"Servant Of Desire" by Stephen Williams
"What happens when the voices become more real than the bugs and the sex and the pretty boys?"
I was asked to visit and took my notebook and dictation machine with me. But even as I arrived I knew it was never going to be easy trying to make sense of the movie playing in Brent's mind. There was too much to see and I began to understand how difficult life has been for him. I had wondered why they called me. Now I knew why.
Tony, Pedro and Polly are Brent's friends. Dessie is his fantasy lover. Neil left him to live with a much older man.
Listening to the hushed whispers, my pen moved across the page and Brent's voice entered my mind directly rather than filling the air with sound like other voices do. Then I understood...
If you break an arm you can have a plaster cast and everyone sympathises, but if you break your mind no one can see a thing.
Brent's life is a memory with no present, only a past. He feels compelled to relive episodes from his life, watching and hoping for different conclusions to the scenes in his mind. Each day is one of conflict. He is tormented by his inner self and an inability to interact with society. Paranoia locked him inside one room and it is the only place he feels safe, in there with the "voices."
"Servant Of Desire" is the tragic outpouring of a life wasted on drug and sex addiction, where isolation is the only place of safety, and memories are relived as the mind deteriorates in a bug-filled room. Brent's mental health has gone unrecognised and untreated as his life moved from the innocence of gay teen sex to drug addiction, and then the physical and sexual abuse he endured to feed his desire as the years passed by. Tony, Pedro and Polly are still Brent's friends. Dessie should have been his lover. Neil keeps leaving him to live with a much older man. None of them saw what was happening behind Brent's eyes.
This (mostly true) LGBT contemporary biography is written as literary fiction, the observations are brutal and frank, with intense and graphic scenes portraying Brent's diseased thoughts. The scenes he reveals show a mind in torment, forcing us to experience the ordeals with him. Voices and memories are his friends as he remains locked inside his mind, reliving a lifetime of abuse and of being abused. Controversial and often heartbreaking, this novel is a fictionalised account but one based mostly on facts. Through disjointed flashbacks, the movies in Brent's crippled mind, we watch in shock as his life deteriorates, wondering if life really is the best thing for him.
Enter a tormented world of gay love, sex and drug addiction, and witness the torment and decay of a forgotten mind as it plunges towards suicide.
Parental guidance is advised, this novel has adult sexual and drug content.