Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (12 page)

After rolling around on the wet leaves, laughing at our misfortune, Mitch looked at the sky. “It’s going to get dark if we don’t hurry back to the campsite.”

I agreed. He was older and in charge.

Mitch stood up. “You know what we should do that would help us move faster?”

I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that we had quite a hike to get back to camp.

“We should take these wet clothes off and carry them. That way we can move more quickly.” Mitch leaned against a tree and began untying the laces to his sneakers.

“That’s a good idea!” I said, quickly following my leader’s example. Within minutes we were both naked, except for our tennis shoes, walking through the woods to find our way back to camp.

Mitch walked in front. “Now, aren’t you glad we did this? This is a
lot
more comfortable, isn’t it?” He turned his head and looked at me.

We had been walking for about five minutes and the whole time I had been mere yards behind Mitch’s hot bubble butt. I had a noticeable semi-erection at this point. Mitch looked at me and smiled. I was petrified until I saw that he was in the same…situation.

Had either of us known what to do, I’m sure we would have acted on it. Instead, we continued our walk for another twenty minutes. We put our clothes on when we hit the main trail and made it safely back to camp.

Just like the Hardy Boys!
I thought. Finally, I was having my adventures.

Not everything about my first summer at the Wilds was a real-life homoerotic fantasy come true. I was sixteen years old and had signed up to wash dishes for seven hundred people three times a day for eleven weeks. The first two weeks were torture. I told Dr. Bartley I wanted to quit.

He wasn’t loud, but he made up for it with intensity. Dr. Bartley had a bald head and a gut that protruded from his six-foot-five frame. He intimidated me beyond belief. I thought I might urinate on myself.

“Richie,” he said quickly and directly, “if you quit now, you will never be able to persevere with anything the Lord calls you to do again, do you understand me?”

I looked at the floor.
Why had I agreed to do this? This job was miserable, but I said I would do it.

“Well,” he said, “I’m going to call your parents to come get you…”

“Um, you don’t have to do that, my dad gave me an old car to drive…”

“Well, I’m going to call them and tell them that you’ve decided to quit…”

As Dr. Bartley reached for the phone, it rang. He excused me for a few minutes while he took the call.

I can’t quit! I can’t be known as a quitter!
Dr. Bartley was right.

“I’m staying,” I said resolutely as he finished his call. And for twenty-five dollars a week, I persevered through nine more hot summer weeks washing dishes in the Appalachian Mountains.

My proudest moment that summer came unexpectedly one rainy day. The other guys on the staff and I were sitting around our room when the door opened and a counselor came in. The guy was my brother Jimmy’s counselor.

“Richie,” he said, “There’s someone here who has something to say to you.”

Jimmy popped out from behind him, crying. His counselor said, “What was it you wanted to say to Richie?”

Jimmy looked at the floor.
Oh boy
, I wondered,
what has happened now?

“I…I…I got saved this morning,” he said quietly.

I was stunned. This was the last thing I had expected. I jumped up off the floor and grabbed Jimmy around the neck. I started crying. “I’m so happy! You gotta go call Momma and Daddy.” He smiled at me and nodded and his counselor took him up the hill to the telephones.

Jimmy made a plaque for our mom in the craft shop that had the Twenty-third Psalm, the one that goes “The Lord Is My Shepherd” on it. Momma still has this plaque, but Jimmy and I never again discussed this moment.

The Wilds was that kind of place—there was no television, no telephone without approval, no radio, no stereo—nothing that wasn’t approved by the camp administration. Teens were freed from every possible distraction, giving the staff a chance to get through to them. Emotions ran high and tears flowed freely. For one week, even the hardest hearts melted upon hearing the message of the Lord.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Mitch Harmon. Every time I went on the trail to the falls, I recalled our naked venture through the woods. I started fantasizing about him. Naked fantasies. They were only fantasies because nothing like the inner-tubing incident ever happened again. But fantasies were enough for now. I’d think about us being nude again, this time our bodies touching. I couldn’t help but think how awesome that would be. These thoughts were more tender than overtly sexual. I fantasized about us curling up naked in a blanket under the stars—the more we’d touch each other the further we’d go, first with our hands, then with our mouths. Guilt always snapped me out of it before it went any further and I would catch myself and pull away. I’d suddenly realize what I was doing. I would stop the fantasy and ask God to forgive me.

Then I remember this one friend who I had worked with at the summer camp, named Nick. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, just an adorable guy. We worked together very closely the entire summer, we became good buds, and it was a great feeling.

The following summer I wouldn’t be working the Wilds, I was going to summer school instead. Nick, however, was on his way up to the mountains to work at camp again. “Hey,” I said to Nick, “stop by and spend the night with me at my parents’ house.” He agreed to come over for a visit. We were in the den where we had this pullout sleeper sofa. We watched a movie and when it ended we went to sleep. He was asleep and I remember getting as close as I could to him. I couldn’t stop myself. I could feel the heat from his body. I could smell his clean, soapy scent.

The next morning he woke up and just left. I guess he realized what I was doing. He never spoke to me after that. A year or so later, I went to the camp. Nick was there and he was still very distant. A mutual friend of ours asked, “Did you guys have a falling out?” It was that noticeable. I replied, “Not that I’m aware of.” Yet, I knew what he was feeling toward me and I was ashamed for causing it. I had made the plan, put it into action, and even made an attempt at the seduction. But I was still not calling it “gay.” I still was not labeling it “homosexual.” It was just something that happened that was unpleasant.

Yet there was no denying it. More and more frequently, my thoughts drifted to unspeakable, erotic images of me and my friends. I imagined us rubbing our naked bodies against each other and kissing. I began to fear that I might be a sodomite. But I hadn’t done anything yet, so I was still okay.

Adults involved in religious ministries to young people preach a lot about the “thought-life.” Thoughts inevitably led to actions. That was a frequent sermon and, after hearing it again, I decided to seek help. I was halfway across campus to talk to Mr. O’Leary, a dean I trusted, about my homosexual thought-life. I was halfway across the “Bridge of Nations” on the front of the BJU campus when I stopped. I was standing right next to a sacred place. In the middle of the fountains, in a tiny island, lies the burial site of Dr. Bob Jones, Sr.

“Do right!”

I looked at the sky.
Where was his voice coming from?
I heard the raspy voice of the founder—I had heard that tape a hundred times at least.

“Do right till the stars fall!”
There it was again.

But isn’t the right thing for me to seek help with my wicked thoughts?

“The two biggest little words in the English language are the two little words ‘Do Right.’”

But what is “right?”

Dr. Bob Jones, Sr.’s pithy sayings were ubiquitous around the university. Preachers repeated them in sermons, they were published in the school’s textbooks and every classroom had at least one saying attributed to the founder plastered over the chalk-board. Standing here beside his grave, it was as if he were speaking directly to me. I was at a crossroads. I didn’t know what to do. But I could hear Dr. Bob Jones, Sr.’s sayings.

“GOD WILL NOT DO FOR YOU WHAT HE HAS GIVEN YOU STRENGTH TO DO FOR YOURSELF.”

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

I turned around and returned to my locker, got my books, and went home. God had given me all the strength I needed. I could take care of this myself. Nowadays I refer to my decision to turn around and not tell the dean as my “higher power” looking out for me. Had I proceeded across that bridge, my life would have been unpredictably different. No doubt I would have been sent off to some reeducation camp run by an Exodus program designed to turn gays into happy heterosexuals.

Thank you, God!

“Back to what?” Rambo asked. “My friends died here…part of me died here.”

“John, the war, everything that happened here may have been wrong,” said Trautman, “but dammit, John, you can’t hate your country for it.”

“Hate? I’d
die
for it.”

“Ha-ha! Woo-hoo!” shouted Chuck and Frank. The audience erupted in applause at their hero Stallone’s brilliant comeback. Nothing could undo Sly’s patriotism!

The movie continued. “Then what do you want?” Trautman asked John Rambo.

“What do I want?” asked Rambo rhetorically. “I want what they want.” Stallone’s character pointed to some POWs. “And what every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had wants…for our country to love us as much as we love it…That’s what I want.”

I couldn’t believe I was sitting in an actual movie theater! And with Chuck, of all people! Chuck, the same kid who used to torment me on the soccer field. Now we were practically best buddies.

Being at the movie was scary. Never mind that we were five hundred miles from Greenville. You never knew who might find out. But the movie had been a good one. And besides, Frank had convinced me that the rules of Bob Jones no longer applied to us. We had graduated from Bob Jones Academy a week ago and we wouldn’t be enrolling in Bob Jones University until August. Technically, we weren’t breaking any rules. Jurisdiction is a threshold issue, as I would learn much later in law school, and from the way Chuck, Frank, and I saw it, no fundamentalist school had jurisdiction over us. We were now exempt from getting into trouble.

“What you saw, young man, was an R-rated movie,” said Mr. O’Leary. The Bob Jones disciplinarian hadn’t bought my jurisdictional argument. Apparently fundamentalist universities aren’t bound by the strict technicalities of the federal judiciary.

I knew better than to say anything right now. This was Mr. O’Leary’s turn to speak. “Do you know what ‘R-rated’ means, Richie?”

Am I supposed to answer this? He’s pausing an awfully long time.
“Re…re…” My throat was dry. I cleared it. “Restricted.”

“I don’t mean, what does the ‘R’ stand for,” he said, disgusted that I had missed his point. He sat down and looked at me directly. “Richie, a movie that has a rating like this…what that means is that
sinners
are telling
sinners
‘Beware of this movie!’ Do you think any Christian has any business seeing a movie that sinners think might be problematic?”

His point was clear to me now. We were supposed to be better than the best, our standards higher than the highest. Chuck, Frank, and I had messed things up, big time. Frank had decided to sit the year out and make some money, rather than face the music. Chuck had to live in the dorms if he wanted to enroll in the university. That way they could keep an eye on him.

Frank had warned me a day earlier. We had been ambushed!

“Richie,” Frank said, apologetically. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. It’s going to take some explaining.” I had been toiling away at the Wilds all summer, being a super-good Christian. I had no idea that our little escapade at the beginning of the summer would get us in so much trouble.

Frank continued. “Remember last year, I told you that the study hall monitor, Tim McMaster, used to always give us lectures about masturbation, and we called him Tim McMasterbater?”

“Vaguely, yes.”
Where could this be headed?

“Well, when we were visiting your aunt and uncle and lying out by the pool and your Uncle made you go take the SAT a second time, remember that?”

“Yes, yes I definitely remember that.”

“Well…Chuck and I used to always joke about masturbating, on account of Tim McMasterbater.”

“Okay, just tell me this has nothing to do with my aunt and uncle.”

“No! No, this has
nothing
to do with your aunt and uncle.”

“Okay,” I said.
Then what is this about?
I was getting more and more nervous.

“Okay, well, Chuck wrote a letter to Dan…” Dan was our friend in Pennsylvania who wasn’t able to take the mid-Atlantic road trip with us after graduation. “And, well, Chuck made up a bunch of things…you know how Chuck and Dan always kid around…”

“Yes,” I said, nodding my head impatiently.

“Chuck wrote Dan that while you were away taking the SAT, that what he and I did was lie around your aunt and uncle’s swimming pool and, and, well…masturbate the whole time.”

“I see,” I said. I kind of did. Actually, I still didn’t have a clue what masturbating was, but I knew it was an expulsion offense. “Did you?”

“No, no, Richie, that’s just it! It was all
a joke!
”

“So…why aren’t you coming back to school? Why does Chuck have to move into the dorms? Why do I have a note to come see Mr. O’Leary as soon as I get back to campus?”

Frank looked at the ground and scratched the back of his head. He let out a nervous laugh. “Heh-heh, that’s the funny part. Well, well, crazy old Dan! He left the letter that Chuck wrote him lying around the house. And you know what a…what a…
bitch
Dan’s mom is!”

“No! No! He didn’t!” I couldn’t believe it! Dan was usually the smart one in the group. How could he have been so stupid as to let his mother read a letter from Chuck, a letter that joked about…about
masturbating
, whatever that meant.