Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (21 page)

My job was to be a platoon commander for a Stinger missile platoon. I was immediately sent to the Philippine Islands (“the PI”) with a group of ten Marines for six weeks of training. The PI is often referred to as an adult Disneyland. The Navy bases are Subic Bay Naval Station and CUBI Point Naval Air Station, both next to the city of Olongapo. In Olongapo are dozens of bars where service men can “meet” woman for sex. Nearby Subic City is even tawdrier.

There was not much going on in the military in late 1991. The Gulf War had ended and everyone was back into a peacetime mode. The volcano, Mount Pinatubo, had erupted in the PI and had destroyed the nearby U.S. Air Force base completely. A lot of volcanic ash was lying around the Navy bases and it had caused a few buildings to collapse. Because of the damage, we knew America’s days in the PI were numbered. So we made the most of it.

It was the holidays. As a hard-charging young lieutenant on my first assignment, I eagerly tried to get training opportunities for my men. Everywhere, I met resistance. I would beg for flights and vehicles and permission to enter training areas. No luck. Senior officers would tell me, “Lieutenant, it’s Christmas. Take it easy. Go out in town and live it up. This might very well be your last chance to be a ‘warrior god in a foreign land.’”

“Taking it easy” meant taking advantage of the local delights—a bevy of pretty, young prostitutes to help a lonely serviceman pass some time. Of course they held little interest for me, but I went along with the flow. I guess I equated getting away from home with getting away from my true self because I had sex with a lot of women there, and one of them even called herself my girlfriend. I felt that this was a chance to prove to myself that I was straight—even though by now I’d had my first and second sexual experiences with men.

I was still trying to convince myself I was straight. Yet I had crushes on guys and I was always trying to hang out and get close to them. One night, four of the enlisted guys and I got together for an all-night orgy with five prostitutes. There was absolutely no man-on-man sex, just a bunch of Marine buddies in the same room getting their cocks sucked. For the most part, I walked around the room videotaping the action—I guess even back then I had an eye for porn.

This was totally inappropriate, for me as a Marine and especially as an officer, to do this with my men. I knew it, but by now I didn’t care. The Marines have a saying: “What happens in the PI stays in the PI.” I took that to heart. I had no moral boundaries and I was still convincing myself I was straight, even though, when it was my turn to get sucked by one of the beautiful prostitutes, I fantasized about the time I had sex with Ian at the hotel.

“What happens in the PI stays in the PI.” There was a permissive attitude in the lazy, tropical atmosphere. Married guys who would ordinarily never cheat on their wives allowed themselves to do it there. One hooker delightedly showed me a money order she had just received from a colonel who kept her well funded. You would see dozens of married guys you knew hooking up each night, leaving the bars with prostitutes. No one ever said anything. That was the code.

The Philippines wasn’t all about sex and drunkenness. I saw unbelievable poverty, as I’d never seen. A river separated the bases from the town of Olongapo. We called it “Shit River” because of the raw sewage that filled it and the smell that emanated from it. As we’d exchange our dollars for the large Filipino pesos that were worth about four cents, many servicemen would throw the coins into Shit River. Local Filipino children, some of whom had blond hair and blue eyes, would willingly dive into the river and retrieve the coins. That’s how poor they were.

Back on Okinawa, one Saturday night, Jack, a first lieutenant I worked with, and I were knocking down a few beers at the club and playing the slot machines, which were legal in overseas bases.

“Hey, Rich!” he said. “Remember when the major said he’d give any officer a bad fitness report who got a tattoo? Fuck him, let’s go get tattoos!”

“What? Your wife will never let you get a tattoo,” I said.

“I know. But she’s on a shopping trip to Hong Kong. That’s why we have to get it tonight!”

“Okay, what the hell, let’s do it!” I responded. Jack and I were going to be tattoo brothers.

Tattoos, much to my surprise, were illegal in Japan. The rumor was that only the Yakuza, the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia, gave tattoos.

We drove to Naha, the capital of the tiny island, and found the address we’d been given. We walked along a rickety wooden walk-way hidden tightly between two dark buildings. We could barely see our way in the dark. Finally we reached the door and the guy let us in. The small, dank room was full, with about a half dozen dependent children of military personnel drunk or high, and getting tattoos.

We continued to drink until finally it was our turn. The old guy giving the tattoos had two prosthetic legs, and he walked and worked very slowly. I decided to get the Marine Corps symbol, the “Eagle, Globe, and Anchor” with the USMC letters stenciled in gothic lettering below it. It took two hours and hurt like hell, but I felt the thrill of belonging just a little bit more once I had my official USMC stamp permanently inked on my arm.

“Hey, I’ve got one for you…a bunch of fags were sitting in a hot tub and a condom floats to the surface of the water…”

“Aw, fuck it, sir! That’s
gross!
” said Jack to our battery commander. The four of us officers in the Stinger missile battery frequently ate lunch together in the officers’ club. Sometimes, like today, the battalion commander joined us.

“No, no, wait,” said the captain as we all laughed. “That’s not the joke…a bunch of fags were sitting in a hot tub, and a condom floats to the surface of the water.” The captain looked at his lieutenants to make sure he had our attention for the punch line. “And one of ’em says…‘okay, who farted?’”

Our laughter was coarse and loud, just as we thought we were supposed to be. We didn’t realize it so much at the time, but we were at the end of an era. This was before three American servicemen raped an Okinawan schoolgirl, a crime that drastically changed everything for U.S. service personnel stationed in Japan.

In 1992, the military was fresh from its Gulf War victory and it was still somewhat safe to strut our stuff. Getting drunk was still admired although that would soon change. Women still weren’t allowed on many Navy ships, another fact that would also soon change. Vietnam seemed like a distant bad dream and we paraded ourselves around like conquering heroes.

We heard the news from back in the States that the governor of Arkansas was picking up steam in his quest to be commander in chief. What caught our attention was his plan to allow gays in the military.

“I tell you,” said Lieutenant Colonel Killian, the new battalion commander, “these fags…they’re so
promiscuous
. They don’t settle down…they hop from fuck buddy to fuck buddy. There’s nothing ‘marriage-like’ about it! If AIDS doesn’t finish ’em off, I say we should. There’s no use for ’em!”

The captain’s joke had seemed funny. Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s comment seemed…well, wrong. Psychotic even. It made me feel uncomfortable. I repressed the memory of my two sexual partners. They didn’t count because technically I wasn’t a fag. Still, I wondered how many gay men the battalion commander knew. I mean, where was he getting his data? And what had they done to him to make him so homicidal?

“Fags are the last group that it’s okay to make fun of publicly,” said our communications officer. I had repeated the joke I had heard the captain tell us at lunch. “It’s not cool to tell racial jokes or even sexist jokes anymore. But with fags, it’s still okay. You know you’re not going to offend anyone.”

How do you know you’re not going to offend anyone?
The question popped into my head so quickly I almost said it out loud. Fortunately I didn’t. Still, what if I
was
a…a…I couldn’t even think it. What I wanted to think was,
What if I’m a fag? How do you know you haven’t offended me?

Because you’re the one who told the joke, asshole.
The voice in my mind was right. I had repeated the fag joke. And my conscience was reminding me of it.

“The reason I’m so homophobic, and that I think it’s okay to be homophobic, is that if you look at every civilization, their fall was immediately preceded by an acceptance of homosexuality,” said a lieutenant I worked with.

“What?” I said. “The British Empire never accepted homosexuality. In fact, its strictest antigay laws were passed by Queen Victoria, just before Britain’s empire collapsed.”

“What’s going on, Merritt, are you becoming a fag lover?”

“No,” I replied, backing off before I seemed soft on this issue, “it’s just that history and logic are two of my passions…and when I hear something that’s wrong, I say it.”

“Uh-huh. I see,” he said.

Truth was, I didn’t care for the lieutenant. He was one of those playboy types who overrated his own attractiveness. He had also smuggled a huge porn collection into Japan. I had borrowed some of his videos; I kept the ones with hot guys in them.

Before Lieutenant Colonel Killian had arrived on Okinawa, the outgoing battalion commander had treated all the officers in the battalion to a night at “the Stage.” The Stage was a club in Naha, where women put on live sex shows with selected members of the audience. Our supply officer, who was very intoxicated, jumped up onto the stage and, much to his later embarrassment, tried to fuck one of the women in front of us. His incredibly small penis didn’t quite penetrate, but he was happy. He came anyway.

“Most of these old Japanese men who come here just want to see how big American men’s dicks are,” said a drunk lieutenant, looking at the forty or so local men gathered around the stage.

“They’re going to want their money back after this!” I exclaimed, a little drunk myself.

“Ouch! That hurts! Supp O isn’t even here to defend himself,” laughed the lieutenant.

“I know, hesuponstage!” I said, highly intoxicated by this point. “Heshouldgetdown!”

I had been in Okinawa for about six months when I met another officer at Camp Butler. Camp Butler served at the headquarters post for Marines stationed in Japan and it had a better officers’ club than the Futenma Air Station. Occasionally I’d go there to drink if for no other reason than a change of scenery. The new officer was handsome—a very nice change indeed.

His name was Philip. He was a Marine F/A-18 pilot but he had been drafted to work at the headquarters of the First Marine Airwing. Philip, like Gary’s friend Tina, was a notorious liberal. A lot of people knew him—apparently his behavior was somewhat flamboyant—and there was this rumor going around that he was gay. Of course that immediately made me curious. We became friends and one evening, I invited him to dinner at the officers club on the air station, conveniently across the street from my barracks. After dinner, we crossed the street to my room.

“Well, look at these rugs,” he said, noting the throw rugs I had recently purchased at the Base Exchange. “Don’t you have…a
flair
for decorating.” Philip batted his eyelashes. And he was implying I was a fag?

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, looking at a bunch of pictures I had framed and hanging on my wall. “You know Gary Fullerton? And Mac? I knew those guys at Pensacola. What was Mac’s wife’s name…Tina, that’s it. I liked her! Very progressive thinker.”

I kept my mouth shut about the argument I had lost with Tina. Besides, I felt like I was kind of making a play for this guy and didn’t want to come across as anti-gay. That might defeat the purpose of my quest.

“Yeah, Gary and I went to college and OCS together.”

Philip looked at me for a second. “Oh. Really. I see.”

There was something that wasn’t being said, but I didn’t know what it was. Damn, I hated having been brought up in such a weird, freakish sheltered place like Bob Jones. I didn’t get any double meanings, there was so much stuff I had missed out on, like music and movies…and I never knew what people really meant when they made comments like Philip’s. Of course, I could just ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh. Nothing. I was just wondering how you knew him.”

Bullshit!
Philip was just fucking with me now. I hated him for taking advantage of my naiveté. But at the same time, I was more intrigued by him than ever. Nothing happened that evening, but our friendship continued to grow in new and strange ways.

Philip was half-Greek; his dad was an extremely wealthy lawyer from Harvard who had been working at a European office of his law firm when he’d met Philip’s mom, a Greek heiress. His parents now lived in Miami. I was to find out that Philip was a spoiled brat. He had joined the Marines as a way of “acting out” against status, and sometimes regretted it. But he certainly had a dark, swarthy, seductive Mediterranean-lover-look, inherited from his mother, and a cocky, overtly sexual personality that he exuded like heat. It was the kind of sensuality that was apparent to both men and women, but Philip got away with a lot of unconventional behavior.

Every once in awhile someone would say he was a faggot but then someone else would quickly retort, “Oh, he’s not gay—he’s from Europe.” Or they’d say, “He comes from a different class of people—they’re more sophisticated about a lot of things.” I spent months trying to figure Philip out. I began a flirtation with him in a way that made me feel like I wasn’t really flirting. Rather, I was being buddy-buddy, matching his jokingly smart-ass attitude towards sexuality with a cautiously racy banter of my own

Finally, two weeks before I left, I found out the truth about Philip. I had been teasing him, saying things like, “Hey, you’re a fucking homo—come blow me!”

He would just look at me enigmatically, give me a sort of half-smirk, and reply, ‘No, you come blow me.” Marines joke with each other like that all the time, to a certain extent. As I’d learned at boot camp years earlier, you can always hear one Marine shout to another, “Kiss my ass!” and the other will retort, “You can come blow me!” but this was getting to be a bit much. Just when the tension was reaching a fever pitch, I went back to my room to pack up my stuff because the next day the movers were coming to collect everything. While I bustled around my room, boxing my things, thoughts of Philip haunted me.