Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (9 page)

Soon after, I took a shower. I was hitting puberty. I recall catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, of my bare butt and my bare side. My leg had started to develop. I no longer had just a little boy’s limb; I was starting to get some muscle definition. I remember stooping down like that image of Adam and looking in the mirror and thinking,
Wow, this feels good. I like looking like a man. I like looking at this.
I wondered how much I had looked like that image on the TV show.

Looking in the mirror, I was attracted to what I saw. So I guess my first sexual attraction was to myself. That’s the type of thing that’s hard for me to admit. It sounds so narcissistic. I’ve heard that homosexuality is the ultimate form of narcissism because by wanting to have sex with someone of the same gender, we are really wanting to have sex with ourselves. Whatever. I just thought I looked hot.

Sometimes my penis would get hard and I didn’t know why. I came up with the theory that grown men’s penises were this big and hard all the time and, that since I was growing up, soon mine would be big and hard like this all the time. That didn’t seem very comfortable but if every man in the world dealt with it, so could I.

I also remember my second sexual attraction. All the boys in my sixth grade class took swimming lessons. I felt a strange sense of excitement inside me about changing clothes in the locker room with them, but I didn’t have a clue what that excitement meant, where it came from, or what it was about.

After a swimming lesson I was in the locker room on the bench getting dressed. I looked up and found my face inches away from the butt of a nineteen-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, buff college swimming coach. He was buck-naked and a hot feeling ran up and down along my backbone and to my chest and down my legs and back to my head. I couldn’t take my eyes away from this man’s butt. I had an urge to reach out and touch it, but of course I didn’t dare. My penis got hard and I covered it with a towel. Maybe there was some connection between the naked man, the tingly feeling inside, and my penis getting hard, but I wasn’t sure. I knew, though, that through no intention of my own, I was attracted to this man’s body.

Slowly, I was learning about the sexual world. One evening while watching the evening news, the anchor talked about something called rape. I had assumed rape was the same as murder, but one night they talked about rape
and
murder. At the dinner table I asked what the difference was.

Momma gave Daddy a very serious stare and said “Paul, you need to talk to him.”

Daddy called me into his bedroom a few hours later, something he never did. He had an open encyclopedia in his lap. At once, I was frightened and excited. I had long suspected that the world was full of secrets adults hadn’t told me. Now I was about to find out what one of those secrets was.

He pointed to a diagram of a nude male figure and said something about semen and sperm coming out of the penis. Then, he turned to a diagram of a nude female figure and said something about the semen and sperm going into the woman’s opening between her legs. That’s how a baby was made. It was okay for a man and woman to do this if they were married but, if not, they weren’t allowed.

He said that when a man sent the semen and sperm to the woman when she didn’t want it, that was called rape. Daddy explained that when the penis was hard, it couldn’t pee, that that was when the semen and sperm came out. He said that maybe I’d noticed my penis getting hard already when I was around a pretty girl. I nodded even though I hadn’t observed quite that correlation.

I was more puzzled, though, by how the sperm and semen made it from the man’s penis into the opening between the woman’s legs. Daddy had left out a pretty important piece of the puzzle and I was left to my eleven-year-old imagination to fill in the gaps, so to speak. I reached the conclusion that sperm went through the air like hair spray from an aerosol can and found its own way into the woman. What that meant to me was that when my penis got hard, I needed to stay away from the girls.

As I entered puberty, staying away from girls would be the least of my worries.

Considering how many books I read, it’s only natural I would learn the nature of my dad’s omission—“the missing link” of sex—by reading about it. My junior high school history teacher encouraged us to read historical novels to learn history so I found a copy of a book called
The Bastard
by John Jakes. Probably not the book she had in mind. I became addicted to reading about this strange family of American Revolutionaries. They did wild things. The men took off the women’s clothes and played with their body parts. The women did the same to the men. Finally, one scene used words like “semen” and “thrust his penis into her opening” and later she had a baby. Finally, it all made sense. It sounded gross, but it fit with what Daddy had tried to explain to me.

The second or third book in the series talked about two men on a ship during the War of 1812. One man attacked the other and tried to “thrust” into the man’s butt-hole. The man who was to be the “thrustee” spotted the bulge in the “thruster’s” pants and fended him off before he could execute his sex act. The word “sodomy” was used. I read and reread that part several times. A light dawned and I became further enlightened to these adult secrets.

I campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980. When he came to the campus of Bob Jones University, I got to hear him speak and, after his speech, I got to shake his hand as well as Nancy’s. I was the happiest twelve-year-old in the world that day.

The late Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., was the former president and, in 1980, the current chancellor of Bob Jones University. We referred to him affectionately as “Junior.” He was world-renowned for being a loose cannon. He was old and didn’t care what came out of his mouth. Quite frequently his comments in our daily chapel service earned him ridicule or condemnation on the national news at night. He called Betty Ford a “slut” and prayed that God strike Al Haig dead. I and the other five thousand students, faculty, and administrators in the building joined him in that prayer.

“Dr. Bob [Junior] will fool you,” reported the
Washington Post
in the eighties. “He’s not at all what the media has put him up to be. You’d think he was some backward hick who barely knew his English. He’s not like that at all. He’s multifaceted…he’s a fine Shakespearean actor.”

The paper contained a 2,500-word story on the seventy-two-year old Dr. Bob Junior and his passion for the arts. “A painted portrait of the chancellor hangs just outside his office. It shows Bob Jones dressed as Shylock. There is a Bible in the painting—and a statue of the Bard.”

The story was that Dr. Bob Junior had wanted to be a professional Shakespearean actor, but that his father, the fire-and-brimstone turn-of-the-century evangelist, had persuaded his only son to sacrifice his passion for the stage and serve the Lord. While Junior may have not become a professional actor, every year he performed in at least one Shakespeare play and all of the students, staff, and faculty were required to attend. His sermons were also much more of a theatrical monologue than a theological discourse.

At the formal plays and concerts, which were also part of the “Artists Series,” all of the members of the audience showed their respect for the Jones family by standing when the Joneses arrived and took their seats in the special box reserved for the university’s “first family.”

Junior’s talents were not restricted to the stage. He was an avid art collector and today visitors come from all over the world to admire the University’s art collection. The
Washington Post
story focused primarily on Junior’s taste in paintings.

“Art feeds hunger in the hearts of men,” Dr. Jones Junior is reported to have said.

The
Post
noted the seeming contradictions presented by Dr. Bob Junior and his artistic preferences. “Protestant fundamentalists, whose wood churches are as spare as white china doorknobs, whose unpretentious hymns are shoveled out four-square, traditionally oppose pubic [sic] ostentation. Yet these Baroque pictures—with their ecstasies of passion, their flesh and writhing limbs—are some of the most sumptuous in the history of art.”

Al Franken had this to say about Dr. Bob Jones Jr.’s art collection in
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
: “You see, Dr. Bob II had spent some summers in the late 1930s as a tour guide in Rome, Paris and Vienna, and had acquired a taste for fine art. Luckily, when he returned to Europe in the late forties, he was able to acquire quite a bit of it at very reasonable prices.”

The
Washington Post
story concluded with a revealing tidbit about Jones. Dr. Bob Junior had a personal requirement that all of his paintings feature a Biblically-based subject. However, one painting that was thought to have been about Pharisees was about a “heathen subject” instead.

“I thought [Jones] would be dismayed, but not at all,” said the collector who discovered the mistake. “When I told him they weren’t Pharisees he said, ‘That’s all right. We’ll just call them scribes.’”

Dr. Bob Junior told us about a new disease that only sodomites could get and it was deadly. This was proof that God strikes dead those who mock His name. I thought Junior had finally gone crazy. How could a disease know if someone liked sex with men or women? It turned out Junior was right, sort of. This was how I learned about AIDS.

I had problems of my own. I got pubic hair way before any other guys in my junior high gym class. It embarrassed me. But suddenly I was the third tallest guy in the eighth grade. That was different. My voice also changed, but not in a good way. Instead of becoming deeper and more masculine, at first it had a higher pitch, like a woman with a deep voice, but still a woman’s voice. When I answered the phone at home, no one asked for my mother anymore, they just started in with “Hello, Ruth…” or even worse, “Missus Merritt…” I felt like shit. My voice was changing, but into a woman’s voice!

In the South, any hint of effeminacy in a male was not about to go unnoticed. Randy was a fat, typical bully type and he had his little sidekick Brent. Randy and Brent. One day I was walking and Randy and Brent were standing on the side—which wasn’t allowed—loitering was forbidden, but Randy and Brent were doing it anyway. I was walking toward the area where my Mom was picking me up. My head was lowered and I was thinking my own thoughts, when all of a sudden I realized Randy was focused on me. He was making the limp-wristed motion with his hand calling, “Hey, Richie.” I knew he was making fun of me and I locked eyes with him and then looked quickly away, not breaking my stride. Yet, I felt this intense heat inside of me and I knew my face was red. Because he knew he had gotten to me at that point, he pumped up his name-calling.

At first I was so shocked I couldn’t even process it. As I got farther away I wanted to cry. When I got in the car to go home I was very upset, very disturbed. I couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t tell my mom what had just happened. I couldn’t tell her that the other boys thought I was a sissy.

After that happened then I thought back wondering,
Wow, if this is what I’m seeing now what did people say up until this point?
”

After that, the two eighth graders made fun of me every day. They mimicked the way I walked and they made limp-wrist motions whenever they saw me. I cried at night about this but during the day I paid strict attention to how I walked and tried to butch it up, a phrase I wouldn’t learn about for years.

By high school my voice sounded manlier and no one called me “Missus Merritt,” on the phone, so that was one less thing to worry about in a growing list of concerns. And I liked the freedom in high school as opposed to junior high and got into the swing of things with band, debate, student government, theater and drama, and of course, chorus. I discovered that within certain circles I could be popular.

Things were generally okay, but not always. At night alone in my room I’d cry for no reason I could think of. Gradually, it got worse and worse. There was nothing I could tie it to. I just wasn’t happy sometimes. I didn’t have a girlfriend, but that didn’t bother me. I was friends with some of the best-looking and most athletic guys in the class. But…something was wrong. I just knew it, but I didn’t know what that “something” was.

Today it would be diagnosed as clinical depression. But this was before Prozac and Paxil and in South Carolina, no one had sympathy for anyone who “suffered” from depression. You just quit whining and got over it.

The depression worsened but I didn’t know it had a name. I was just very, very sad, and pretty soon I was sad all the time.

One night I decided to end it all. I was sixteen.

Like most Southern families, our house had several guns. We had rifles and shotguns and one pistol. Daddy kept the bullets for the pistol in a drawer and I got one out. I went to look for the gun but it wasn’t in its usual place. I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it. I would have to settle for stabbing myself with a knife. The thought of using the rifle seemed awkward. Using the shotgun was out of the question.

I wrote a note telling my folks I couldn’t take the overwhelming sadness anymore. Suddenly, Momma and Daddy came home early from wherever they’d been. I stuffed the note in my desk where I had also placed the hunting knife as Momma opened my bedroom door. I was crying. She begged me to tell her why, but I couldn’t.

Later, Momma told her sister that she had hidden the pistol in our house when I was fourteen because she was afraid I might kill myself. But I never saw a counselor or therapist of any kind. People who believed in God were supposed to be happy; to be sad was a sign that maybe you weren’t all that close to God. That’s how we interpreted it, anyway. So no way would I, or my mother, admit that I wasn’t happy.

Life went on, of course, and things got better. I learned to deal with the chemical changes in my adolescent body and mind.

My friends were good looking, but Bobby the Fourth befriended one of the handsomest boys in school, Julian. He was from San Diego, California, automatically making him the most intriguing kid in Greenville, South Carolina. We were taught that people from California were strange and rebellious. The land of the fruits and nuts. It was as if he was an alien we all feared and secretly admired. Bobby was the only one confident enough to reach out to him.