Making Beds in Brothels Page 4

  I started attending the youth group aged just thirteen, in 1994, twenty-five years before I now write. I was very young, even for thirteen; young looking and emotionally young. Gay House initially provided me with some stability when school wasn’t working out for me. I barely attended, preferring to sit in Manchester’s Central Library and read history and art books all day, in the long-curved art department on the third floor.

  The youth group supervisors were Mavis and Julian. Mavis was aged somewhere in her early to mid-twenties. A sporty lesbian with close-cropped red hair, she habitually wore jeans and a sports top. She had a slightly hunted air, dark circles around her eyes, suggesting concealed anxieties. Julian was Indian, of a similar age to Mavis, short and stocky with long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had the type of jovial campiness associated with presenters of children’s television.

  Usually there was a group-focused activity that was supposed to promote confidence or help us develop a strong sense of worth. Manchester, in 1994, was still a place you would regularly encounter casual homophobic abuse in the streets and, though becoming more liberal, was still a ‘hard’ city, a tough, largely working-class town. I have clear recollections of being called ‘a faggot’ and worse, several times in the street. Clause 28 was very much in full swing, meaning that teachers and television could in no way be seen to be endorsing homosexual behaviour.

  I had once tried to speak to Mrs Baker, a teacher at school, about my sexuality. She was an angel who always spoke to me kindly and I sensed she knew there was more going on with me, but even she sat me down and said, “I’m so sorry, Adam, I’m not allowed to speak to you about this.” She looked heartbroken. That was Clause 28 in action. There were few positive or self-affirming structures in place for young gay or lesbian people, so the youth group at Gay House was a beacon of its time.

  Chapter 7

  I first met Mitchell just after my fourteenth birthday. There was only year and a few months between our birthdays. He rushed into Gay House in a state one Saturday afternoon. He was anxious; something was upsetting him and there was no making him stay. His stubbornness was an absolute trait that, in the twenty years of our friendship, never altered; you could not make Mitchell move an inch if he didn’t want to. He was back next week, this time much calmer and I liked him the instant we got chatting. We were opposites in many ways: he was as dark as I was fair; he was from the grim far reaches of North Manchester, I was from the South with its museums and libraries; we had a shared love of Motown music, and both of us were fundamentally friendless. We clicked, and our fates, for good or bad, were indelibly linked.

  Mitchell had endured a horrific childhood. We had that in common too. He was shunted from pillar to post by his unstable, alcoholic mother, Ellen. I never quite worked out how many children she had. I met four, but all but one had uncertain paternity. In one of the many rough bars she frequented on Oldham Street in the city centre, his mother would lean over the table, cigarette in hand, point a chipped fingernail unsteadily at some deadbeat and croak, “That’s ya father!” I witnessed this several times over the years and it was invariably a different man every time. Mitchell may or may not have shared the same father as one of his elder sisters, a career criminal who had done time for raping his own elderly mother.

  Mitchell was raised in a series of grim council houses on a sink estate in the far North of Manchester. Ellen moved all the time. It was possible, in those days, to go to the local housing office and get a new place in a few weeks, and the poorest families often moved around a lot as means of dodging creditors or the rates’ man. The situation in the city is very different nowadays, with nine- or ten-year housing waiting lists being the norm. He told me that as a child it wasn’t unusual for Ellen, addled with drink, to forget him outside bars or leave him wandering around the supermarket until he was found and returned home by the police or social services.

  His elderly Aunt Patricia gave Mitchell the only stability he ever knew. Years earlier Patricia had been crossing a street with her infant daughters when she was hit by a car. Her children were killed instantly, while she was dragged half a mile down the road before the inebriated driver stopped. She was so ill no one dared tell her that her children were dead, fearing the shock would kill her. They were buried for months before anyone had the courage to tell her.

  I remember her as a kind, damaged woman, slightly otherworldly. She shared her home with the ghosts of her children and a dozen or so cats that coughed and wheezed, all in various stages of terminal cat flu. The fumes from the urine-soaked carpets caught in your throat. Cat faeces made resting your hand casually anywhere a potential health hazard.

  Regardless of her personal loses Patricia was always considerate and hospitable. Always concerned whether you had eaten, she would offer me “a nice plate of eggs, chips and peas, dear?” which I instantly regretted accepting but received with horrified curiosity. Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips. If you were lucky, she forgot that she had offered to cook you anything at all.

  Mitchell’s love for his Aunt Patricia was unquestionable, one of the few people he treated with absolute sincerity. It was he alone who nursed her in her final illness. As she lay dying in her front room, it was he who administered her medicine. He wouldn’t let anyone else near her. I was a pall bearer at her funeral.

  Mitchell and I grew close, becoming inseparable even. We would walk ten or fifteen miles a day to our respective homes, on either side of the city, chatting incessantly along the way, ‘putting the world to rights’. In those early days we never had money, but somehow still got smashed on Hooch, the notorious alcopop which unfortunately made its debut at the time we started drinking. In Ellen’s damp front room, we sang and danced to old Diana Ross and the Supremes records, twirling around madly, watching multi-hued fungus, that was sprouting and spreading over the walls and ceilings, seem to spin like some nefarious kind of pyrotechnic. It was a rough area, and our voices carried, drawing homophobic abuse from the neighbours. Ellen would stand on the doorstep, cigarette in hand, and tell them to “bleeding fuck off, and mind your own business!”

  Once, on the small bus into town, a guy walked past muttering “shirt lifters” under his breath. Ellen, with radar hearing, swung around and spoke sweetly to the culprit

  “Pick a window…”

  “What you talkin’ about, ya daft cow?” he sneered in reply.

  A fury in leopard print and leggings, she turned on him roaring, “Pick a fucking window, because if you say another word to these lads, you’re gonna go through it!” Ellen had a lot of faults, but she was very protective of us, and I loved her to bits. She usually found enough money to feed us both on a pan of ‘tata-hash’ and was, in lots of ways, a surrogate mother to me when I desperately needed a parental figure.

  Even then Mitchell was an inconsistent friend. He could turn on you in a second, then at other times show great loyalty. For years we had times of intense closeness, followed by spectacular falling outs. Mitchell was an alcoholic like Ellen. From his early teenage years he would drink whatever he could whenever it was available. I suppose the drink was responsible for at least some of his terrible mood swings and violent outbursts. Sometimes he could be cruel, vindictive like your absolute worst enemy, he would do terrible things, say terrible things, and encourage others to act the same way. He often didn’t think twice of robbing me or betraying me in other ways. Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else. And Mitchell was like my shadow brother, following me in everything I did. He was with me through much of what I recount here. We travelled together, lived out of each other’s homes, shared rooms, ate together. My story is really his, and his is mine.

  We got ourselves into pickles over the years. When we were kids we often went on the first coach to London in the morning and got the
overnight coach back that same day, you could get a day ticket very cheaply, I think for about £7.50. Anyway, on the return trip one night, we both fell deeply asleep, waking up in Blackburn, miles past Manchester. We had no money, so we hitch-hiked and were relieved when a man pulled over, “Do you boys need a lift?” Thanking our lucky stars, we replied to the affirmative and stashed our bags in the boot. Mitchell sat in the back and I sat in the front, as the balding bespectacled bloke, introducing himself as Peter, leered in our direction. We thought nothing of it, we were just happy to be homeward bound.

  As we entered Greater Manchester, he asked, “Did you see Big Ben in London…?”

  “Nope” I replied, innocently.

  He turned to me, still leering, and with one hand whipped out his pecker. “Would you like to?”

  Mitchell let out a shriek, grabbed Peter by the back the neck, and the car swerved violently from side to side. “Let us out of this fucking car you pervert, before I rip your fucking head off!”

  Peter slammed on his breaks. Forgetting our bags, we escaped and walked the remaining six miles home, laughing our heads off. He could have been a serial killer or anything, but we could couldn’t have cared less – we were fearless together.

  Chapter 8

  After each group meeting at Gay House, a group of us, maybe as many as twenty, would all walk the short mile or so up Oxford Road and across Grosvenor Street to the Empire State Bar. The nights out after the group meeting were part of the attraction, an integral part of why we went and Mavis and Julian assured us we would be safe and sound there.

  The pub that bore the name of New York’s famous skyscraper, took up an outer corner of the city’s main coach station and even though there were large picture windows, inside was dark and low. There were cosy high-backed banquettes where you could socialise without being seen, and pool tables, although I didn’t play. We were not supposed to drink alcohol, but the bar staff took a laissez-faire approach to policing this, and there was often vodka in my seemingly innocent coke or orange juice.

  The wisdom of allowing a group which included under eighteens into a pub at all, when eighteen was the legal drinking age, was somewhat questionable. I do not know what agreement Mavis and Julian had with the managers of the Empire State, only that there was an agreement and we were given tacit approval.

  We loved it. In our naivety we certainly didn’t question anything. It allowed us kids to play grown-up, to consider ourselves more mature and sophisticated than we actually were; really, we were just play-acting. We would sit nursing our drinks and self-consciously smoking our Lambert & Butler’s, as Aretha Franklin’s ‘A Deeper Love’ pulsated in the background. It was all very exciting, and for me, a child who had known very little positive excitement, the novelty was appealing.

  There were men in the Empire State, watching us. I didn’t notice them at first. I have never been the first to catch on, but I noticed there was always a group of older men talking to each other at the bar or talking to scruffy younger men. Hunched over their drinks, their eyes followed us as we moved around the room. They watched us as we entered, watched as we went for a piss and watched as we left. I don’t think anything of it. For me the bar felt like an extension of Gay House – a safe place.

  We’d had it instilled in us by Mavis and Julian that the gay community was a haven. It was populated with people we could trust; this was the scene of gay liberation and queer power. Those to be feared were outside the physical borders of Manchester’s Gay Village. It was in retrospect an unbelievably dangerous place, but unsurprisingly, as we were children and still believed what we were told by those in authority, we didn’t question anything. The men watching us had only one thing on their minds.

  And it’s not surprising in retrospect. the Empire State was smack bang in the centre of the gay red-light district, where rent boys plied their trade and, more dangerously, where men came to purchase sex from young boys, from children. This was happening under the same roof. We were on an outing to the red-light district. Thinking about it after a hiatus of twenty-five years, my mind boggles.

  We had been brought somewhere we were most likely to be exposed to sexual exploitation. Mavis and Julian had delivered us to the sexual predators. A bar situated in an area where men were seeking to meet young men and children for paid sex. The colloquial term for those considered young fresh meat on the gay scene is appropriately ‘chicken’, we had been turned over to the foxes by those who were supposed to protect us. What were they thinking?

  The memory of the first time I was raped is so vague and unsubstantial that I cannot quite persuade myself it happened. Recalling it feels like fragments of a dream you remember on waking: illusionary, indistinct. I recollect going into the toilet at the Empire State in a slight drunken haze, and being pulled into a cubicle as the music of Take That blared away in the background. Initially I felt confusion, then briefly fear, perhaps resignation, and I cannot honestly recall more than that, it was over so quickly.

  I don’t know who did it, I can’t see a face. Was it one of the hungry-looking men at the bar, or someone from outside? I’m not even certain I ever saw his face. I have probably successfully repressed it, slipping away into a world of princesses, castles, dungeons and dragons as I was violated. These violations didn’t register with me in the normal way anyway, registering more as a distraction than anything, an irritant. I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, because who would have believed me? A lesson I learned growing up was that if you complained it was unlikely you would be believed, and it would probably make things worse.

  The second time is clearer. There was a doorman called Derrek. He worked at Clubshack, one of the first all-night dance clubs in the Gay Village. At the weekend the Empire State transformed into a nightclub. There was considerable space upstairs, and both up and downstairs were used for the venue. The dancing, fuelled by copious amounts of ecstasy and amphetamine, the drugs du jour of Manchester’s gay scene, was uninhibited and went on all over the weekend, day and night.

  Derrek befriended me; bought me vodka orange, or cider and blackcurrant. He was short, overweight, with a straggling goatee, a mullet, and he breathed heavily. I cannot remember how he got me back to his flat, but he raped me almost immediately I was through the front door.

  He had sleep apnoea and I recall looking at his breathing equipment in the corner of the room while he sweated and breathed over me. A sharp dry stabbing pain that went on and on. His weight was crushing me, and his breathing become more laboured before stinging, hot wetness. I zoned out at sometime during this, switching back to the safe place, and when I returned it was over. What may shock you is that I went back and allowed him to do it again, several times. God only knows why, or what I was thinking.

  What I didn’t understand then, but am much clearer around now, was the impact that my childhood abuse was having on my decision-making process. I wasn’t working on an appropriate emotional level. I hadn’t developed the normal healthy responses to trauma and self-preservation that protect young people from abuse and exploitation. The impact of childhood sexual abuse, or traumatic sexualisation, alters survivors’ psychosocial and psychosexual wellbeing. It often leaves us with distorted disassociated personalities which impact our ability to relate to others in an appropriate manner. Cognitive and emotional responses are stifled, meaning that we engage in inappropriate relationships or enter unequal power relationships. This includes a lack of normal protective behaviours and information processing that would prevent poor decision making. This is all exacerbated by the likelihood of pre-existing psychiatric pathologies, or post-traumatic disorders and personality disorders.

  Essentially my childhood had primed me to be the perfect victim of sexual exploitation, or to get involved in risky sexual behaviours. For many years I didn’t recognise that this was a problem, and if I had, I would have blamed myself.

  Chapter 9

  I was standing at the bar of the Empire State when a youngish man with dark hair
offered to buy me a drink. Of course, being broke, I acquiesced, and we chattered for a while, it wasn’t unusual for people to offer and I didn’t read anything untoward into it. When the guy suggested that I might like to come back to his hotel, which he informed me was just around the corner, I politely declined, as I was only interested in him as a source of free drink. When he then offered to pay me fifty pounds for the pleasure, which seemed like a huge amount to a fourteen-year-old child, I didn’t hesitate. I recall he offered me cocaine which I refused. That was my introduction to prostitution.

  It did not occur to me at the time what the long-term ramifications would be for me, or that this man was a paedophile and I was yet again being victimised. I just took the money and ran. This wasn’t some ugly old man or violent predatory doorman, and he wasn’t sexually demanding. He was probably, and I say this with a certain bitterness, the perfect person to introduce me into the trade.

  The popular imagination places child prostitution within the Far East, Thailand and Cambodia, in poverty-stricken Russia, or among the exploited street children of Brazil or African countries. I have often wondered why the prostitution of children in Manchester has drawn such little comment. I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras. I often saw police cars driving past, but they never stopped.

  Manchester is now one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, it has high employment, relatively low poverty, a well-developed and sophisticated police force, three large and well-funded universities, several papers and TV stations. Yet so little is said about the prostitution of children that has taken place on its streets. I have, as an academic, read the research of those who have studied male sex work in Manchester scientifically, recording accounts of child sexual exploitation. It has been noted and analysed by people qualified to comment. What makes Manchester different from those other places further afield? Nothing does; it’s happening right now on the well paved streets of this 21st century English city.