Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (13 page)

“Do you think it’s a joke?” Mr. O’Leary’s question jolted me back from the memory of my conversation with Frank a day or two earlier.

“No! No, it’s not,” I said. I hadn’t been paying attention to Mr. O’Leary.

A shocked expression crossed his face. “You mean…do you think they were actually…”

“Oh! No NO NO!” I exclaimed. “It’s definitely a joke! I thought you meant…I thought you were asking if I thought it was a joking
matter
!”

Mr. O’Leary almost cracked a smile. He was actually one of my favorite people in the administration. We students suspected there was a real human underneath the cloak of righteousness these guys had to wear, something we doubted about the others.

I didn’t get into any trouble. What spared me was that in his letter, Chuck had told Dan that I was a stick-in-the-mud, a party pooper, and a goody-two-shoes who didn’t want to do anything to get in trouble.

“To your credit,” Mr. O’Leary said, “you were a ‘wet blanket’ on their party.”

The only thing I had done with them was see
Rambo II
. I felt worse than if I had gotten in trouble. Chuck didn’t think I was cool at all. He thought I was a prude. No matter what I did, I was never going to be a part of the group.

The week after my automobile trip to Maryland with Chuck and Frank, I returned to work at the Wilds. This summer I had been selected to run the concession stand on the ball field, a much more desirable position than washing dishes.

In my spare time, I played a piano solo before a chapel sermon. Dr. Bob Jones III was the guest speaker. When I finished and walked away from the stage, I heard him say my name and that I had been president of my senior class at Bob Jones Academy. He called me a “model Christian school student.” I got goose bumps and almost cried from the pride I felt in myself. Dr. Bob remembered my name! Not only that, now he thought I was a model Christian school student! He had told over five hundred people! This was the pinnacle of my days as a fundamentalist.

All my life people would ask me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” But by this point they were serious about it. I would say, “Oh, Christian school teacher, or Christian band director.” Secretly I thought it might be fun to be a televangelist. Hell, I already had the hair for it! Yet, I really wouldn’t mean it. I would think about it and say to myself,
I don’t want to do that
. And then my uncle gave me this idea—apply to the United States Naval Academy. He even paid the exorbitant last-minute late fee for me to the SAT so I could score higher than I had before. Really there was nothing else for me at that point. For years, I harbored a secret desire to join the military. I wasn’t sure exactly why, but the thought of it excited me.

In retrospect, I feel certain that my budding gay feelings played a lot into my decision to go into the military. A friend of mine had recently joined the army. He went to take the physical and when he came back he gave me a full report on what had happened. About how they all had to strip naked and they all stood there buck naked—all fifty of them—and the doctor came around and felt their balls and stuck something up their butts and I’m saying to myself,
Wow, that’s hot
.

It started me thinking: When you’re in the military, you’re around a bunch of guys and you’re always doing things together. At this point what I wanted is what I never had. When I was younger I didn’t mind not being part of the soccer team or playing with the other boys. But as I got on up into my high school years, I longed for that. I wanted to be closer to other guys. I wanted the camaraderie. That’s when my Uncle suggested I go to the Naval Academy. Some people at Bob Jones understood that. Some people, like my parents, didn’t. They were dead set against it. But it was an honorable thing to do, it was a gentlemanly thing to do. I wanted to go to the Naval Academy because I loved my country, the country that allowed me and my family to worship God so freely. This would be my chance to pay America back. I also liked the prestige. But most of all, I was thinking,
Wow, for once I’ll be a part of a group of men.

During my trip with Chuck and Frank, we had visited the Naval Academy so I could get an idea of what a military base looks like. It was awesome! More than ever, I wanted to be a part of it. Despite the fact that Chuck had almost gotten us all into a fight by calling a high-ranking officer an “asshole,” the visit convinced me I wanted to belong to the military.

I didn’t get into the Naval Academy, but that didn’t stop me. I could become a Marine officer by going to Officer Candidate School in the summer while I attended Bob Jones University.

In the meantime, to see if I really wanted to be a military officer, I came up with a brilliant plan. I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserves.

“A
re you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Do you have any intention of ever engaging in any homosexual activities?”

I wasn’t completely sure what she meant by “homosexual activities,” but I was fairly certain it wasn’t sunbathing or figure skating. “No.”

This was how the military screened out gays and lesbians. It was December 30, 1985. The army doctor asked me many more questions about my psychological health and history and my physical history, and checked the appropriate responses on the form. Then I took the written test. These were routine procedures to get into the military.

I didn’t lie. At eighteen, I wasn’t a homosexual, at least not to my conscious knowledge. I was still a virgin, I still hadn’t whacked off. I honestly had no intention of ever kissing another man—I might fantasize about it, but I’d never act on it. And I’d certainly never suck a dick or take it up the ass.

Actually, after I got in, my entrance physical was a reality check. Not too many of the guys were in shape. I joined the Marines after my first semester of college, so it was the winter. Ordinarily the really gung ho recruits go in right after high school, starting in June. The young men I joined with really couldn’t find anything else to do, so they joined the Marines. That’s what the drill instructors told my winter platoon to make us feel like even bigger pieces of shit. I didn’t know that when I joined. But once I got in it, it wasn’t how I had romanticized it.

I was looking around, there were all these winter-white East Coast bodies that weren’t in shape, and I had this horrible doctor squeezing my balls and putting his finger up my ass.

I was thinking,
What the hell am I doing?

I gave the right answers. I passed the entrance tests and the physical and took the bus across my state to the swampy coastland of South Carolina. Last stop was Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island. Once I started, there was this feeling of, “
I’m going to be a part of this. I’m going to succeed. And we’re all in this together
.”

“Ready…strip!” barked the drill instructor.

We stripped until we were all naked. All sixty of us Marine recruits in this platoon. I was so stressed out. There was nothing sexual about it. Even when we were in the shower and we were pressed up against each other and some guys were getting hard-ons it was,
God, we’re getting fucked with here! And when is this going to be over. How many days to graduation.
That’s all you’re thinking about all the time

We did this periodically. It was one of the ways the drill instructors played “fuck-fuck” games with us. We didn’t strip fast enough so we had to get dressed again. Putting on boots and lacing them up takes forever especially when they don’t even let you sit down.

“Not fast enough! Ready…strip!” We got naked again. And again.

“Get in the showers, now, do it!”

We’d cram our eighteen-year-old nude bodies (which were improving daily) tightly into the small space that we ordinarily used to clean ourselves. On these days it would become a torture chamber. He ordered us to turn on the cold water. We gasped as the ice-cold spray hit our defenseless bodies. The cold water pretty much took care of my hard-on that had been forming. It didn’t stop the one on the guy behind me, though. I could feel his erect penis on my ass. This was the closest I’d ever come to gay sex.

“Turn on the hot water, now, do it!”

The recruits closest to the showers dutifully obeyed so that now we were scalding ourselves.
This has to be illegal
, I thought. Recruits around me were getting angrier and angrier. It was humiliating, as it was designed to be. They were taking away our manhood. Once we were emasculated, they would replace it with a sense of Marine-manliness, a masculinity that is like no other. First, though, we’d have to earn it.

“Drop your soap!” the drill instructor screamed.
Fuck.
There was only one place this could lead. We obeyed. Then we were ordered to pick it up.

“Fuck these faggoty-ass games!” a recruit whispered, angrily.

I was never good with strangers. I get that from my mom too. And suddenly I’m in the middle of all these strangers. It was uncomfortable. I kept thinking,
What have I done? This isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

Then once I broke through my reservations I started feeling,
I’m here. I’m going to make the most of it
. Eventually by the end of it I remember feeling great. Really feeling a part of it. That’s the way it is. If you’re going to finish boot camp—you’re going to feel a part of the group. It felt great by the time I was done but, I have to admit, sometimes the process was hell.

One of my three drill instructors was African American and I had to call him “sir” just like the others. Compared to all the other adjustments I had to make to get by at boot camp, it wasn’t that big a deal, but it did remind me that I was in a place of greater equality I’d ever been in before.

They talked about that. They told us they shaved our heads, stripped us of our clothes, and made us dress alike because we were all equal. That meant we were all at the bottom of the Marine Corps totem pole, but among us recruits, no one was superior, no one was inferior. That’s the way it was supposed to be. At least in theory.

As luck would have it, the senior drill instructor made me the platoon scribe, the pencil-pushing geek who did the paperwork, because he said my GCT score was the highest in the platoon. I didn’t know what that meant except that, from now on, boot camp would be that much harder for me. In addition to all the crap a recruit has to deal with, I now had forms, rosters, schedules, you name it, added to my pile of shit.

Midway through boot camp while we were outdoors on the rifle range, the senior drill instructor called me over where he was standing with his buddies, three other senior drill instructors from different platoons. I was terrified.

“Scribe,” he said, affectionately calling me by my new name. “Could it be true that you go to Bob Jones University?”

“Yes, sir!” I shouted. I kept my eyes straight ahead, fixated on the imaginary horizon like I was supposed to do. How the hell did he know this?

“Do you drink, scribe?” he asked, laughing.

I didn’t mind if he was having fun, even if it was at my expense. I thought I’d play along with him. I replied, “Only virgin drinks, sir!” I thought I was being cute. Months earlier, a friend from Bob Jones had purchased a virgin daiquiri at a Mexican restaurant and I felt scandalized. I made him put it in a regular glass. Then I ordered one for myself, also in a regular glass, but I thought I was really being bad by getting a nonalcoholic alcoholic drink.

“Ha-ha, I bet you are a virgin, aren’t you, Merritt?” He got in my face.

Fuck! Why had I used the word “virgin?”

I didn’t answer. My hesitation was all he needed.

“Oh my God! Merritt, you’re a friggin’ virgin!”

I turned beet red and he sent me back to my position on the firing line. I shot my worst score that day with my rifle.
Why did I have to be a virgin?

I learned a lot about sex at boot camp. We got a class from a woman Marine, “WMs” as we called them. She was attractive but had some noticeable facial hair.

“Damn,” whispered the recruit seated next to me. “Look at the mustache on
that
! I bet she’s got some
bush
! How’d you like to eat that pussy?”

This was how I learned what oral sex was. Before that, I thought it meant kissing.

Marines used the expression “suck my dick” a lot. It was always joking or in anger, of course, usually the way someone would say, “You can kiss my ass!” Marines will say, “You can suck my dick, asshole!” or something to that effect. I had never been around people who talked in such a vulgar, sexual way. For me, it wasn’t meaningless banter and I couldn’t help but conjure up a visual image each time the explicit words were brought up.

As we were getting ready to go for a platoon run and were putting on our skimpy red running shorts, the drill instructor caught a recruit staring at his noticeable package, through the tight nylon.

“What you lookin’ at?” he barked, his booming voice reverberating off the concrete walls. “You queer for my gear?”

Years later, at officers’ basic school, a friend who had been a drill instructor said, “When I was a senior drill instructor I could have ordered any one of my recruits to drop his trousers and let me fuck him up the ass. He would have done it, too.” This was from a heterosexual Marine just crowing about his superiority.

Another Marine officer pushed the limit, though, when he said, “If you’d fuck a woman up the ass, you’d fuck a guy up the ass, ’cause an asshole is an asshole.” The other guys in the room denied this and called him a fag.

At this point another lieutenant added, “You know what they say…‘You can build a thousand bridges, but if you suck one dick, you’re always known as a cocksucker.’”

Back at boot camp we would line up every morning in two lines, each facing the other. We wore briefs and T-shirts to bed, and stood on line that way. Occasionally recruits would have wet dreams leaving spots visible for the recruit across the room to see. Sometimes they’d talk about who had the biggest stain on his skivvies.

I was mostly a bystander to all of this. I felt naive, sheltered, like I had missed a whole world growing up. Now I refer to this as my “Charlotte” phase, named after the somewhat innocent and bubbly character on
Sex and the City
who isn’t quite in the same league as her sexually aware and worldly-wise friends. I almost fell over in shock when one recruit wrote home to his girlfriend, “Mail me your pussy. You stay there, I just need your pussy!” At first I had been offended by the sexual innuendo, but as time went by, I found them funny. I was still shocked, but in a humorous sort of way.

Without realizing it, I was adapting to my environment. One night during our brief period of so-called free time that we had to use to shine our boots and press our cammies, I ran out of boot polish.

“Fuck!” I said aloud.

My rack mate dropped his boots. “Damn, Merritt. Did you just say ‘fuck’?”

I had. It was my first cuss word.

My rack mate was the first Catholic I’d ever known. To my surprise, he was a cool guy. Bob Jones had taught us that many Catholics were good people, they were just severely misguided by the teachings of their church, which, unbeknownst to them, was run by Satan.

Sometimes issues from my past—things I thought I would escape from in the Marines—came back to haunt me. I walked hurriedly through another platoon’s squadbay. Two of the recruits pointed at me and laughed. “He walks like a girl!”

That brought me right back to junior high school. I was crushed. I had let my guard down and wasn’t paying enough attention to my mannerisms. That wouldn’t happen again. Even with my guard up, though, I couldn’t completely disguise who I was.

After we completed the challenging confidence course, my rack mate said, “You know, Merritt, sometimes I wonder about you, the way you jump up and squeal in that high-pitched voice of yours to respond to the drill instructors. But when I see you on the confidence course today, man, you’re one tough stud!”

“Thanks. I think.”

They told us about the fourteen leadership traits and frequently reminded us that integrity was the most important.

In preparation for our academic tests, the drill instructors asked us question after question as review. At the beginning of one of our impromptu review sessions, the drill instructor ordered me to go into the office and get the academics review sheet.

“Sir, does the drill instructor mean the copy of the old test, sir?”

He glared at me. “No, Merritt,” he said, spitting my name out with utter contempt. “I mean the ‘academic review sheet.’” He continued to look fiercely at me. “I don’t know why the senior drill instructor likes you so much. Sometimes I think you’re the stupidest motherfuckin’ recruit in the whole goddamned platoon!”

I ran to get the “academic review sheet.” It clearly said
TEST
at the top. Ah-ha! We weren’t supposed to have this, I realized. Our drill instructor had managed to get a copy of our test from a buddy over at the academic department. I had stupidly blurted this out. What an idiot I could be sometimes!

They taught us that the only thing we could ever use to clean our rifles was hot water and CLP, which stood for cleaner, lubricant, and protectant. On the rare occasions we went to the small exchange, however, the drill instructor told each of us to buy a can of lighter fluid. Why the hell recruits needed lighter fluid was beyond me. Like they were going to let us celebrate Fourth of July with a cookout. When we returned, we gave the lighter fluid to the drill instructor, which he hid in a locked footlocker. As the time drew closer to our final rifle inspection, we started using a concoction that most definitely was not hot water or CLP to clean our rifles.

But I thought we weren’t supposed to do this.
These things puzzled me.
Isn’t this a lack of integrity?
I wondered.

Not long before graduation, my senior drill instructor took me aside and said, “Merritt, you need to go to officer candidate school. You’re officer material.” That was one of the proudest moments of my life, just like when Dr. Bob Jones III had called me a model Christian school student.
I was officer material!

Immediately after boot camp I went to a seven-week school in Huntsville, Alabama, where I was supposed to learn my “military occupational specialty,” or MOS. Our barracks was more like a college dorm than boot camp. I had two roommates. One of them listened to Madonna all the time. I had never listened to rock, or as I would later learn Madonna’s category, pop, music. Our teachers and preachers at Bob Jones were constantly warning us of the evils of rock music.

“Listening to rock music is the first stop on the highway to hell!” they’d exclaim. I wondered what the other stops were and whether I could stop at one of those before I actually slid into the lake of fire.