Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (16 page)

This sort of control hadn’t waned over the years; rather, it had intensified to the point of smothering me. She would do that non-stop. All the time. It really got to me. And everything was like that. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Some mothers abandon their kids. Some mothers beat their kids. Some mothers are crack addicts. But what my mom did to me seemed like the worst thing in the world—she would tell me what I was supposed to think, to feel, to believe. And if I thought differently, she made me feel like dirt.

For example, I would not have a coat on. She would tell me, “You’re cold.”

“No, I’m not cold. I know what I feel and I feel fine.”

“No, you don’t, you’re cold.” Maybe that’s typical mother stuff, I don’t know, she was the only mother I had. I didn’t have anything to compare it to. But that’s what had become impossible to live with.

Years later, long after coming out, long after I had completely altered my beliefs, my mother still knew how to stick a dagger right into my heart. “You know the Truth,” she would say. Maybe I did. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was wrong. We wouldn’t know in this life.

That morning after I sneaked out of the house with all my possessions, she called, panic-stricken. I met her at her office and told her I had moved out. She was hysterical. How could I do this to her? I explained that it was a practical decision. I was a manager at Swensen’s and I needed to be near the restaurant. I also wanted to be closer to Greenville Tech. That made no sense, she said, I had always lived fifteen miles from school, wasn’t I used to the drive? She would hear none of my sensible reasons, so finally I told her the truth. I was moving out because she was impossible to live with. That didn’t exactly calm her down.

When I left her office she was still crying.

The truth is, many people move out of their house long before they are twenty. Part of the problem was the way I did it. Without consulting her, like a thief in the night, I had slipped away. The other part was, she just didn’t want me to leave. No one else understood her like I did.

I had some stock in a steakhouse chain, which my parents had given me as a high school graduation present. It had skyrocketed along with many other stocks in the go-go years of the mid-eighties. As long as nothing happened to that, I would be okay financially.

The following Monday, October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed.

I didn’t regret the move, but now I had no money. I had all the freedom I had ever wanted, and a completely empty apartment, except for my childhood bunk beds that I had brought with me.

The only rule at Bob Jones University that still affected me was that students, faculty, staff, and administrators are not permitted to associate or communicate with students who have been expelled. Considering that I had been enrolled at a Bob Jones school from the first grade through my second year of college, almost everyone I knew was subject to this rule. Overnight, I lost almost every friend I’d ever had.

Lucas was one exception. He defied the rule and continued to hang out with me. We were in the Marine reserves together and spent our drill weekends together, and Lucas frequently hung out at my apartment. He started bringing friends, male and female, BJU and non-BJU, over to spend time with us. My barely furnished apartment quickly became a party stop for a lot of people.

One Sunday afternoon, Lucas showed up with two handsome young men who were freshmen at BJU. Jason was one of the men; he was from Chicago and had a swaggering, big-city attitude that I found dangerous and appealing. He used profanity freely and chain-smoked as soon as he was off the campus. His audacity amazed me; couldn’t his prayer captain and dormitory supervisor smell the cigarette smoke?

“I don’t give a fuck!” Jason exclaimed. “Those pricks can fuckin’ blow me!”

Without naming it, I felt weirdly excited by Jason.

At my apartment, the four of us drank beer that my manager at Swensen’s had purchased for us. Jason took off his tie and his shirt, leaving on just his tight T-shirt. The sight of his muscular body was a visual bang. Just like Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His friend was cute, too, but seemed shy and quiet and faded in comparison to Jason’s overwhelming braggadocio. Oh sure, I still wasn’t admitting any homosexual feelings to myself. But there was a powerful attraction in the air on my part that I attributed to my new, decadent life. Sitting around with a bunch of guys, smoking and drinking and swearing, had given me the feeling of being adventuresome, even a little devilish.

We continued to smoke and drink and listen to music—as if we were deliberately swinging an invisible club in order to smash the BJU rules. A security person came by to tell us to turn the music down. This was the third or fourth time that had happened. My neighbors hated me, but I didn’t care. What were they going to do? Report me to the BJU administration?

A little later, there was another knock at the door.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” I exclaimed. “Who is it now?”

“So that’s his middle name!” laughed Lucas.

I opened the door and saw an attractive young woman with short blond hair. She had that BJU look to her—the long dress, the styled hair, and trace of makeup.

“Is Jason here?” she asked.

Jason had stepped up behind me. He smiled and held out his hand for her to enter my apartment. He introduced her to the group and then added, “You don’t mind if we borrow your bedroom, do you?”

What was I supposed to say? “Of course not, help yourselves,” I managed.

What I was feeling was jealousy, but I wasn’t about to identify it. That would require admitting that I really wanted to take this girl’s place in the bedroom. I denied what I was really feeling but the anxiety simmered within me. I was also beginning to feel used by Lucas and his friends, and that added to my uneasiness.

Less than an hour later, Jason and the girl emerged from my bedroom and the girl promptly left the apartment. Jason beamed a triumphant smile at the rest of us and when she left, he exclaimed that he had scored. Lucas and the other guy high-fived Jason.

“Make sure you clean the sheets,” I said. That was my contribution to their high spirits.

Several weeks later, during the first week of December, Lucas visited me at Swensen’s with some bad news.

“Jason and that girl got shipped,” he reported. “Some fucking asshole that lives in your apartment building works at the school. He’s a manager at the goddamned drycleaners on campus. He recognized Jason and turned them in. Jason’s already on his way home to Chicago.”

I was outraged and felt violated.

“They didn’t know that he fucked that girl,” Lucas said. “He got shipped just for being at your apartment. He had to lie on his off-campus permission slip when I picked him up that day. That’s what they got him for.”

Wow. I was a pariah and anyone who came in contact with me was in danger of catching my condition. The school didn’t really care that Jason had had carnal relations with a girl; it was bad enough that he had spent time with
me
!

I wanted to lash out, but didn’t know how. The next day, I picked up the Yellow Pages and called several law firms in town about suing BJU and my neighbor for invasion of privacy. No luck. I wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey and included a copy of the BJU handbook, highlighting the portions that excluded interracial dating. My letter told my story and referenced the 1984 Supreme Court case that BJU lost by an 8-1 decision. Oprah responded, thanking me for submitting an idea, but declining to pursue it because it was not newsworthy for her audience.

Lucas retaliated in his typical style. He slashed my rat fink neighbor’s tires.

Jason’s expulsion came at the last possible moment, just before his first final exam for the semester. This way, BJU could collect his tuition payments for the entire semester, but deny him any credit for his work. Based on my fourteen years at BJU, the way they handled Jason’s expulsion was consistent with their past behavior.

One Sunday morning at Swensen’s, an employee told me that an angry man was at the front wanting to speak to a manager.

“Already? We just fucking opened.”

Standing at the front was the Provost of BJU, the same man who had given me such a hard time about wanting to go the Naval Academy. I had only been sixteen and he scared the shit out of me. He had said that it was “God’s will for every Christian young person to go to Bob Jones University.”

When he saw me behind the counter in my Swensen’s manager’s shirt and tie, he smirked.

“So this is what you’re doing now?” he asked, his voice dripping with
schadenfreude
.

“How can I help you?” I asked, my face frozen into a perfect manager’s smile.

The Provost told me that the night before he had bought some ice cream for his family and the cashier had shortchanged him, giving him change back for a ten dollar bill when he had given the cashier a twenty dollar bill. I gave him a ten dollar bill from the register. He took it without thanking me or changing the smirk stuck on his face.

I hope I’m never like him,
I silently said. See? I hadn’t completely given up prayer!

Jason’s expulsion deepened my banishment. Lucas still came by to visit, but now he usually came alone. He and one other friend were all I had left. I was lonely, isolated, and rejected by my whole world. I began to understand why so many students who’d been expelled returned to BJU after a year or two away. The world was a desolate place for someone who had never learned how to identify with it.

On occasion, I toyed with the idea of calling the dean of students begging for forgiveness, and returning as a repentant student to complete my degree. That idea usually lasted a nanosecond before the rage and bitterness ran it out. No, I resolved, I would never go back there. They would not defeat me; BJU could not and would not get away with treating me the way they had and for causing these desperate feelings of loneliness within me. I would emerge someday, more successful and victorious than anyone from that school had ever been!

Practical realities would pull me back from my triumphant proclamations. Somehow, I had to come up with next month’s rent.

Money problems were starting to overwhelm me. Had I bothered to estimate the amount of money it would take to live on my own, I definitely would not have miscalculated. The owner of Swensen’s had given us neither a Christmas bonus nor a raise. If I kept working there as a manager, I would have to move back in with my parents.

A friend was a bellman at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Greenville. He said that he sometimes made as much as twenty dollars an hour in tips. That sounded like a dream job and I applied and was hired.

My job at the Hyatt did turn out to be a lot of fun and working at a large hotel was an eye-opening experience. The night manager and a front-desk clerk were openly gay. A male housekeeper attended the annual employee dinner wearing an emerald green evening gown and two of the male waiters at the four-star restaurant in the hotel went as each other’s dates. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who identified themselves as homosexual and displayed neither remorse, guilt nor shame.

I noticed an interesting dichotomy—workers still told gay jokes and made snide remarks about queers, but everyone sincerely liked the openly gay employees at the hotel. I felt the same way. While I continued to believe that homosexuality was a sin against God and that gay sex was abnormal and unnatural, I befriended the gay people at work. On my twenty-first birthday, Lucas and some of the bellmen took me to a bar near the Hyatt. Later they told me that when we walked through the hotel, I kissed the gay night manager, although I must have blacked it out. I have absolutely no memory of doing that.

In the two years since I had tasted my first beer, I had progressed from vomiting at the taste of alcohol to enjoying the flavor of it. On my reserve drill weekends, I was learning to pound brews with the Marines, keeping up with the senior sergeants beer for beer. People started enjoying my company more, so it seemed to me, and I didn’t feel so lonely. It seemed incredible that BJU and the Baptist churches prohibited people from enjoying drinks with friends. Who the fuck was BJU to tell people not to drink?

In the summer of 1988, the two guys I had met from Clemson, Gary Fullerton, Colin Steiner, and I attended the first of two summer courses at Officer Candidate School. We flew up to Washington National Airport together, too afraid to talk about much of anything because of the ordeal we knew we were about to undergo. Think Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentleman,
only this was much worse because it was the Marine Corps and not the Navy. Because I had already been to boot camp, I had this déjà vu feeling of dread. Marines met us at the airport and herded us like cattle from the busy DC area an hour south on I-95 to the sprawling, wooded and hilly Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia.

We joined several hundred other nineteen- and twenty-year-olds from all over the country. We were there to see who had what it would take to become an officer of Marines. About ten percent of the candidates had prior Marine Corps boot camp and reserve experience, like I had. We had an advantage over the others because were familiar with the routines and traditions of Marine Corps training.

Gary, Colin, and I were sticking to each other and the other guys from South Carolina like peas in a pod. But as fate would have it, the sergeant making the platoon assignments ended India Company, Third Platoon with Gary and barked at me to get in a different line from my friends. I would be the first officer candidate in Kilo Company, Fourth Platoon. Most of my platoon mates were from the Midwest; I was cut off from the Southern men and once again was all alone and frightened. But it didn’t feel so bad this time; I had been by myself before and had learned I could survive. Still, this would be hell. It would have been nice to be with Gary and Colin. Afterward, Gary and I promised each other we’d never be separated like that again.