Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (29 page)

A few months later, Steven would introduce me to his roommate, also a Marine, named Jerry. Jerry was a friendly but quiet guy, and we went out a couple of times and became friends ourselves. One weekend Steve and Jerry introduced me to Andrew, a friend who seemed to have a romantic interest in Jerry. I couldn’t be sure though and, since Jerry and I had hooked up in the past, I didn’t want to cause any problems just in case Andrew might be the jealous type.

Andrew seemed pleasant, but anxious. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he didn’t stand out among the thousands of handsome young party boys that populate San Diego and the rest of southern California. He didn’t seem to notice me either, until Steven mentioned I was a Marine. Apparently Andrew was fascinated with military guys.

Two years later I received an urgent voice mail from Steven, who was now living in Seattle. I called him back.

“Do you remember Jerry’s friend Andrew DaSilva…I think we introduced you to him in San Diego.”

“Vaguely,” I said. I tried to picture him.

“Well, he’s killed two people. In Minnesota, and they don’t know where he is now.”

“No shit, Steven? Are you serious? This is crazy. But that’s probably a smart move.”

“Oh,” said Steven before hanging up, “as it turns out, his real name wasn’t Andrew DaSilva. It’s Andrew Cunanan.” Later, after a murderous rampage across the county, Andrew Cunanan murdered the clothing designer, Gianni Versace, in South Beach. A few days later, he killed himself on a houseboat.

The week after my introductory jerk-off video, Dirk called and said he wanted me to be in a movie—just a low budget thing that they were filming in a studio in San Diego for this series he had called the Barracks Glory Hole series. I would be a model in a film entitled
Glory Hole 4
. Dirk went on to say that it would pay four hundred dollars and that I would be in a scene with two guys. He wanted me to top.

The taping was scheduled for a weekday after work. I remember that whole day at work I was tingling with sexual excitement and struggling with other feelings that would occasionally interrupt. I would go from giddiness to extreme guilt, thinking,
I can’t do this. I better call this guy and cancel.
But then I went back to thinking,
My life has become so mundane, just putting in time, nothing special, nothing interesting—I haven’t been this excited about anything in a long time.

I showed up at the studio early that evening. From the front it looked just like another decrepit office building northeast of downtown San Diego. Since then, Dirk has moved his studio to a larger complex near the sports arena thanks to all the money he’s made with military porn, but back then, it was in the middle of a regular commercial office area. I parked a few blocks away and went through back alleyways to get there. I didn’t want anyone to see me going in. Once inside I noticed a little studio set that looked like a bathroom. There were a couple of fake toilets, a urinal, and stalls with glory holes in them.

I expected to see lots of assistants and production people standing around with towels, but this was a low-budget thing and it was just Dirk and an old man who would be running the camera.

Dirk’s direction of my first real scene in the porn industry was thus: “You’re going to be in the middle stall. This guy who we just brought in from Tijuana is going to be over in the next stall.” I looked over at the guy from Tijuana and my eyes immediately looked down to the biggest dick I’d ever seen in my life. This was oh-my-God huge! Uncut, too.

“…and then this little guy who you’re gonna fuck is going to be over here in this stall. You go sit on the toilet seat and pretend to be taking a crap. The little guy is going to look at you through the glory hole and then you stick your dick through it and he’ll suck you.”

Now I was checking out the tight little stud who would be sucking my dick, thinking,
Ah, he’s really cute.
The big one, I wasn’t as attracted to, but his mighty, dangling cock was truly a force to reckon with. Dirk told me they were both straight. The guy with the huge dick hardly spoke any English—I didn’t, however, think that this would hinder his career in any way.

Before we started the scene, I talked to the cute guy with the hot little body whose main mission, I soon found out, was to get fucked.

“You’re straight?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m attracted to women, but I can’t wait for you to fuck me! I love taking it in the ass. I’m straight but I love the feeling of a guy’s cock up my ass.”

I said, “Okay, whatever.”

We did the oral scenes through the glory hole first. Since I had never been involved with a glory hole in real life, this was sort of thrilling. The little stud would blow me and then the big hunk would stick his enormous cock through the other glory hole. I was in the middle and I would have to go back and forth between getting sucked by the little guy and then taking a mouthful of the big guy. The little stud looked through the glory hole and said something like, “Why don’t you come fuck me?”

Then we took a little break while they did the next setup. I didn’t realize all the difficulties with lighting. They have something called a “crotch light.” When they do a close-up of the penetration they have to get the angle just right and they get the crotch light down there and it gets really hot. Hot in the sense of heat-hot. But this wasn’t a really complicated film.

In the next part of the scene I simply walked around the stall and the little guy got down on his hands and knees and we did it doggy style. He had a really tight ass. It was hard to fuck him but I was eager. The hunk from Tijuana stood over us, fondling himself and working his very dark and very meaty cock. The camera was rolling but that was the last thing on my mind. The action was really hot. I fucked the hell out of him and he really liked it, if I do say so myself. But it didn’t last very long. These kinds of scenes don’t take forever. I imagine Dirk strings a whole bunch of them together on one video.

Afterwards we toweled off and got dressed. Dirk met with each of us individually and paid us in cash. He looked me up and down. “We need a name for you,” he said, “You look like a ‘Danny.’”

“Okay,” I said, “what the hell, I’ll be Danny.” It made no difference to me. But there was one thing I did care about. “Dirk, I can’t be on any box cover,” I said. “That would be too visible.” My thinking was that if somebody went to the trouble to rent or buy this video, take it out of the box, stick it in the machine, sit down, and play it, they’re going to really be into it. Whereas if I’m on the cover, somebody could just be casually browsing and see it by chance and not be culpable themselves.

Dirk said, “That’s fine—no covers.” I gave him my driver’s license and social security card. We signed this release that stated we’d only make what he’s paying us at that time and the scene could be used anywhere, in any way. I was looking at it thinking, “This is ridiculous, I should never sign something like this.” And then, as was my wont, I did anyway. He told me that he had me in mind for another similar type of scene. The whole process had taken about three hours.

Another thing I was to learn from the writer Steve Zeeland was that there had been a scandal a couple of years earlier, in 1993, regarding Marines doing gay porn. Actually, there’s a “scandal,” either nationally or locally, involving Marines in San Diego and gay porn about every five or six years. Kind of like
el niño
. Steven knew the “behind the scenes” story.

Interestingly, the 1993 scandal did not involve All Worlds Videos or Dirk Yates. There was this guy who lived in Oceanside, a sort of low-life type, named Billy Ramirez. Billy would hang around the bus station, pick up Marines, and bring them back to a hotel room with the promise of drugs and women. When they got back to the hotel, drugs would be liberally distributed and eventually Billy would videotape these naive, young Marines, jerking off, jerking each other off, and some of them even having sex with one another. Occasionally, he would actually get a woman to join in, but for the most part Billy would usually slip on a little jock strap and ultimately get these servicemen to fuck him. “Fuck me like you fuck Thai pussy,” he would gleefully exclaim to the obliging boys.

Well, it came to pass that a vigilant wife somehow heard about her Marine-husband’s conduct unbecoming and showed up un-announced at the hotel, while Bobby and friends were in the other room videotaping. In the course of her snooping, the irate wife came across a drawer filled with a batch of photographs of naked Marines—including one of her husband. She snatched the pictures and turned them over to the Oceanside police. Well, Oceanside police looked at them, threw up their hands, and said, “They’re all over eighteen, there’s nothing we could do!” But they did turn the photos over to Camp Pendleton. The story made it to the media to the extent that Tom Brokaw or one of the national evening network news anchors reported it.

People immediately assumed the man at the helm of the sleazy operation was Dirk Yates. The media descended on him. Yates denied to the media that his company had anything to do with this scandal. Being an astute businessman, however, Yates realized what this could (and did) do for his business. Smartly, he let some time pass and the media inevitably turned its attention elsewhere.

In reality some Marines were prosecuted for these bizarre incidents. Out of all of those in the films, the Marine Corps could identify nine guys and one woman who had participated in the sexcapades. There were many more involved but they couldn’t be recognized. Rumor had it that the way they identified the ten was that these hapless participants were wearing their dog tags. The officials could simply blowup the stills and read the information. That doesn’t seem likely because dog tags are hard to read, even up close and in person, but it makes a good story. They also made a point to include this one woman so it didn’t look like a totally gay thing. They sent them to be court-martialed or gave them non-judicial punishment. They were discharged.

What I learned from this incident is that this kind of publicity was the last thing the Marine Corps wants. Actually, the Marine Corps did all they could to simply stamp that scandal out. If anything ever happened involving my appearances it would be a national scandal, especially because I was a captain doing porn. So I was thinking, “If anything happens I could just negotiate a deal to get out of the Marines.” I really had nothing to lose, especially with the thought that my career with them was over anyway. If they came after me I would say, “Just let me go or I’ll go to the press.” They didn’t want me stirring up trouble.

These were some of my thoughts, to justify doing what I wanted to do, which was the videos. Rationalization, justification and denial. I couldn’t have done any of this without those powerful devices. It seems so stupid now—I was really putting myself in a lot of danger and for all the wrong reasons.

A week later I went back to the studio in San Diego to film another. This one was for a movie called
Boxer Shorts 2
. Dirk asked me if I would bottom this time.

“Sure,” I said, rather nonchalantly. “I don’t have any problem with that.” I had never understood guys who were exclusively “top” or exclusively “bottom.” Part of the fun of being gay was the versatility. Fucking a guy’s ass felt great, so did getting fucked. After twenty-five years of self-denial and prudery, I no longer limited my pleasure. And I had a lot of time to make up for.

“Exclusive tops are frustrated breeders,” I said to Philip. “You might just as well fuck pussy.”

“Ooh,” he exclaimed. “Stop grossing me out!”

I also didn’t see any reason to limit my video performances to one role or the other. I figured I’d get more roles the more things I was willing to do. Where the limit was, I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.

This time Dirk had a weight bench. I was supposed to go over and pretend to be lifting weights. Then some guy would come over and fuck me on the weight bench. Classic stuff.

Dirk did not direct this scene. He had another guy there, named David Babbitt. I guess Dirk had called in David to see if he wanted to use me in a major production he was putting together called
Bad Moon Rising
. At the end Dirk paid me; this time it was five hundred dollars because if you bottomed they paid you a hundred dollars more. I was looking at it thinking,
This really isn’t much money
. Still, it was nice. My car payments, my insurance, my credit card bills from college—all of these debts were still there. I had gone a long way to getting out of debt when I was out at sea, but I still had a way to go. This was really helping me out financially. So I kept telling myself,
I’m saving money for law school. This is one way I’m doing it.

Dirk had named me “Danny.” But now David asked, “What’s your last name? You need a last name.”

“Danny Orlis.”

I remembered exactly who Danny Orlis was. He was that obnoxious holier-than-thou Jesus freak in the books I had read as a kid. His name had popped into my head and out of my mouth before I could even think about it.

“All right,” David said. He didn’t sound too fond of the name. After all, it wasn’t Blade Steele or Ty Foxx, like the catchier-sounding names for gay male porn stars. But if he had reservations, he didn’t express them. “You are now Danny Orlis.”

That’s who I became. I’m sure an analyst could spend quite a few sessions figuring that one out. The porn star now shared a name with a little boy famous for his adventures in the pages of Christian literature. Today, if some parent out there goes on the Internet looking for Danny Orlis books for their kids, they’re going to get quite an eclectic set of hits on their Google search.

David Babbitt was sufficiently impressed with my performance in
Boxer Shorts 2
, to offer me another movie. His critique to me was: “You’re fantastic! You bottom really well.” And then he added the music to my ears: “You’ll do really well in this industry.” Even though I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about being in the business, it was still nice to hear that I could do well in it if I so chose to.