Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (20 page)

Tami sighed and said, “A
hissy
fit? Okay, that’s what we’ll tell everyone.”

Soon after that Gary called. He was in Pensacola, Florida, at flight school. He delved right into it: “Rich, I hear Shanna’s saying all this stuff.” I simply repeated to him what I had just told Tami.

“You just started your career as an officer yesterday,” Gary reminded me. “You sure as hell don’t want this following you to Quantico.”

I assured him Shanna was crazy and he knew his two friends would never do anything like that.

But the guilt just kept on building.

A few days later I told Gary the truth. I couldn’t keep it inside anymore. I had to confide in someone or I was going to explode, or worse.

He hesitated for a minute, staring at me very seriously. I couldn’t tell whether he was mad or what he was feeling. I wondered if maybe I had done the wrong thing by telling him. But then his face softened a bit.

“It sounds to me like you guys just had too much to drink. You were superhorny, Shanna got you both all worked up…then she passed out. Guys in prison do it if there’s no women around…” Gary’s voice trailed off. He furrowed his brow and then stared at me again.

“I mean…you would know…you would know by now…if you were gay. Wouldn’t you?”

Gary was awesome! He had discovered a way for me to get out of this horrible thing I had gotten myself into.

“Yeah! You’re right,” I practically exclaimed, “She made me horny and then passed out. Besides, I
would
know by now.” I assured him that I was not gay and that his theory must be correct.

The more I thought about it, though, the more Gary’s question troubled me. It was the first time I had ever heard a friend or anyone close to me refer to “gay” as something a person “was” rather than something a person “did.”
Could a virgin be gay? Could a guy who had been fucked in the ass and who had sucked dick be straight?
These were questions my Bob Jones education had definitely
not
prepared me to answer.

Confessing my secret to Gary, though, lifted the weight of the world from my shoulders. But it had created another problem. Ian.

I met Ian for lunch before I moved to Virginia. We were friendly. He made it clear that the subject of what had happened between us was never to come up. In my mind, I was freaking out. I had to tell him I had told. I just had to.

I drove him back to his building. In the restroom outside his office, I told him that I had told Gary that we had fucked each other. That Shanna hadn’t been lying.

He gave me a long, threatening, penetrating stare that was much more painful than anything we had done at the hotel. “Have a nice life.” He stormed out of the restroom and into his office.

Months later, after I’d reported to Quantico, I received a letter from him.

“If you get a bullet in the back of your head during training,” he wrote, “don’t expect me to come to your funeral.”

I
carried some residual guilt, I suppose. You don’t endure fourteen years at the “Fortress of Fundamentalism,” then commit sodomy and get off, so to speak, without your so-called conscience creeping up on you. But mostly it was like a Pandora’s box had been opened. What had happened with Ian felt so good, I imagined that guys must secretly be doing this everywhere, I just had to learn how to find it. No wonder the Bible was so dead set against sodomy. If men were allowed to fuck each other, they’d never go back to fucking women and the human race would die out. There would be no one left to worship God. What would the “Big He” do without us to worship Him? He’d go insane, for sure.

Sometimes my blasphemous thoughts terrified me.
What if Bob Jones is right?
I would most certainly spend an eternity in hell. But with what I’d done, it just seemed like there was no going back now. Like my literary hero Mark Twain said, “I prefer heaven for the climate—but hell for the company.”

There were 250 Marines in my officer class at the basic school. Of those 250, three of us had gone to Bob Jones University.
What a funny coincidence
, I thought. Even though I had entered the big world beyond the “fortress,” I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t have imagined how the little fundamentalist school nestled in the foothills of northern South Carolina would constantly pop up in my life in the years ahead.

Although I now suspected that gay sex might be available everywhere, I was a novice and had no idea what clues to look for. Two other second lieutenants in my platoon at Quantico came on to me separately, but the subtleties were lost on me at the time. I had better luck with “hooking up” at the air defense officers’ course at Fort Bliss, in the shit-hole city of El Paso, Texas. I was there for a four-month course learning all about the Stinger and HAWK missile systems. Unlike Quantico, which was world renowned for its intensity and rigorous training, the school at Fort Bliss was four weeks of material spread over four months. Our days were short and work was easy.

In the movie section of the El Paso newspaper were ads for adult films, something I had never seen in South Carolina. And mixed in with the ads for the adult movies were advertised “gay porn” theaters. It was the first time I had ever heard of gay porn. I decided to drive out to where one theater was located.

It was way out on the eastern outskirts of the desert city. I had to drive for miles to get there. The place was pretty seedy. I had never been in an adult bookstore before, but you had to go through the bookstore to get to the theaters. Finally, after searching around row after row of porn magazines with creepy-looking guys leering at me over the racks, I figured out which theater had the gay videos.
Maybe there’d be some hot guys in there
, I thought.

The room was empty. I took a seat and decided to enjoy the show.
Oh my God
, I thought after a minute or two. I had never watched two guys have sex before. Here it was, up on the big screen for all to see. Well, for me to see, since I was the only one in the theater.

It was a locker room scene, something I would soon learn is pretty standard fare for gay videos. One young-looking guy had his “buddy” bent over the sink, fucking him in the ass. The guy getting fucked was wearing a baseball cap turned backward. The scene was so hot.

While I was enjoying this view, I heard someone enter the theater. Suddenly I was terrified. Who was this? The guy sat down in the seat right beside mine. I didn’t look at him. His hand started moving closer to my leg. I didn’t stop him. He started massaging my dick. I was already erect from watching the video. In an instant, I came. I didn’t know what had happened. This was the first time I had ever come while awake.

Immediately, I was over it. I darted out of the theater, covering the crotch of my pants with my hand.

I worked out at the gym on base. There was a hot tub in the locker room and frequently I noticed quite a few guys sitting in there naked. One Saturday, I decided to join them.

I had been in the hot tub about five minutes when the guy sitting next to me started rubbing my leg, just as Ian had done. This wasn’t subtle in the least and I knew
exactly
what his intentions were. He was a soldier at the base’s dental clinic. He invited me back to his house and I went.

The soldier’s name was Tim and he rented a one-room house behind a larger house not far from the base. Before going in his place I emptied my pockets of all my money, my wallet, my military ID and anything else that would have given away my identity and locked them safely in my glove compartment. I was not about to take any chances. At least, not any more chances than I had already taken to get what I wanted.

Tim wasn’t particularly handsome and he was a little bit overweight, but I didn’t care. It had been eight months since my experience with Ian and I wanted to fuck a guy, or have a guy fuck me, or just do something with a naked guy involving dicks, hands, mouths, and asses. I was horny.

Somehow he knew I wasn’t in the army. “What branch are you in?”

“Air Force,” I lied. “Name’s Steve.” I felt like shit, saying I was in the Air Force. No self-respecting Marine would
ever
say he was in the Air Force! Of course, no self-respecting Marine would ever do what I was about to do, either. At least that’s what I thought back then.

We were standing inside his studio apartment but were still fully clothed. I was as nervous as I had ever been in my life. I didn’t know what to do with my hands at this point so I kept putting them behind my back, then in my pockets or folded across my chest. I didn’t want to give the wrong body language signals so I put them back down at my sides.

Tim noticed my nervousness and tried to put me at ease.

“Well…‘Steve,’” he said. He said it just like that, or so I thought, like he knew I was lying to him about my name. “Do you mind if I take your shirt off?”

“Yes…no, I mean…I don’t mind.” He slowly approached me and took off my shirt.

He took a step back. “You don’t look like you’re in the Air Force, not with that body.”

I didn’t think I looked that good, actually, but maybe I did. It felt good that he thought I did. But he knew I wasn’t in the Air Force.

“What do you like to do?” he asked.

I didn’t know all the available options, but I knew what I had liked before. “Um…I like blow jobs…and fucking…”

“Good,” said Tim. “I like to fuck, too.” He took his clothes off and I took the rest of mine off. I didn’t know yet that “top” and “bottom” were identities; I still thought of them only as sexual roles that could be played and switched, as Ian and I had done. But I had let Ian fuck me first, so I thought I’d let Tim go first, too. When I was naked, I leaned over the bed.

His laughter caught me off guard. “Not so fast! I want to play with you a little first. But I am glad to see that you’re a bottom.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but he and I lay down side-by-side and had tender foreplay. Within three minutes of his playing with my dick I came all over the bed. His eyes grew large and he smiled at me. “Well, that’s flattering,” he said. “All I do is touch you and you come? Or you just haven’t had any in a long time?”

Tim gave me his number and I called him for sex two more times. The last time I tried to let him fuck me. I had been drunk with Ian; with Tim, I was sober and it hurt like hell so I made him stop. We just sat on the floor and jerked each other off.

I hadn’t asked him to use a condom and he hadn’t offered to. This time, I knew he was a gay guy, so the reasoning I had used for the unsafe sex with Ian didn’t apply to Tim. However, I knew that because he was in the Army, he had to get tested for HIV. If he had tested positive, they would have kicked him out. I let the fact that he was in the military give me a false sense of security.

He told me that there were a lot of gays and lesbians in the military. I was shocked. I wanted to know more, but I was too afraid to ask. I might say something to give away my real identity. But Gary was coming to visit me that weekend and my mind began working on a plan.

“How can you tell?” I asked. “I mean, how do you know if another soldier is gay?”

“When one of these trashy Army queens sticks her hand down your pants, that’s usually a good sign,” he said.

“No, I’m talking about guys,” I said.

“God damn, Steve, you really
are
new at this…” Tim lowered his head and looked at me. “When I say ‘queens’ I mean effeminate men. There’s lots of ’em in the Army. When I say ‘her’ I’m talking about a fag. A guy. Got it?”

I started to get it, but it made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t like referring to men as women, saying “her” when I really meant “him.” But this wasn’t why I had asked.

“Well, I’ve got this friend from coll…back home,” I said. I had almost said “college” and I didn’t want to give away that I was an officer. “Anyway, he’s coming to visit me next weekend and I’m hoping that maybe he’s…well, that maybe he does this.”

Tim looked concerned. “Steve,” he said. “Be careful. You might be starting to think that all guys fuck each other. A lot do, but most don’t, and even the ones that do are real weird about it. You make the wrong move and you could ruin a friendship. Gay guys waste a lot of time with wishful thinking.”

“I’m not…” I started to deny that I was gay. Considering where Tim’s dick has just been, I decided my protest might sound pretty hollow. I also took Tim’s advice to heart. I decided to just keep my eyes open so that if Gary gave me any indication he was into guys, I’d be ready to react to it. But no way was I going to do anything to ruin our friendship. But that didn’t stop me from “wishful thinking.”

For my twenty-fourth birthday, my fellow officers took me to a “gentlemen’s club” in El Paso. They hired a dancer to give me a personal lap dance with her bare titties in my face. The conflict was too much for me. It was “in my face” that the life I was leading in private was very different from the life I was leading professionally and I freaked out. I insisted my friends take me home, which they did. They assumed that the problems I was having with the strip club was due to my fundamentalist upbringing. They were partly right, although not for the reasons they assumed.

Gary was in flight school on the other side of Texas, in Corpus Christi. His visit with me in El Paso was fun but uneventful. I kept all my secret sexual activities to myself and, of course, there were no sexual overtures on his part. I still wasn’t calling myself “gay” or acknowledging the true nature of the feelings I had for my friend.

I had feared that after we graduated from Clemson, my friendship with Gary might disappear, not because of any overt hostilities, but simply because of the erosion that commonly occurs in friendships due to distance in geography, busy schedules, and the passage of time. Gary and I talked about this and resolved not to let that happen.

Fortunately, we were able to see each other on a number of occasions. After his trip to El Paso, he and I met up with our old gang from Clemson. We—along with my entire family—converged at an old familiar place to me—McNeely Memorial Pentecostal Holiness Church in Powdersville, South Carolina. This was the church my family had attended when I was a baby until the preacher’s “indiscretions” had forced him to resign the pulpit.

The occasion—my cousin Amy’s wedding to our friend Colin.

I had been freaked out that Ian might show, but I didn’t see him there. That was a relief.

A few weekends after the wedding, I flew to the gulf coast of Texas to spend a weekend with Gary. We went to officers’ club at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, where all the student pilots strutted around the bar in their green flight suits trying to impress each other and to pick up women. I wore jeans and a casual shirt, and an attractive blond woman approached me.

“You look different from these guys,” she said.

I choked on my beer.
What did she mean? Could she tell I had had sex with a guy—two guys now? Was it that obvious?

“You’re not a pilot,” she said, stating the obvious, considering my thick eyeglasses and civilian attire. “What do you do?”

Thank God. That was all she meant.

“Actually, I shoot pilots down,” I said, referring to my new job in the Marines.

She tossed her hair and sipped her drink through a straw. “What a coincidence,” she said. “So do I!”

“Hey, Rich,” Gary said calling me across the room. “I want you to meet Tina. Remember, we’ve talked about her.”

We had. Gary had been itching to get me into a verbal duel with Tina, the wife of another Marine student pilot. Tina was a feminist and a liberal. I wasn’t sure I had ever met a real liberal before and certainly not a feminist. Even though I was no longer associated with Bob Jones or fundamentalism, I was still politically very conservative. I was also opinionated and vocal about my opinions. So was Tina.

Tina and I conversed a bit while Gary and his buds egged us on. There were no fireworks until the subject of AIDS came up.

“AIDS is God’s judgment on homosexuals,” I said, parroting what I had heard the Jones’s say many times. I wasn’t sure I believed that, but it seemed like a good thing to say. After all, what a coincidence, right? I mean, how else do you explain a disease that only…

“Well, then,” Tina said, practically spitting the words at me, “Lesbians must be God’s chosen people!”

“Ohh! Ooh! Score one for Tina! Damn, Rich, she got you!” Gary said laughing.

Wisely I kept my mouth shut. I pondered what Tina had said for a long time. Not only was I a homophobe, I was a sexist. I had forgotten about the women. My own logic and theological reasoning had been used against me!

So there were holes in Bob Jones’s doctrinal theories. And I was beginning to see them.

I reported to Okinawa in late November ’91. Okinawa is a long thin island seventy miles north and south, ten miles wide, which is used as a primary training area for the Marines. The American military controls half of the island. A million Okinawans live there, but large parts of the island are American training bases. Something like fifty thousand Americans are stationed there and, because it’s small, the natives kind of resent us.