Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (14 page)

I liked the Madonna songs. She had a new one that was only on the radio, called “Live to Tell.” It was sweet and sad and wasn’t difficult for someone who wasn’t used to pop music to listen to. It didn’t seem so bad. It had a pretty tune. What could be wrong with this?

Most people at Bob Jones believed that a Christian in my position should insist that his roommate either turn off the music or put on headphones. To me, though, that seemed kind of rude. As long as he wanted to listen to it, who was I to tell him to turn it off? The more I grew accustomed to it, the more I looked forward to our time in the room when he would play Madonna’s first two tapes. I recognized one of the songs. One of the rock music lecturers had read us the lyrics to “Material Girl” as an example of what was wrong with worldly music. It promoted materialism. For me, it had a good beat and was easy to dance to.

I was alone in my car driving around Huntsville on the weekend. My radio was tuned to the local Christian station. I looked at the dial. I was three hundred miles away from Greenville. No one would know. I changed the station and recognized the song. It was “Live to Tell!” I kept it on. When the song ended, I changed it back and asked God to forgive me. The Christian station was really bad, though—penance enough, I thought.

Fuck!
I thought. Damn it, I had just thought a cuss word. What the hell was happening to me? Was I being corrupted by the Marine Corps? Seduced by the devil through Madonna? I changed the station back to the pop station. This time it was a song called “Dreams” by the group Heart. My roommate liked this group, too. I kept the radio on that station and drove to the mall. I decided not to think about it.

My first night at this school, I had gone to the enlisted men’s club across the street from our barracks. My roommate asked if I wanted a beer and explained that you didn’t have to be twenty-one to buy alcohol on base.

“No, thanks,” I said sheepishly. “I’ll just have a Coke.”

“What a lightweight!”

A few weeks later we returned. I didn’t want to be a lightweight. I wanted to fit in and belong. I ordered a beer. To my virgin taste buds, the beer tasted bitter and awful. I couldn’t believe people drank this!
Thank God it tastes so bad
. I’d never become an alcoholic, not if I had to drink this shit.

One of the Marines in my class, Becker, was an African-American woman. She had been in the Corps awhile and the rest of us newbies looked up to her for her knowledge of the Corps. She was a lance corporal. We were all privates and privates first class.

The topic of gays in the military came up. This was the first time I had ever heard this discussed. There aren’t any gays in the military, I thought. They asked us those questions and if anyone answered “yes,” they weren’t allowed in.

It turns out a top soldier in the Army the previous year was gay.

“Goddamned faggot, can you believe it? They oughta give him a blanket party.”

A blanket party involved getting a bunch of guys together at night, surprising the offender while he slept, and beating him with weapons made out of bars of soap tucked into the toes of socks. It was painful and could cause permanent injury.

“Whaddaya expect?” asked another Marine. “A butt pirate in the army? Aren’t they all fuckin’ queers?”

Becker waited until the men had quieted down. “So he likes to screw men. How does that make him a bad soldier?”

No one had an answer. For the first time in my life, I had heard someone defend gays.

Things were different when I went back to Bob Jones University. Certainly, I was different. I had missed a semester of college when I was at boot camp. My peers had raced ahead of me in school, but I felt I had sprinted in front of them in life. None of them had experienced what I had. They had remained behind in this sterile, artificial world—the “Fortress of Fundamentalism.” After encountering some of the living, robust, vulgar, spirited people in the outside world, the students here seemed spineless and bland. They were self-righteous and judgmental even while being naive and ignorant about so many things.

I started getting into lots of squabbles. For instance, even though I hadn’t started drinking yet, I argued that nowhere in the Bible did it say that alcohol was forbidden. My peers would react angrily, making all the no longer convincing points we’d been brainwashed with for the previous thirteen years. Your drinking might cause your “brother to stumble.” You don’t know whether you might become an alcoholic, so why tempt fate? Jesus never actually drank wine, he just turned water into wine. And in the Bible they had to have wine because there was no method of refrigeration, therefore fermentation was the only way to preserve a beverage other than water. Now, we have refrigerators and can keep nonalcoholic beverages fresh so we have no need of wine.

I wasn’t buying any of it anymore. I had been taught that the Bible was the literal Word of God. So, I reasoned, God had not specifically forbidden the use of alcohol. I could drink if I wanted to!

I had the same kind of attitude change about race relations. Nowhere in the Bible did it say that blacks and whites couldn’t marry. That was a Bob Jones rule. By 1986, a few of the Bible faculty were quietly disagreeing with the school’s official ban. I openly disagreed and was talked down by my classmates.

At Bob Jones, women were forbidden from instructing a man in the ways of religion. Women were not permitted to lead in prayer in church and certainly not to be ministers. My thoughts about this were starting to change as well, although the Bible was pretty literal about this and maybe Bob Jones wasn’t so far off the mark. Still, if women could serve in the Marines, they were more equal to men than I had been taught.

I didn’t get the GI Bill. Bob Jones wasn’t accredited. I knew this going in and had specifically talked to my recruiter about it. “Oh, sure you’ll get it,” he said. He had lied. But now I was done with boot camp and the hard part was over. But I wouldn’t get my monthly check as long as I was at Bob Jones.

Without an income, I decided to take a part time job waiting tables at Swensen’s Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant. It was fun. A few of my co-employees were Bob Jones college students. They weren’t exactly what we called a “BoJo,” meaning a Bob Jones student who kept all the rules. They drank beer, cussed, listened to whatever kind of music they wanted to, and made out with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Marines talked about doing things like this, but I had never known Bob Jones students who did. Most of them had graduated from other Christian high schools in town.

One night, a guy I worked with who was a classmate at BJU offered me a beer. Even though I knew I wouldn’t like the taste, I accepted. I drank it quickly and threw up. Actually, it didn’t taste as bad as the first one at the base had. A few weeks later I was hanging out with the same guy and had another. This time I sipped it slowly and didn’t throw up. I felt a rush of excitement doing something so forbidden with a friend. I watched him laugh and drink his beer and felt a bond with my fellow sinner. He winked at me and I nodded in return. We understood there had to be a code of silence between us.

A gay man worked at Swensen’s. He was the first openly gay person I can remember meeting. I never talked to him but stared at him in wonder and, yes, contempt.

“How can you stand to let a guy shove his dick up your ass, man? Doesn’t that hurt like hell?” I was standing next to a cook who dared to ask the questions I had been wondering myself, but would never work up the nerve to ask the gay guy.

“Don’t knock it till you try it!” was his response.

Don’t knock it till you try it?!
My eyes were as big as saucers. How could I even
try
something like that? I couldn’t even imagine such a thing. But the gay guy had given me a visual image to go with my theoretical questions.

The gay guy wasn’t very cute. What if he had been? What would I do? He was married to a woman, too, a fat lesbian. More and more, I was learning the world was a very different place than I had been taught.

Bobby Jones IV was back in town. His exile was over and he had been permitted to enroll in Bob Jones University. He was a year behind our old class; I was a semester behind. He also worked at Swensen’s with me. Julian had also returned from San Diego and soon he was working at Swensen’s, too.

Dr. Bob Jones III made a big deal about Julian coming back, as if he were the prodigal son returning to the fold. Dr. Bob told the entire student body that Julian had been living in wretched sin and depravity in California, with “sin and depravity” usually being synonymous with California in the mind of a fundamentalist. The story went that Julian’s roommate in San Diego told him that none of the sins they were indulging in excited him anymore, so he wanted to “try” homosexuality. That was too much, even for the immoral Julian, and he hopped on his motorcycle and returned cross-country to Greenville to beg forgiveness.

I thought about this as I watched Julian light up a cigarette in the back hallway at Swensen’s. He sure was cocksure and exuded a definite sex-vibe that I was receptive to. I couldn’t help but feel sparks. No wonder his roommate had turned gay.

Still looking for anything handy to camouflage my ever-mounting feelings, I met a girl. She was a couple of years older than I was but she liked me and that’s what mattered most to me. We went out on my nineteenth birthday hiking in the mountains at the Wilds, the camp where I used to work. She gave me my first kiss on a swing by a lake. It was about as romantic as anything I’d ever seen in the movies. I liked kissing and we did it more and more frequently.

One night, we drove to the top of Paris Mountain in Greenville to a spot that was popular for young lovers. We kissed but our hands roamed more than before. She undid her shirt and I grabbed her tit. It was the first time I’d ever fondled a woman’s breast. It felt wonderful. She reached down at my groin and I undid my pants. She stroked my dick and I felt a sense of pleasure unlike any I’d ever known. Wow. This was physical pleasure. Maybe not the kind that I was secretly longing for, but certainly better than none at all. I wanted to do this every night.

Almost as quickly as it started, we stopped. I’m not sure why we didn’t go all the way. We sat in awkward silence as I drove us down the mountain. A few weeks later she broke up with me. I was crushed and confused. But I think she suspected something I wasn’t prepared to admit to myself. She had joked that I only dated her to be near her handsome brother. She may have been right.

It was time to follow through with my plans to become a Marine Corps officer. At a Marine Corps physical fitness test that summer I met a couple of other officer candidates.

The captain who headed our commissioning program introduced us. “Rich Merritt, this is Gary Fullerton and Colin Steiner. The three of you will be going to Officer Candidate School together next summer.”

“What do you want to do in the Marines?” asked the one named Colin.

“Intel,” I said, meaning I wanted to be an intelligence officer. Truth is, I hadn’t given it much thought. Just becoming a Marine officer was a big enough hurdle. I’d tackle that first and deal with the specifics later. But Intel sounded cool, so that’s what I said.

“I’m going to fly F/A-18s,” said Gary Fullerton. He had black hair cut in a short buzz cut. He also had the leanest, most ripped physique I had ever seen.

Immediately I was envious of this guy’s ambition and determination. “We’re only nineteen years old,” I said, laughing. “How can you be so sure that’s what you want to do?”

“That’s all he talks about,” laughed Colin.

Gary Fullerton and Colin Steiner were students at Clemson, a well-known university thirty miles west of Greenville. They knew I went to Bob Jones and looked at me strangely, at least that was my paranoid perception. I was beginning to get used to that. The reputation of the university stretched far and wide, and they probably saw me as some sort of religious zealot.

Yet they seemed to like me. The fact that I was already a Marine and had survived boot camp at Paris Island impressed them considerably. That felt good. Maybe they sensed I just needed a little guidance in the right direction—or the wrong direction, depending on how you looked at it. They talked about how much they liked Clemson and how much freedom they had there. Freedom sounded very appealing. It never crossed my mind to go to college at Clemson, or to go anywhere other than Bob Jones or the Naval Academy, but maybe a new place with new people and fresh energy would be a good thing for me. If nothing else, I’d be able to get the GI Bill.

We ran the three miles that was part of every male Marine’s physical fitness test. I ran it in twenty-five minutes, barely under the slowest time to qualify. Gary Fullerton completed it well under the perfect time of eighteen minutes. I had only known this guy a couple of hours, but already I felt an odd combination of emotions toward him. Part admiration, part jealousy, and part something else I couldn’t quite name.

Meanwhile I continued to discover more of the outside world. With a small group of Marines I went to California for the first time. We were off to summer reserve training in the Mojave Desert at Twentynine Palms. We flew to Palm Springs but my view was limited to staring out the windows of an airport and the windows of a bus. What a strange place! The mountains were so tall and there were no trees or water or anything green that was there naturally.

The Marines I was training with nicknamed me “Bob Jones.” The captain didn’t even know my real name. “How come everyone calls you by your first name, Lance Corporal Jones?”

When my Grandpa Schrader died, I had to fly back from Twentynine Palms early. On the phone Momma kept saying that I didn’t have to fly back for the funeral if I didn’t want to, that she’d understand if I had to complete my Marine training.

She’d always hated the fact that I’d joined the Marines. “You don’t even like guns,” she reminded me. I had told my folks I was going to boot camp just three weeks prior to my departure. The suddenness of my decision had upset them, but the fact that it involved joining the Marines drove them absolutely bonkers.