Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (31 page)

Maybe there really are only a hundred people in the world and I just keep running into them all
, I mused.
What are the odds?

JT was a huge porn star then and he became even bigger in the coming years. I know he went on to star in the play,
Making Porn
, at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles. Recently,
Adam Gay Directory
wrote, “We never tire of seeing JT’s remarkable body, his rock-hard cock or his spectacular butt—and when those perfect globes are spread to reveal his butt-hole, it’s like glimpsing heaven.” I certainly appreciated getting my glimpse of it, and doing the scene with him was intense, hot fun.

Another interesting thing to mention is that, in the very beginning of the scene, I’m wearing sunglasses (they would ultimately use stills from this scene in
The Advocate
when they exposed my porn past). I think, if you didn’t know better, you might not recognize me. This is probably the video my friend Tim Carter and his boyfriend had seen before it was made public that I appeared in porn films. This is the one porn where someone could plausibly deny it was me—if you wanted to. The only one.

Jim and John had invited me to a party which was that very day, after the taping. I left Hollywood thinking,
Jeez, I’m too tired to go to this party
. Once again, after all the hot fun, I was feeling ashamed of what I had done. Sam Abdul had paid me seven hundred dollars for the day and I had the check in my pocket.

A young woman named Bethany was holding the beach party. Her dad was a very conservative businessman, very wealthy, and very prominent in Orange County. She was Jim’s friend, and mine. They hooked up to be each other’s beard as boyfriend and girlfriend. She would show him off as her boyfriend to her dad; Jim would take her to all the military functions. The party was actually a lesbian beach party, but they included a few guys.

Ah, what the hell
, I said to myself,
I’ll go to the party anyway
. Fate stepped up to the plate, I went to the party, and that’s where I met Brandon. And my life changed.

I wasn’t drinking during this period because I was still having a paranoid reaction to the fact that I had blabbed to my friend that I was gay after my wetdown party at the strip club. I had stopped drinking cold turkey because I was so freaked out at the chance of once again losing every ounce of self-control while drunk.

Soon as I arrived at the party I zeroed in on Brandon. He was exactly my type. Short, muscular, blond hair, blue eyes. Absolutely adorable. He had a playful, boyish look, but was very manly at the same time. The immediate attraction was purely physical. On the other hand, I was sure Brandon was hitting on my friend, Wesley. The fact that I, a rising porn star, was not the focus of Brandon’s attention was part of the challenge for me. I became resolved to get Brandon to turn his attention away from Wes and exclusively on me.

As if on cue, one of the lesbians complimented me on my physique and, completely out of nowhere, a bolt from the blue, Wes said, “Yeah, Rich is a porn star.” Huh? What? Where? Who? It floored me that he would say something like that out of left field! Apparently Wes’s little joke was just one of those weird, omen things that happened once in awhile just to freak us out—there was no possible way he could have known about my recent porn history. As far as I knew nothing was even available on tape yet. All the while I was thinking,
How is it possible he would make a comment like that? Right at this moment I have a check in my pocket from Forum Studios
.

No one took the comment seriously, including Brandon, for whom I was about to make a play in a big way.

“Hi,” I said. “Your name’s Brandon, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered with a cute smile. “And you are…?”

“Rich. I think you and I met at the Superbowl party Jim and John threw in San Clemente about six months ago.”

Brandon looked puzzled. “We did? I was there. But I don’t…” He was too polite to actually say he didn’t remember me, but he obviously didn’t. I was appalled.
How could he not remember meeting me? We had talked for about twenty minutes!

“I was pretty drunk,” he said, offering me a face-saving reason for not having made a memorable impression on him.

By now he really intrigued me, beyond the fact that I thought he was adorable, because he was also challenging. I remember we had a conversation about gays in the military and I found his comments borderline offensive, yet over-the-top sexy. Most of the time people would listen to my story and then they’d say, “Oh, wow, that’s really interesting” and take it at face value. Brandon probed with comments like, “Well, why would you be in the military? Why wouldn’t you come out in the military if that’s the way you feel?”

A lot of the guys I met at the time, even at this particular party, were either in the military or they had a military fetish. I’d grown accustomed to my Marine background being a turn-on to guys. I was used to that. I’d say, “I’m in the Marines,” and they would flock. With Brandon it almost turned him off, it seemed. I sensed it. But challenging me was a sure-fire way to keep me interested.

At first he didn’t want to go home with me. He most certainly didn’t want to have sex that night. I was insistent. I was aggressive. I was desperate to have sex with him because I thought he was cute and hot and smart and the whole combination just enflamed me—even after all that sex (in a sling, no less) earlier that day. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Later I discovered that Brandon didn’t understand the difference between officers and men who enlisted. He had this stereotype of Marines just being “young, dumb, and full of cum.” At first Brandon thought I was that way. It took us getting together a few times before he realized I was different. Being an officer meant you had to have a college degree. And my ego liked to think of itself as more intelligent than average. Still, it took a while for him to warm up to me.

Philip always used to tell me that I was too aggressive which, coming from Philip, was hilarious. But I always replied that someday I would find someone who likes assertiveness, so I would continue to be myself.

Finally Brandon gave in and said, “Okay, come to my place.” Weeks later I told Brandon what Philip always said about me and he replied, “Well, you were too aggressive but I thought it was kind of cute.” So, see?

Brandon lived in Long Beach and I told him I would follow him home. I drove to his house. As we were going up the stairs to his condo he said, “Oh no, the dog is going to wake up my roommate.”

I thought,
Oh, fuck, he’s got a dog
. I still had my mother’s old attitude about civilized people not allowing animals in the house. Philip’s boyfriend had a dog and his house stank to high heaven. But this was a little Jack Russell terrier and the place didn’t stink at all. He came charging out, his tail wagging, and Buster jumped up on Brandon. It was so cute. I immediately had this sense that this was a family here. I fell in love right away. Even in the short time that I knew him, I realized I wanted to be a part of his life.

We had great sex that night. The next day we had breakfast at a little place in the gay area of Long Beach. In the same vein as the night before at the party, I would say things and Brandon would disagree. Where I come from you don’t act like that with someone you’re trying to impress or get along with. I had tried my best but I figured he simply didn’t like me. Our personalities clashed. We both had our own cars and I was planning on just driving off into the sunset.

But then he suddenly said, “No, let’s go to the beach in Laguna. You have to head south anyway, right?”

An unexpected offer, but nice.
Okay, what the hell…I’ll give this another shot and go to the beach with him.
It was a hot, sunny day. We went to the beach and had a wonderful time.

It was incredibly remarkable and a special twenty-four hours in my life. Still, I was confused by his signals and I informed Brandon, emphatically, that I was NOT going to call him. I would wait for him to call me. I didn’t add “with bated breath,” but I was thinking it.

Monday night he didn’t call. I was pretty bummed. Tuesday night the phone rang at about 9 p.m., I jumped for it expecting it to be Brandon. It was Philip calling from Osaka, near Tokyo. He dove right into the conversation without greeting, just chewing me out, yelling at me, because I had let it out to his boyfriend that Philip and I had had sex years before. I never knew that it was a secret. It seemed so mundane, so incredibly stupid to me now, but he was just livid with me.

Philip was a man of many secrets and he liked it that way. It never occurred to him that most people wouldn’t consider some things a secret by default. There had been no cheating involved with our tryst, so why was sex a bad thing that needed to be kept secret?

I hung up on him. Then I called Brandon because I was so upset. He listened. It was so nice to have someone actually listen to me. After that he started calling me.

I had committed to one more video for a producer that David Hubert had put me in touch with, Bill Scheffler at Centaur. By now I was feeling very differently about my budding career, but I’d already agreed to do it.

I told Brandon I would come spend the following weekend with him but I would have to leave Sunday morning without giving him a reason, and hoping that he just assumed I had business at Camp Pendleton. That whole week I had a totally fresh outlook on life. I was seeing everything with a new perspective.

Am I going to do this? Am I going to keep doing the porn? I could really have something going with this guy. This could turn out to be special. Do I really want to keep doing these videos and hide it from him?

I told myself that I would decide later. I spent Friday night and Saturday with Brandon. Saturday night we went out with his friends. One of them bought me a beer and that’s when I started drinking again. I said, “Oh, what the hell.” My red-flag phrase. The next day Brandon and I went to breakfast, and I realized that I couldn’t lie to this man.

He asked, “Where are you going when you leave me this morning?”

I gulped, looked down at the table, and then back into his eyes. “I’ve been doing these porn videos.” I said. “I have to film a scene later today.”

And he didn’t believe it. He said, “Oh yeah? That’s funny.”

“No, really,” I replied. “I’m a porn star.”

He refused to believe me. “Oh no, you’re not,” he said.

We were at a breakfast place in Long Beach and he gave me directions saying, “When you leave here you gotta go that way to get on the 405 South.”

I thought, without saying:
Fuck, I just told you I’m not going back. I have to go make this video and I have to get on the 405 North.

We left together and he watched me drive off. He thought I just missed my exit and went the wrong way. I knew now, for sure, that I was.

I drove up to the San Fernando Valley, to a warehouse that had been set up for making porn. There was no script. I just showed up. I discovered that I was taping a scene with the same guy I had done the video with a week earlier—the one who had fucked me in the sling for
Leather Obsession 2
. He immediately whispered, “Shh. Don’t tell anyone we already did a scene or they won’t let us do this video together.” He was an accountant during the week, I believe. All the guys I met in the porn industry were congenial. My only negative encounter was with Sam Abdul.

The scene was pretty standard stuff. I think the film was called
Breakthrough
or
Breakout
. It was about some guy breaking out of the closet. We are supposed to be waiters and there is a locker room and we fuck each other in there after our shift. The scene went without incident. At this point I was in the best shape I’d ever been in.

There was nothing remarkable about this film in particular except that, on the way home, I decided that this was it. I intuitively felt that this thing with Brandon could be real. Before I met Brandon, one of the conclusions I had come to believe was that it was hopeless for me to try and be in a relationship. I kept telling myself it just wasn’t in the cards for me.

Meeting Brandon made me feel that there were possibilities. If something real and lasting developed between us, I didn’t want people to say, “Oh there’s that guy whose boyfriend is a porn star.” I now had a reason for not doing porn that hadn’t occurred to me before: There was another person in my life who was important to me. What I did not only affected me, it affected him. It wasn’t all about me anymore.

For several weeks after my decision, I kept getting calls from people in the porn industry. From David Babbitt. From the guy at Centaur. David Hubert called with more producers who were interested in using me. I told them all no; I said I wasn’t interested in doing any more. David Babbitt even asked why. I told him I was too freaked out being a Marine. Later someone from the industry would tell
The Advocate
, “We thought he was just wonderful…Everybody wondered why he just disappeared.”

The following weekend I made sure that Brandon understood that I had really done the porn videos. To me, it was very important for him to know up front, before I got too involved with him. I didn’t want to get my heart broken if he found out through someone else.

Already I was getting the feeling that my videos were being seen.

When I came out of the closet to myself three years earlier, I thought that meant I was done with denial. That at that moment, I believed I’d gained a complete and total sense of self-awareness. Unfortunately, that was just unrealistic hope. Looking back, I can see that was only the
beginning
of getting rid of denial. Denial is a habit and like any other habit, the longer it has been practiced, the harder it is to break. I didn’t want to believe that any of my friends would see the porn videos I was in, so when I thought about that happening, I just said to myself,
No, they won’t.
There, problem solved.