Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (17 page)

Officer Candidate School is a program separate from the rest of the Marines in that you don’t “enlist” or just “sign up” but you have to apply, be evaluated, and compete. You have to give them your grades, you have to give them references. They interview you, and if you meet their standards, they say “okay” and you can give Officer Candidate School your best shot. It’s just like boot camp, except everyone there is an officer candidate. At boot camp, they make you finish and, when your training is complete, you’re going to be a Marine. At Officer Candidate School, half of you are not going to make it, it’s so tough and competitive.

Those guys were hot. The cream of the crop. I remember those shower scenes. It was very homoerotic because the young men were all muscular, in-shape, good-looking college boys—smart, tough. No one was shy; we were all proud of our tough-looking physiques. I swear some of those guys posed in the showers like they were on the cover of
Muscle and Fitness
magazine. We reveled in our masculinity. We were going to become leaders of Marines.

You go to Officer Candidate School for two summers. If you make it through the first summer, you go back and finish the second summer. Then you graduate college, and then you become an officer. After that, you go back to Quantico for six months

Unlike most of the guys at the camp, I wasn’t in the best shape of my life. My newfound freedom away from BJU and my family had resulted in poor dietary habits and excessive drinking and smoking. Although I survived the six-week platoon leaders class junior program, I had been a poor performer and wondered whether I should return the following summer for the senior program. We were free to “drop on request”—DOR—anytime between summers with no obligation. I postponed the decision until the last possible moment.

In the meantime, I was admitted to Clemson University in the fall. My parents were pleased that I would be continuing with my education, although they still did not contribute to my tuition. Because I was a transfer student, I was ineligible for scholarships and my parents made too much money for me to qualify for assistance. Because I would be in school full time, I would have to reduce my hours at the Hyatt. Money was becoming a big problem for me. At Clemson, I received my first “pre-approved” credit card application.

My only choice was to move back into my parents’ house—to reduce expenses. It meant I would have to drive thirty miles each way through the country of upstate South Carolina to attend classes, but the ease in the financial burden was worth it.

Gary and Colin were from Spartanburg, South Carolina, too far to commute to campus. They and other friends from their high school lived on the same floor in one of the old dormitories known as Johnstone Hall. Johnstone was badly in need of demolition and has since been torn down and rebuilt. In the late eighties, though, because everyone knew it was headed for the dust pile, no one really cared how badly we trashed the old buildings. It was a wild party place, quite the opposite from the cloisterlike student housing at Bob Jones. I loved it.

What was shocking to me was that women were allowed into the men’s dorms, and vice versa! I had never heard of that—in fundamentalist circles, a man would never go behind closed doors with a woman who wasn’t his wife. It’s not that fundamentalists are always about to jump each others’ bones (although given the sexual history of prominent evangelical ministers, maybe that
was
the problem); rather, we had always been taught to take extreme measures to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But here, men and women students could be accused of doing all sorts of things, whether they were true or not!

On days when I had long breaks between classes, I hung out in Gary’s or Colin’s dorm room, where things were more laid back than the library. One afternoon I was studying quietly with Colin when suddenly, the door to his room burst open.

“Colin Steiner, you’re a fucking son of a
bitch
!” shouted a beautiful young blond woman as she burst into the room. Colin pulled back against the wall of his room. We all thought she was going to hit Colin.

Who could this be? The only women I had ever heard use language like this were in the Marines. She had a knockout body and, had I been straight, I’m sure I would have lusted after her. All I felt right now, though, was fear.

A few seconds later, I saw Gary quietly enter Colin’s room and gently step behind the physically fit woman.

“Tami, you wanna calm down?” Gary looked in my direction and gave me a glance that might have been a warning. “Rich, this is my girlfriend, Tami. Tami, this is our friend from OCS, Rich.”

Tami, who had been unaware of my presence earlier, looked at me and instantly transformed herself from an Amazonian Warrior into a giggly college freshman. Her persona was captivating, even for a gay man like me. No wonder Gary adored her and put up with her wild nature. She and I exchanged pleasantries for a second, and then she returned her attention to her scathing assault on Colin. Apparently Colin had told a male friend a secret Tami had told him about one of her friends. To me, it sounded totally high schoolish. But then I remembered that while I was now a twenty-year-old Marine, almost twenty-one, only three months earlier Tami had been a twelfth grader.

To my delight, this odd assortment of people soon became my first group of friends after a year of painful post-expulsion isolation. It felt great to belong somewhere again.

I continued with the same major, accounting, that I’d had at BJU, because to change would mean I would lose even more credits than I was losing and further delay my graduation. That was unacceptable for the officer-commissioning program. I was stuck in a major I didn’t care for and wasn’t good at. As the accounting courses became more difficult, my grades plummeted. For someone who had been an A student in high school, my college grades were a shock. But all I needed to become a Marine officer was passing grades. I set my goals very low and barely achieved them.

I was still working at the Hyatt at night and attending classes during the day at Clemson. During slow shifts I would stop by the Hyatt gift shop and chat with the vendor who leased the space from the hotel. Occasionally, he would ask me to cover for him while he went to the restroom. I looked forward to these visits because it gave me the opportunity to cruise the magazine rack.

At the back of the magazines on the top right shelf was usually a copy of
Playgirl
. I was extremely nervous because the magazine rack was in full view of the hotel lobby through large glass panes. I devoted precious minutes to ensuring that no one was in sight and then I would grab a copy of the
Playgirl
from the top shelf. I sneaked behind the cash register and eagerly opened the magazine, always feeling a peculiar tingle as I flipped through the pages and stared at the handsome, nude men. Each and every time I got an erection, but I blamed this on my status as a virgin. Looking at anyone’s naked body would cause an erection, I reasoned. That I chose naked males over naked females is something I conveniently ignored. I made other rationalizations for looking at hunky men: I wanted to see what I could look like if I put my mind to it. Looking at these magazines, I told myself, would encourage me to hit the gym more often.

My sneak peeks at the
Playgirl
would take longer and longer until one time I was still drooling over a buff, blond, bodybuilder when the gift shop owner returned. My heart was racing as I ran around the corner hoping that I could return the magazine before he got a look at my choice. As I was leaving, however, I realized he could see every move I made in the reflection in the glass walls between the gift shop and the hotel lobby. He just smiled at me, shaking his head.

It was weeks before I gathered the courage to return to the gift shop. Eventually, my horniness surpassed my anxiety and, on a slow night, I climbed the steps to the second floor of the lobby. The owner saw me coming and retrieved something from a bag under the counter.

I entered, he gave me a glimpse of a small vial in his hand and asked if I wanted some. I had no idea what it was, but my instincts told me to say no. That was fine with him. He turned around and took a sniff from the vial. I wondered for a moment if it had been cocaine, but quickly decided that cocaine was only in big cities—not Greenville, South Carolina. Still, if it had been cocaine, why had he been so bold as to offer me some? And if I had thought about it a moment longer, would I have been so quick to say no?

I had no idea if he was coming on to me or not. He was single and also owned an adult bookstore in the next county. He would tell me about all these porno films that he had collected. At the time, I wasn’t about to admit that I might be interested in watching gay porn and straight porn wasn’t appealing to me, so I didn’t follow up on the conversations.

But I did have guys coming on to me—overtly—at the hotel. One guy asked me up to his room suggesting, with a dangerous smile, that I have sex with him for money. He didn’t say it that explicitly but I knew he wanted to hire me for the night. My facial expression froze and I walked away. On different occasions there were businessmen from out of town, New York, Chicago or California, who made their interest very obvious. I also had a lot of guys ask me where the gay bars were. And I told them because I knew.

In chatting with my gay friends at the Hyatt, I learned that there were two gay bars in Greenville. My curiosity was building and I began to wonder if maybe I was bisexual. After all, I was enjoying looking at
Playgirl
more and more. Maybe I could be interested in exploring another man’s body? Sometimes I would think this, but at other times, the idea repulsed me and I wondered what was the matter with me. Perhaps, I thought, if I went to one of these bars, I could find out for sure what was going on inside my head.

One Friday evening, I drove to the more discreetly located of the two bars. This bar didn’t even have its own name; it was known only by its street number. It was situated on a side street behind the municipal airport, not the type of destination that could be accidental.

I found the building and drove past it a couple of times. It was the mystery, more than anything else that was pulling me towards my first gay bar. I pulled into a gravel parking lot a few hundred feet away. My paranoia doubled because a large Buick had followed me into the gravelly lot. I remained seated, taking deep breaths, as I watched the driver of the Buick get out of his car. He was about my age, twenty-one or twenty-two, and had squeezed his large body into very tight jeans. His shirt was cut off at the middle of his stomach. He twirled with a flair and sashayed across the street into the door of the gay bar.

Well, that wasn’t very attractive
, I thought. I checked my watch. It was about nine thirty. Not being familiar with gay clubs and their ways, I figured it was about peak time. I walked from my car to the bar, trying to untangle my feelings each step of the way: No, I wasn’t gay, just very intrigued by all aspects of human life. I had been repressed all those years at BJU and wanted to experience lots of things. Maybe I really was gay; maybe I would meet someone interesting in this bar and they could answer some of my questions. No, I wasn’t going to be gay, I just wanted to see what it was all about.

The bar was practically empty. I sat down and ordered a beer. An effeminate younger man sat nearby. His friend came out of the restroom and stood beside him. I was extremely uncomfortable, slightly contemptuous, fearful of something I couldn’t name. “And then, she just threw her heels in the air and squealed for more!” said the young guy in a very high-pitched voice. Those were the first words I ever heard in an openly gay establishment. I had no idea what the guy was talking about but as the guys chatted and I sipped my beer my dread continued to grow.

Just then, I felt a tap on my wrist.

“Buy you another drink?”

I spun around to see an old guy with leathery skin and beard, his stringy, unwashed hair hung down over his eyes.

“No, thank you,” I stammered. “I’ve, um, got to go.” Repulsed and frightened, I gulped down my beer and raced out of the bar.

On the way back to my car, I prayed a prayer of thanks. “Thank you, God, for showing me that I’m not gay.”

“O
h yeah? Well…Fuck your mother, too!”

God damn!
I thought. I could hear Gary’s roommate through the thin walls. He was so fucking
loud
and he was the most tasteless person I had ever met!

At the beginning of my second year at Clemson I moved into Johnstone Hall to avoid the sixty-mile commute each day. It would be expensive, but I had only three semesters left until graduation and then I would be making lots of money as a second lieutenant in the Marines. Relative to the minimum part-time wages I was making in college, the starting salary of about twenty-two thousand seemed like a lot. I moved into the dorm room next door to my friend and fellow Marine officer candidate, Gary Fullerton. Colin had opted to DOR—“drop on request”—in order to pursue a career in his major.

It had been just Gary and me at Quantico the previous summer, and we had made sure this time that we were in the same platoon. At the beginning I had problems physically, but Gary stayed up with me after lights out, coaching me to do extra sit-ups and push-ups so I didn’t get booted out.

Gary and I returned to South Carolina, super proud of the fact that all that stood between us and the gold bars signifying that we were second lieutenants was our undergraduate degree.

“Hey, Rich, what was the name of that cousin your aunt wanted to set me up with?” Gary asked on the telephone one night after we returned. He and Tami had broken up for the seventeenth time before we went to Quantico. On a weekend liberty from the base, he and I had visited my aunt and uncle across the Potomac in Maryland. My aunt was really taken with Gary. She thought he would be a perfect match for her niece. She wanted me to arrange it.

“You mean my cousin Amy? Why?” When my aunt had mentioned it, I hadn’t given it a second thought. Although I was fond of both Gary and Amy, I knew that with both of their extreme type A personalities, it would have been a match made in hell. I wasn’t about to put myself through that.

“I think she was an intern at the same company as Colin this summer up near Charlotte, and they’ve been going out. What’s her last name?”

“Schrader.”

“Holy shit! That’s her! Colin keeps going on about this hot babe he met this summer and how he’d like to…”

“Shut the fuck up, asshole! You’re talking about my cousin. Amy’s like a sister to me.”

Gary was the “resident assistant,” the RA, on our floor, and his high school friend Donnie was his roommate.

Gary was a straight guy, but to the outside world so was I at that time, or at least that’s how I liked to present myself. I still didn’t think of myself as gay and sure as hell didn’t like anyone else to think of me as gay either. But people are savvier than that. Even though I didn’t admit the true nature of my feelings for Gary, the guys on our hall sure noticed it.

Outside Gary and Donnie’s room, there was a bulletin board that the RA used to communicate messages from the housing department to the residents. Gary, being a resourceful leader, was always trying to think of effective ways to get the guys to actually read the RA board. One way he did this was to include games and contests with his weekly postings. For one contest, he made a list of interesting quotes and statements residents had recently said or were likely to say. We had to guess who on our floor had made, or was most likely to make that statement.

One of the quotes was, “Gary Strydom, Prophet of Mass!”

Gary Strydom was Gary Fullerton’s hero and favorite bodybuilder of the late 1980s. Gary Fullerton was also into bodybuilding, as evidenced by his own lean and muscular physique. The resident most likely to utter “Gary Strydom, Prophet of Mass!” was none other than Gary Fullerton himself. Most of us knew that.

Someone, however—probably Donnie or another guy on our hall, Ian—crossed off the name “Strydom” and penciled the name “Fullerton” in its place. Now the question called for everyone to guess who had or was likely to exclaim, “Gary Fullerton, Prophet of Mass!”

Almost all of the contest sheets came back with my name as that person. Like I would be the one to refer to my friend as “The Prophet of Mass!” Like I was some queer sitting back just admiring Gary’s physique. Maybe I was, but no one was supposed to know that. I was devastated. These jerks just didn’t understand. They were jealous of the close friendship I had with Gary. They could all go to hell for all I cared. How dare they mock something that was so special to me?

Donnie was the worst. Ian was a close second, but Donnie’s special place as Gary’s roommate really irked me. Donnie and I were opposites, for sure. I was still a virgin; he had fucked, and had fucked over, many girls on campus. He brought out the worst in Gary and I detested him for it. Honestly, I was envious of Donnie’s and Gary’s friendship. Donnie knew it, too, and he constantly taunted me. He also made inappropriate sexual references about my mother. It really pissed me off, so bad sometimes that I would storm out of the room. The fact that he made sexual references about
everyone
’s mother didn’t make a difference. He was vulgar and disgusting.

Late each evening, a group of guys would congregate in Gary and Donnie’s room for casual chat.

Ian was one of the few guys in the group who liked to read. It was about the only thing we had in common so I tried to engage him in conversation about the books we read. One evening he had a book with him.

“That was a good movie,” I said. “I haven’t read the book, though. How is it?”

Donnie was sitting nearby. “It figures you’d like
Less Than Zero
. All that’s about is a bunch of faggots using drugs in Palm Springs!”

“Why does it figure that I’d like it?” I asked. “I’m not a faggot, I don’t use drugs, and I’ve only been to Palm Springs once and that was on Marine reserve duty. I had to catch a red-eye back to South Carolina when my grandpa died.”

Ian smelled blood and joined in the fray against me. “But what’d you do while you waited on the plane? Bet you found some faggot to blow!”

“Fuck you, Ian!”

“Fuck your mother!” shouted Donnie.

One evening the subject of circumcision came up.

Ian asked, “Yeah, Gary, what’s it like to have foreskin and fuck a girl? Does it get in the way?”

It made sense that Gary would be uncircumcised; he had been born in England and his family had moved to the States when he was a child. Still, I had never thought about it in quite this context.

In a fit of stupidity, I looked at Gary and asked, “You’re not circumcised?”

Ian let out a howl. “Bullshit, Rich! We all know that
you
, of all people, would know that Gary’s not circumcised!”

The truth is, I
didn’t
know. We all showered together almost daily in an open shower room and, had I been able to, I probably would have sneaked a peek or two or more at my handsome and well-built friends, especially Gary. But I never wore my glasses or contact lenses in the showers. Glasses especially would have been rather obvious, and water and steam fucked up my contacts. My unaided 20/400 eyesight didn’t allow me the luxury of visual gratification in the showers.

But Ian’s comment and the underlying assumption that I lusted after Gary infuriated me. I had a major drama-queen-like hissy fit, and stormed out of Gary’s room and retreated to the solitude of my own. Gary followed me.

“Rich,” he said quietly sitting on the small sofa next to my desk chair, “the only reason the guys give you shit like that is because you let them. They enjoy getting a rise out of you.”

“But that’s fucked up,” I said angrily. “Why treat someone who’s supposed to be your friend like that?”

“Because that’s what guys do. That’s how guys treat each other. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you, that you’re not their friend. But if you keep getting mad and storming out of the room like that…well, that’s kinda weird and they will stop liking you.”

I turned and looked at my friend. “But…Gary…I can take it from them. It’s when
you
laugh too that it gets to me. Like, Donnie, when the two of you get going…”

Gary was still being patient, but I could tell that was waning. “Donnie and I have been friends since high school and yes, we’re gross and disgusting and I laugh at his crude stories and Ian’s jokes and Colin’s dumb-shit remarks and all the rest. That’s just the way it is. You and I…we’re both going to be Marine officers and that’s something that
we
share. That
only
you and I share, ever since Colin turned into a pussy.” We both laughed at the expense of our defenseless friend.

“You know what you should have done?”

“What’s that?”

“Thrown it back in his face!” Gary said. “Ian’s the only one who seemed to know I wasn’t circumcised…you gotta be quick and point that out to him. That’s the way to shut him up.”

No shit! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

As if reading my mind, Gary said, “Well, hang around us long enough and you’ll get good at it. And Rich, you’ve got to learn to let people be who they are. And most of all,
be confident in our friendship
, okay?”

Be confident in our friendship
. That was beautiful harmonic music to my lonely ears. Gary was right, no matter what, he was a solid guy and I knew I could count on him to be my friend. When I was expelled from Bob Jones, I had lost every friend I had. The only time I saw Lucas anymore was at reserve meetings, and ever since Melanie had married the asshole soccer coach, she and I had lost touch. My ability to be confident in friendships had been destroyed. Gary’s gift to me in that moment was a restoration of that ability, the ability to have friendships and to have confidence in the strength of my relationships.

At Bob Jones and within my fundamentalist family, all I had ever known was moral extremism.
Don’t do it. Don’t think about it
. As a result, I had never learned moderation. Moderation is something you have to learn. A kid grows up very repressed and when he finally lets loose he explodes. And I guess there’s a truth in that. In the late 1980s, I started doing everything in the opposite of moderation. I was doing all I could to get promoted within my reserve unit, spending my summers at the notorious and tough Marine officer candidate school, and studying my ass off at Clemson while living in the dorm.

Practically across the street there was a row of bars. I could simply walk across the street and have a beer. No one looking over my shoulder, no questions asked. Needless to say, I started drinking a lot. Tuesday afternoons when I didn’t have a class, why not go to a bar and drink?

Also, in 1989, when I was twenty-one, I took my first baby steps toward total exhibitionism by becoming a stripper. I had already quit the Hyatt and was looking for some other ways to make money. Of course, there were any number of things I could have done, but the idea of displaying myself seemed very enticing.

That fall Gary really started pushing me into getting in shape, picking up where we’d left off at OCS that summer. We were both going to be Marine officers soon, after all, and we needed to look the part. We worked out over a period of months at the Nautilus center at Clemson. This was the fittest I’d ever been, even more fit than when I’d graduated from boot camp. I thought it would be fun to show off a bit. It was my old habit of testing myself, proving to myself. First, I’d done it morally, then academically, and now it had turned to the physical.

It was one of those things that gets planted in your mind. I had recently watched some stupid TV movie where one of the main characters was a male stripper and it started me thinking,
I wonder if I could be a stripper—if people would look at me like that?
Once I got an idea in my head I usually went all the way with it, so I looked in the Yellow Pages and sure enough there was an ad for a place that did “Strip-O-Grams.” Of course, it also gave me an excuse to watch the movie, over and over and over.

I called the number and, as luck would have it, the guy who had been stripping for them had just quit. I set up an interview with the woman at her apartment in Greenville. A short but well-built woman opened the door. She smiled and looked me over.

“You don’t mind taking your clothes off for me, do ya?”

“Um, no,” I said. That seemed kind of stupid question to ask a guy who was auditioning for a role as a stripper, but I was glad she asked. It made it seem more personable.

I undressed down to my underwear.

“That’s as far as you need to go,” said the woman. She was cute, although not exceptionally beautiful. She seemed spunky, though, and I bet she had a lot of the guys who stripped for her. “You never get buck nekkid. This is South Carolina, after all,” she said.

She looked me over and nodded her head. “You look good,” she said. She said the last guy had had longer hair, but I explained that I was in the Marine reserves and that this was as long as my hair could get.

“That’s okay. So that’s why you stay in shape, huh, the Marines? The women will like that.”

As I started leave, she added, “And you don’t need to worry, we won’t send you to do any ‘all guy’ parties, if you know what I mean.”

I hadn’t thought of that and I’m not sure what I would have said if the woman
had
sent me to an ‘all guy’ party. But that wasn’t going to be a problem and I felt a thrill at hearing those magic words “you look good.” I still wasn’t sure if I was going to go through with this, I just wanted to know that I looked good enough to do it.

A week later she called since she had an engagement for me. The first gig I did was for a girl’s sweet-sixteen party. Her mom had hired me. I was terrified but it turned out to be easy because it was a large room filled with both teenage guys and girls. Her mother didn’t want me going down to a G-string so I wore a blue Speedo. The whole thing was all very decorous. Gary even came along to videotape it. It was easy enough. I went there, got paid, and came back. It was exciting, but the whole time I was doing it there was that voice in my head asking, “Why am I doing this?”