Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (3 page)

She replied, “You just have to let this stuff go.” I didn’t realize how relevant that piece of advice would soon become.

Things were starting to happen very quickly. Jennifer told me that the
Times
wanted to do a feature story on Brandon and me, and she would be the writer. She said this was rare, the paper and the magazine rarely do crossover stories like this. Soon after that she conveyed the happy news that her magazine article had been nominated for a Pulitzer. I was incredibly excited.

Next, the
Los Angeles Times
called requesting an interview. They did a story on me that also included photographs. It was all really thrilling. People were aware of who I was. “This is the
New York Times
cover boy!”

And then, just as it was getting bigger and bigger, the bubble burst.

Shortly after Christmas I received a phone call from John Erich at
The Advocate
. He informed me that one of his readers, a man to whom I had been introduced by a mutual friend years before, recognized me from my pornographic videos. Now the editors wanted to know if it was true. Was I the model from the porn videos?

I was stunned. All I could say was, “I don’t have any comment. Let me get back to you.” Before I could hang up Erich said, “Well, we’re going to do a story.”

I immediately called SLDN and they in essence told me, “We have nothing to do with this—SLDN has nothing to say about this.”

I thought,
Oh great. I’m being abandoned by these people.
I had done the story partly for them. I had put my neck on the line—not to mention that I had helped raise a lot of money for the organization. Now I felt as if they were washing their hands of me.

Panic-stricken, I called
The Advocate
back. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this story,” I said indignantly. “It doesn’t help anyone. If it’s a lie, you’re going to get sued for libel. If it’s true, what good does it do? I don’t understand why you would do this.” My argument didn’t do anything to sway them.

After I realized that they were going to go ahead with the story, the worst part was knowing how this would affect Jennifer Egan. I had trusted her completely. She had placed her trust in me as well, and she rewarded me with a beautiful article. Sure I spilled my guts to her, but I hadn’t spilled
all
my guts. I had chosen what I wanted her to hear.

I called Jennifer and told her. I could hear the hurt in her voice. I sensed that she was feeling as if I betrayed her. But all she said is that she would get back to me. Soon after, she telephoned. Obviously the new feature story was off. And now the
Times
was going to have to print something about my past, which they did shortly thereafter—on page A-17:
GAY MARINE IN
TIMES
ACTED IN SMUT FILMS
.

Brandon and I kept thinking that maybe
The Advocate
wouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. Indeed, the next issue didn’t have anything about it at all. I breathed a sigh of temporary relief. Jennifer called me feeling the same way. “Maybe they decided to drop the story,” she said. I could only hope.

But two weeks later, on a Sunday, I received an e-mail from a friend of mine in DC. The e-mail simply said, “I just saw
The Advocate
! Fuck ’em.” So I knew something was coming. Yet no one was talking to me. The silence was deafening.

Monday night I came home and Brandon said, “Tim Carter just called—You’re on the cover.” Oh my God. Now I was identified as
THE MARINE WHO WAS ALSO A PORN STAR
. I was just mortified. How was I going to deal with this?

Everything I struggled to accomplish in becoming a Marine would now be questioned. All the good things I had hoped would come out of Jennifer Egan’s article would be stained. Everything that had come before would now be put under a microscope. My goals, aspirations, my very character, were all about to come under major scrutiny because of two completely separate parts of my life that would soon be connected forever: the fact that I had been a Marine and the choice I made to appear in porn films. Now even I questioned my choices.

I didn’t know I was gay when I joined the Marines, or rather, I hadn’t consciously admitted I was gay, even to myself. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had taught me that homosexuals were evil people; therefore, I could not be a homosexual. Occasionally, I had sexual thoughts about other men, but because I could not be gay, I assumed most men were just like me and also had these thoughts. I was adept at mental gymnastics.

I joined the Marine Corps for the same reasons most people join the Marine Corps: I loved my country and wanted to do my patriotic duty. I also needed money for college, and I joined in 1985, just after Congress had just passed the new GI Bill giving tuition assistance to men and women who had completed their service commitment.

Subconsciously, I felt deficient in my masculinity and wanted a boost to my manliness. I also wanted to be around a lot of men. Wanting to be around a lot of men is not a homosexual desire; many heterosexual male Marines prefer to work in an all-male environment. For me, however, my desire to be around men was both sexual and nonsexual.

I also wanted a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of something larger than myself. I wanted to be a part of “The Few, the Proud.”

W
hen people are trying to get to know me, asking me questions, attempting, I guess, to find out why I made the decisions I’ve made and what led me to become the man I am—I look back over my childhood. At the time, nothing seemed all that unusual to me. It was all I knew. I had nothing to compare it with. But reviewing my life as an adult I can understand—so clearly—that my decisions, my inhibitions, my exhibitions, the person I am today, all have their roots in that small Southern town where religion was such an integral part of my existence. A place where I always tried so hard to please and live up to the expectations that everyone had for me—my parents, my family, my teachers, God, but most of all myself.

I was born in the early fall of 1967, just at the end of the fabled “Summer of Love.” The “Summer of Love” was as foreign to my birthplace as the Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. I was born at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, appropriately beginning my existence at a church-affiliated hospital. I always perceived my upbringing as middle class, now I think it may have been lower middle class.

To get to my house, you went ten miles south of Greenville and took a nondescript exit off the freeway onto a narrow, winding, rural country road. On a hill off the road, there was a big plot of land that my granddad had purchased years before. As any Southerner will tell you, family is of utmost importance. Grandpa Merritt’s house was there, and right next to it was our house, and right next to that was the house of my aunt and uncle. Our house was small; my grandpa built it in 1963 for my parents. We had a big front yard and a driveway, which we shared with my aunt and uncle. There was an extensive wooded area behind our houses that sloped steeply down to a winding river. If you kept on going down the road another mile you would come to a little town called Piedmont built on the banks of the Saluda River.

At the time I was born my father was working for Duke Power as a meter reader. Soon after I was born my mother went to work doing bookkeeping and secretarial stuff for a big chemical conglomerate.

I loved my mom. She was beautiful and tender and we were very close but sometimes, it seemed to me, she had trouble expressing herself. For as long as I could remember, I was always, always, always trying to do little things to make her proud of me, but she never seemed be able to satisfy my hunger for approval. She
did
feel proud of me for many things—my sensitivity, my thick hair, my thoughtfulness—but she wasn’t always able to express it. Or maybe I just needed to hear more than she was able to give.

In the mornings, before my mom left for work, she would take me to Momma King’s. She was my babysitter and the one person in life to whom I could do no wrong. She spoiled me, buying me the kind of apples I liked, making me pinto beans for lunch, and things like that. To this day—and she’s in her late eighties—when I visit her she says, “Richie, do you remember when you were two years old, I was dusting the light, standing on that footstool, and you came in and said, ‘Momma King, be careful. Don’t fall, you’ll hurt yourself.’ At two years old you were the most thoughtful little boy.”

And that’s the kind of thing my mom would never say to me. She would never point out that I was considerate—because she wanted me to be even better. Yet Momma King made me aware of all those little things I did right. Things like that stand out in my mind because they were so important to me at the time.

One sunny October morning in 1970, I was staying over at Momma King’s and I remember walking across her driveway as Daddy pulled up in his 1960 black Ford Falcon. Momma was in the passenger seat, looking radiant and lovely, as every mother should appear to her three-year-old child. My mother always looked that way to me. She was holding something across her chest.

Momma King had already informed me that my parents would be bringing my new little baby brother home from the hospital that day, but I was unprepared for the sight. I was overwhelmed. I had seen Mom hold babies before, but not one of her own. Seeing her sitting there, beaming with this new child, was like magic. She seemed complete. Daddy looked handsome and content, sitting in the driver’s seat with his wife and two sons within his reach. I could hardly believe it—I had a baby sibling! I was thinking,
This could be fun!
Jimmy, my baby brother, looked like a toy I could play with, he was so cute. We were a happy little family with a promising future ahead of us.

Sadly, although I did not realize it, Momma King would never again be my babysitter. By the time my mother returned to work several years after my brother was born, I had started school and no longer needed a full-time babysitter.

But throughout my life, I visited Momma King every few years. People frequently remarked that it was so sweet of me to visit this lonely old widow. Well, perhaps it was sweet of me, but I didn’t visit Momma King only for her sake. I also visited her for my benefit. Everyone needs someone who has known them from an early age, who loves them unconditionally and who believes that they can do no wrong. Momma King has always been that person in my life. Her love flowed freely, extravagantly, unencumbered with judgments. She just loved me simply for who I am, her “sweet little Richie.”

Years later, just weeks after I had gotten over my denial and finally admitted to myself I was gay, I went home for a Christmas visit. Just a few weeks before I took a long, hard look at myself in the mirror and said, “Rich Merritt, you’re a homosexual.” I was twenty-five, still in the Marine Corps, and I hadn’t come out to anyone else yet. While I was visiting my family I went to see Momma King and she told me a story about a relative of hers. She said, “You know he’s one of those homer-sexuals.” That’s the way she pronounced it. But then she quickly added, “But what do I know about that? He is my family and I love him—and you know we’re all God’s children, anyway.” God, I still cry when I think of that—to hear this old woman make that statement at that particular time in my life was just absolutely extraordinary. It was the first time I ever heard anyone back home say something so nonjudgmental about being gay.

Yet her gentle statement also made me somewhat uneasy because it forced me to consider whether God approved or disapproved of what I felt and of what I had done. I had pushed that issue aside for months, and now here was this saintly woman adding new dimensions to my confusing thoughts.

But that was all a long way in the future. Before kindergarten, my life had consisted of listening to my parents’ sweet voices read books to me, playing in the sandbox beneath the oak tree, catching lightning bugs at night, and curling up by the fireplace in the winter to watch cartoons and
The Brady Bunch
. Long summer days. Hot summer days. My cousins would come down and my mom would babysit for them. My mom’s side of the family was five miles up the road in nearby Powdersville, South Carolina, and we’d all play games under the trees in the backyard.

It wasn’t always play. We’d have to work in the garden on those hot summer days, picking green beans and squash and okra. But even by doing that, we were in touch with nature and loving the outdoors, despite the mosquitoes and other bugs. I slept very well at night after playing and working so hard. I loved it all. Heaven really was a place on earth. I was happy. Life seemed easy.

I’m telling you all of this so you get an idea of what my childhood was like. My life on the outside seemed very simple—it revolved around my immediate family and religion. To say it plainly, our religious faith was the center of the family. For example, my dad had taken an old antique wagon wheel from the 1800s, which—with some paint and glass—he converted into our coffee table. Placed on the center of this table, rather symbolically, were a family photo album and a large white Bible. Every night before we went to bed, we’d gather around that coffee table with my dad reading from the Bible and then we’d all pray. Our family devotions lasted from twenty minutes to an hour each night.

From the time I was born until I was five, we were members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church which, to me, now seems really wacky; for example, people speaking in tongues and, in extreme cases, handling live snakes. (I never saw any snake handlers in person; we weren’t quite that backward.) My family went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and I was totally happy with it. I thought everyone did that because almost everyone I knew
did
do that. Even the members of my family who didn’t go to church paid lip service to God and Jesus and the Bible.

Oh, it wasn’t all that extreme. Generations before, Pentecostals weren’t even allowed to see movies, dance, have parties, anything like that. Grandpa Schrader, who was Pentecostal, didn’t think women should wear makeup, have a perm, or have their hair colored. In my day, they were a little more lax about that kind of thing. My mom would say, “Any ol’ barn can use a coat of paint.”

Along with
The Brady Bunch
, my brother and I were allowed to watch some other television shows. My favorite show was
Bewitched
. I imagined how much fun it would be to be Samantha, living a relatively normal and happy life among mere mortals, but having a special secret that made her unique.

“That Uncle Arthur sure is a sissy!” Momma said as she and I laughed at the character played by Paul Lynde. Soon enough, I would come to dread that word, but at this point, I was too young to understand what it meant.

Of course, there were some programs that were totally off limits. Shows like
Sonny and Cher
,
All in the Family
, and later
Three’s Company
, were all taboo. But I do remember trying to sneak a few glimpses of the spectacular Cher when my mom wasn’t looking. I guess that was a hint of things to come.

Martha Rogers was my Sunday school teacher at the Pentecostal Holiness Church. She was my first teacher, and I loved her dearly. She also paid special attention to me, setting me up to be a lifelong teacher’s pet. One morning as she read from the Old Testament to the assembled group of five-year-olds, one segment in particular caught my attention, “And the Lord God rained fire and brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sin and wickedness of that city.” I was fascinated as I imagined the horrific scene of fire raining down from the sky, people running, mass hysteria. Martha continued: “He had commanded that no one turn and look back at the city, but Lot’s wife disobeyed the Lord,” Martha said, almost whispering the deadly judgment that was to come. “God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.”

I was confused. I tried to imagine what purpose was served by a
pillow
of salt. Could you sleep on it? Did the salt get in your mouth as you slept? Was it comfortable or was it crunchy? Years would pass before someone would correct my misguided notion that the Lord had taken a pillowcase and stuffed it with salt made from Lot’s disobedient wife.

Then Martha added, “The Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they were
wicked
.”

“What was so wicked about them?” a child asked

Martha didn’t have a quick answer. “Well…in Sodom…and, well…I suppose in Gomorrah, too…” she stammered, “they…people, er, men…had, um…men
married
other men.” She seemed relieved, as if she discovered the word “married” just in the nick of time.

No Sunday school teacher has ever held the attention of a group of five-year-olds more raptly than Martha Rogers held ours that summer morning. We were amazed. Men marrying men? My only thought was:
A home with no mother? Who would cook the meals?

After church services every Sunday, my family piled into the car to drive less than a mile to Grandma and Grandpa Schrader’s house for Sunday afternoon dinner.

As soon as the car door was shut, I announced, “Mrs. Rogers told us about a place where men marry men.”

Momma looked at Daddy in horror. “What is she teaching them, Paul?”

My dad hesitated his usual minute or two before responding, “San Francisco?”

That didn’t sound right. How could my parents not know this? “It’s in the Bible,” I said.

“There’s no place in the Bible where men…,” my mom began.

“It had fire and a pillow of salt,” I said, giving them more clues.

“Oh,” my dad said, laughing, “You mean Sodom and Gamawrah.” Daddy’s voice, with his gentle Southern accent, was always warm and easy, especially when he was laughing.

Momma laughed too, but added, “I don’t think they’re old enough to be learning about that.”

Because my mother held the title of chief disciplinarian in our household and my dad was the more congenial of the two, the idea of a home with two men intrigued me. But surely that was something that occurred only in Biblical days. The idea of a man marrying another man in modern times was even more unlikely than balls of fire raining down from the sky, or a person being turned into a pillow of salt.

My educational career began at Tabernacle Baptist Church and Christian School on the west side, the poorer side, of Greenville. My cousins Charlie and Glenda were a year ahead of me in school and they went to Tabernacle, so naturally, I wanted to go there. Their younger sister, Amy, who I loved (and love to this day), would also be going there.

When I started school I didn’t have any friends. Frankly, I don’t remember being close to anyone outside of my family. I kept to myself—and I was content that way. At the time, I didn’t feel excluded. It’s just that I was shy and introverted. I was still trying to feel my way about.

My first teacher, Mrs. Hand, was my inevitable introduction to the dark side of life. She was a total contrast to Mrs. Rogers, my kind and gentle Sunday School teacher who adored me. Without a doubt Mrs. Hand was the meanest person I had ever met. One thing, which was totally shocking to me, was that Mrs. Hand loved to paddle her students. Who knew what personal demons had led her down the path towards turning into such a cold, evil witch? All I knew is that she
was
a witch and her choice to become a teacher dealing with children was a wrong one. Whenever she had an opportunity to spank a kindergartner, which was often, I could see pure joy light up in her eyes, even through the thick lenses on her horn-rimmed bifocals. It was pretty sick. Unfortunately on several occasions, I saw that joy directed at me.