Julian’s sin: they were given responsibility of children but failed to protect us, indeed they had led us straight into the lion’s den, fed us whole to the predators. Next there was the state: the police, social services, those at the Kingdom Hall, who turned a blind eye to my complaints, to their own suspicions. None of this was my responsibility, and yet these sins had the huge impact of fermenting sin in me. Had that chain of neglect been broken at any point along the way, I may have been saved. It was not. So sin was fermented in me from a young age and went unchecked, and that sin resulted from parental neglect and abuse, was implanted from structural and social indifference, originated in those who turn away for whatever reason and choose not to see.

  I was beginning to understand that simply viewing my sin as a concrete binary, as something between me and society, me and God, simply good or bad, without ambiguities wasn’t a fulsome enough explanation for the position I was in; it didn’t providing me with the root causes. I believe that sin isn’t black and white, it isn’t simply about good or bad. Because your personal sin isn’t the only one impacting on you. A sinful and careless society is just as damaging. Structural sin also has a real and devastating impact on our life. Structural sin is not an abstract idea without consequences, concerning unfair government or unequal societies. Structural sin is present in poor policing policy or bad workplace practice. In communities that turn away blindly from abuse. Fighting personal sin is merely one step toward recovery. Identifying and understanding other forms of sin at work in our society, at work in ourselves, is vitally important. That’s the only way that another generation of children will avoid being dragged into the world I inhabited for so long.

  And there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill. However, God through unlimited compassion, gave himself to humanity in the corporal body of Jesus Christ, who was both human and of God, thus allowing the notion of a joint responsibility and forgiveness within Christ.

  This provided me with a rational model for forgiveness, one that transcends a one-dimensional approach of good versus evil. By believing there is ‘divine solidarity’ with the Deity, a being that has shared human suffering and thus can acknowledge its reality through Jesus Christ. Jesus commands forgiveness as in Matthew 6:12, “If you forgive other people, your sins will be forgiven”; divine forgiveness is, however, dependent on the action of the individual who must recover from his state of paralysation and walk (Matthew 9:6). And it isn’t easy. The levity with which Christ commands the damaged individual to pick up and continue their life, belies the difficulty of those of us shattered by abuse and circumstance to simply pick ourselves up, whatever the psychological benefits.

  This is especially true within the complex ambiguities of survival-based male sex-work, in which a person might need both accountability and culpability in equal measure. Forgiveness of sin within the self and in others is explained beautifully by JJ Hamman in his 2012 paper Revisiting Forgiveness as a Theological Problem. Forgiveness is “best understood as a complex, spiritual, emotional, relational, and cognitive process of mutual encounter, self-discovery, and the reintegration of the self around new values and practices.” I couldn’t agree more.

  Mine was a fraught battle, a lengthy and complex internal struggle, although I understood its necessity. Renewal, without some pain and without these complex questions, might seem too easily given otherwise. This has been a continual, ongoing process in which I have clung to the hope that something good survived inside me, enough to encourage back some form of decent humanity. I hoped that an ember was left inside me that might smoulder back into life, if I changed my ways.

  Chapter 25

  I took my medicine; I didn’t drown out the thoughts with booze and drugs this time. Taking to heart the messages that came to me through prayer, I worked through my struggles, dragged myself to classes, to church, to drug and drink programmes. In the end, I sought help for the sexual abuse I’d suffered. It wasn’t easy because the men I met at rehabilitation spoke in a manner that pushed all the wrong buttons. One man, not knowing my history, told me wistfully, “If only I could have one more day on the crack pipe, with a couple of whores”.

  I finished my foundation course, just getting the grades I needed for university, and found a place on a degree course studying two subjects I thought I would enjoy, history and theology. I was still struggling with myself and concerned that I would fall back heavily into old habits if I wasn’t careful, so it was a difficult time. But it was the start of an ongoing process of healing. I prayed through it, meditated through it. I can’t say I became used to the onslaught, but with time it became tolerable though it still punches me hard in the guts occasionally, even now.

  Without drugs and drink suppressing everything, I now started to recall aspects of my life that I had long forgotten. I started to think of my childhood for the first time in decades. This was a gentler process of gradual re-familiarisation with what had been.

  I had successfully blocked out large chunks of my life, which came back piecemeal. For a long period I hadn’t really seen my father in the correct light; he was just someone I chose not to see and didn’t like very much. As memories of what happened in the house overlooking Battle Hill returned, so did a sense of wrong that went beyond self-pity. I began to understand his role in what had happened to me, what I had become. His atrocious treatment of us meant I had never been given a proper start in life.

  This was the seed of my acknowledgement that even when you take responsibility for your mistakes, it is vitally important to understand how behaviours are learned, how our minds and the chemicals that control them are altered by trauma. Knowing that so much was outside my control was reassuring, and a means of instigating change in myself.

  The thoughts kept coming, and I started to think about my time as a sex-worker. One of the toughest realisations was that I had been a child prostitute. I had never thought about it in that language before, and that was a very tough one to deal with, coming to terms with the fact that I had been abused by so many in my home city, that hundreds of men had sexually abused me as a child. I still find it hard to grasp that I was being sold on the streets of Manchester, the city I was born in and that, in many ways, I love.

  For a very long time I didn’t see myself as the victim of systematic abuse. Largely because in the environment it happened and continues to happen to this day. I believe sex with children still isn’t regarded as abnormal by some on the gay scene in parts of the city of Manchester. And it isn’t just the paedoph
iles. It is those who refuse to acknowledge that such things are happening, who are not willing to engage in such a distasteful conversation. They too are complicit. It has similarities with the environment that allowed girls in Rochdale and Bradford to be sexually exploited by gangs of men for so long. A tacit normalisation of abhorrent behaviour by people within a community that refuses to face the facts. ‘Normal’ men and women frequenting Manchester look askance at the young men of the street, if they see them at all. Not until the LGBTQ+ community of the Village realise that it’s not the rent boys, or the ‘difficult’ men they mature into, who are to blame, but the men who exploited them, will the cycle end.

  With that came the realisation that for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.

  Those people who should have protected me had failed to do so: the police, social services, Mavis and Julian. In fact, they had often made my life worse. Seeing the wrong others have inflicted on you is not the same as self-pity or diverting blame. It’s an essential part of the healing process.

  It’s a generalisation to say that if you’re born into a decent family with honest hardworking parents who love their children, and actively seek to nurture them towards healthy and happy adult independence, that things will go well for you. I understand that, even with the finest upbringing possible, adults lose their way, become addicts or criminals, and that, likewise, children dragged up in the most appalling circumstances, can somehow develop into healthy, happy adults. But the odds are against abused and neglected kids, and the vast majority of the people who I stood beside during my years in sex-work, the boys and men of the streets of Manchester, and of La Casa, no matter what face they were showing the world, were like myself the product of unstable and unhappy childhoods, often marred by poverty or abuse. If society acts against the root cause of these issues it will have some impact on the psychological damage that develops in children who cannot protect themselves properly, who engage in such risky behaviours. And we need to listen to children. I wasn’t listened to, and that caused immeasurable damage to myself and my family. If you care about children and the adults they will develop into, then listen to those children. Listen to what they say when they come to you in need.

  Everything else recorded in this book came back slowly, allowing me to mentally accommodate it within a less traumatic, but still painful, reawakening. And with this reawakening, more positive memories came back. I recalled my sense of freedom high up above Earl’s Court, in my small room in the Trebor. The wonderment of finding wild asparagus growing in a city cemetery, and those angels throughout my life whose wings I believe secured my survival.

  Chapter 26

  This period of intensive introspection saved my life. I couldn’t kid myself anymore, I stopped trying. I just put my nose to the grindstone and worked. I took every opportunity I could to be helpful, and I made myself a useful person. I tried to be kind and see the goodness in people rather than jumping straight into survival mode, with its inherent paranoia and distrust. I still met bastards, life is full of them, but self-insight taught me that there is probably something else going on with them and being displayed in their ill treatment of others. I realised that perhaps these people were brought to me for a reason, as a God-given way of improving myself. I looked at people I came head to head with and could often see myself in them. That was a lesson in empathy: how perhaps these troublesome souls, as difficult as I could be myself, had their own crosses to bear. Perhaps they deserved the compassion I thought I was owed.

  I realised that I had to renounce what I had been – those years of troublesome behaviour, hopelessness and suffering – in more than simply words or thoughts; my actions had to evidence them. I needed concrete proof that my character was improving, that my mind was thinking in healthier terms. It’s an ongoing task. You cannot change overnight, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed that you can. It’s a continuing battle, an unending process.

  After Deborah’s funeral I continued with my studies. I couldn’t allow myself to use her death as an excuse to regress to my former self.

  Initially, I planned to finish my MA and look for work. I had been studying for nearly five years, and academia does not fully suit me. I am not a sociable person and struggle with the interaction that it demands. I made a few friends during my time in Lincoln, but it’s not something that comes easily to me.

  I wanted a job. I was sick of being broke. I desperately wanted my own home, a few rooms overlooking a garden, so I could have privacy. I craved a garden with earth rather than tubs and pots on concrete. I needed time to sit back and take stock, perhaps give myself up to grief for a while.

  However, I felt a shift within; the need to speak about my experiences.

  With my mind now set to continue my academic activities, at PhD level, I decided to do it as a former sex-worker. I would make the field of male sex work the focus of my academic endeavour, as a means of drawing attention back to the community of men and children that I have come from and, hopefully in the long term, facilitate a greater understanding of the reality their lives. I wanted to provide hope for the hopeless; to do something useful and constructive with my ability.

  But there was a huge amount to accomplish first. I was doing coursework, planning and researching my master’s dissertation, and now added to that was working out a tenable thesis and looking for universities to apply to. I had no idea about funding. Researching, I found the government would pay my fees and there would be some left, but nowhere near enough to live on. I was taking a big gamble again although as usual, I told myself, if it all went ‘tits up’ what had I lost? I took a chance, put myself in God’s hands, and moved on.

  Approaching my tutor for advice, I was told, “Adam, we recommend at least a year for a PhD proposal to be written… and you have a heavy load to be getting on with anyway”. The look from my tutor was a mixture of concern and pity. I could see her thinking, Who does this guy think he is, and what will we do when he inevitably screws up? They were not convinced I was going to finish my MA, let alone start a PhD. I can’t blame them either as, on the face of it, I’m probably not very promising-looking material. Anyway, I pursed my lips, making the ‘hummph’ sound I make to myself when I’m thinking, and absentmindedly said, “Okay. Thanks.” I was already reassessing what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to get support from my superiors, so a new course of action was needed.

  I didn’t have a year, that was the first thing, I had a few months. If I was going to get a place, I had to start applying now. Thinking, How the hell am I going to do this? I got down on my knees and prayed every single day for a week. Someone once said I should have been named for Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, the saint who intercedes for those who seemingly survive against the odds, so I appealed to him now. Somehow, I managed to write the required fifteen-hundred-word thesis proposal in a few weeks. And it was not, I thought, a bad effort.

  I only applied to two universities. The first was a theological college in Birmingham which seemed ideal, being a champion of liberal theology.

  The interview went brilliantly, and I was immediately offered a place. Unfortunately, there was a problem with funding and I could not accept their offer. While I was initially very disappointed, I tried to see this as a positive step. It was helpful to speak openly about my experiences and I told myself it was good practical experience for my next interview. It was a good lesson.

  My second interview was at the University of Manchester. The great gothic bulk of the university dominates Oxford Road, I was back in Chorlton-on-Medlock where I had been born and so much of what is recounted here began. The area is hardly recognisable as what it was twenty-five ye
ars ago. The hospital and universities had swelled, gobbling up more land and becoming the biggest institutions of their sort in the country. The BBC is there no more, and everywhere skyscrapers are rising in the distance. The city is in flux, great change is on the horizon.

  Oxford Road was, literally, the road to my ruin. I wasn’t sure whether returning to the place where all this started is further evidence of some cosmic game, that this peculiar circularity perhaps meant that what was such an inauspicious place for me in so many ways was possibly taking a turn for the better. So, once again, I put my trust in God.

  Disappointingly for me, the interview didn’t take place in some ancient vaulted and wood-panelled chamber. Instead it was held in a modern annex, down a long, cheerful corridor of identical offices in the department of religion and theology.

  It couldn’t have gone better. I was again open about myself and was delighted to learn, after what seemed like a very long couple of weeks, that I had been offered a place. Funding was still an issue and although my fees would be paid via a loan, I would have to find the bulk of living expenses.

  In late July I took a three-day vacation. I needed time away from Manchester. My dissertation for my master’s was due back in August, but I wanted a break from everything, before my submission. Refreshed, I would be able look over my work with fresh eyes.