Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (26 page)

“Wes, I’ll give you ten minutes,” I said.

“Fuck you, Rich, that’s fucked up. I saw him first.”

“I don’t care, Wes, you’ll do the same thing you always do. You’ll stand here and mumble all night about how much you want to go over and talk to the guy, and then the bar will close and you won’t do it. I’m sorry, dude, but if you don’t go over and talk to him in ten minutes, I will.”

Philip overheard our conversation and laughed. “That
is
fucked up, Rich. But Wes, Rich is right. You can’t just claim every guy in the bar and then get pissed off if someone else goes up and talks to him.”

“Okay, to show you what a nice guy I am, I’ll give you an extra five minutes. You got fifteen minutes. Starting…right…NOW!” No shit, I hit the start button on my Casio G-Shock stopwatch.

Wesley lowered his head and gulped his beer. “You’re an asshole,” he murmured.

As the minutes passed, I studied the guy Wesley had in his sights. Wes continued to shuffle back and forth and once even walked toward the guy, almost making it all the way before returning to the safety of our group. The guy was about my height, five-foot-seven, with well-developed muscles visible through his tight T-shirt and jeans. He had a short haircut, but not quite regulation military. The look on his face is what caught my interest, however. He was intense, but conflicted. It was as if he wanted to be here, but he didn’t. He didn’t look very happy. I felt sorry for him and wanted to include him.

My watch alarm beeped. “Time’s up!” Wesley was standing in the same place.

“Aw, Rich, come on, man, don’t do this. I was just about to go talk to him!”

But I was already halfway across the bar. I had no patience with Wesley’s timidity. Sometimes it was cute and sometimes it was annoying. Tonight it was the latter.

I leaned against the rail beside the guy. He sort of nodded at me but returned to watching the men on the dance floor below.

I extended my hand. “Hi, my name’s Rich. What’s yours?”

“John,” he said, unclenching his jaw. “Good to meet you, Rich.”

John sounded professional and intelligent. Turns out, he had just earned a PhD in molecular biology and was working on a project at the University of California at San Diego.

“You want to come meet some of my friends?” I asked. I identified with this guy, and although I would have liked to hook up with him, it just seemed to me that “hooking up” was not to be the nature of my relationship with John. Exactly what was, I had no idea.

I introduced John to the guys. A hook-up definitely was not in the works, so I said good night. I suspected that I would run into John again.

Now that my career was over due to the DUI, I began to worry about my future. Because of my recent extension, I had four more years in the Corps. Four years on a government salary wouldn’t allow me to save a whole lot if I decided to go to law school, not when I still had a mountain of debt to deal with. I began to wonder how I might be able to make some money.

I was flipping through the pages of the
San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times
and I saw an ad for an escort service called Cadet Escorts. A few years before I had tested my physical appeal by stripping. This would be a little further down the road toward total sexual exhibitionism.
Let me see if I could be an escort
, the needy, little voice in my head urged. I had been running hard and working out a lot and felt that I looked good again. I wondered if I was good-looking enough for this. I wouldn’t do it, I’d just see if anyone would want to hire me to do this.

I called the number and the owner invited me down for an interview. We met and talked. He was a gnarly-looking guy living in a dark, dusty room at the San Diego Hotel.

I didn’t even have to take my clothes off. But he said the words I had come there to hear: “Yeah, you look good enough.”

On the drive back to Oceanside, I kept thinking,
I can’t do this! This is crazy! What the fuck is the matter with me?
But the whole thing just seemed so exciting. Why not? So it was against the law. A lot of laws were stupid. This was one of them.

A few days later he called and said there was a client who wanted to meet me. The Marriott Hotel on the harbor in San Diego was to be our clandestine trysting place. I told him I would be there. The entire way there, I felt that incredibly queasy, excited feeling I always got before I did something that I considered a sin, perversion, or taboo. I was thinking,
I can’t believe I’m about to have sex with a guy for money!
Would I be able to? I didn’t even know what he would look like. In my mind I pictured him: 300 to 400 pounds, smelly, with a forest of oily black hair.

When we met, though, I was surprised to find out that he was nice looking and in reasonably good shape (although he was obviously older than forty-two, which he told me he was). He did most of the talking. He had his own condoms and lubes. He didn’t have any toys although I was on the lookout for those. Those might have scared me away as I had never used anything like that.

We had sex. I threw myself into it. If I was going to play a male prostitute, I decided to go all the way with the role.

I was supposed to be paid $150 for the encounter but at the end of it he gave me $200. I only had to pay the guy at the service twenty-five dollars. All that extra cash was mine—for a job well done. The approval was even more important to me than the money.

“Can I call you again?” he asked. “Do I have to go through the escort service?”

I said, “No, you can call me direct.” And I gave him my number.

The next day, in a moment of sanity I asked myself,
What the fuck are you doing?
I had lucked out with my first experience but who knew what might lie ahead? What sort of man might be waiting for me at some hotel the next time? Or the next? So I quit answering the phone when the guy from the service called.

But when the john called asking if I’d like to get together, I said, “Sure, I’ll meet you again.” We had dinner. He took me to a really nice restaurant, which is always a boost to the ego. We were having a relaxed and easy time together, and I felt comfortable enough to tell him what I did outside of escorting. I even revealed how much money I made. He was surprised. I didn’t make a whole lot of money in the Marines, but I made a lot more than the average hustler would make with a regular side job.

He had an attitude change. Now everything he said conveyed the question, “Why are you hustling?” The problem was, I didn’t really have an answer to that myself.

We went up to the room and were about to have sex again. The issue of how much he was going to pay me hadn’t come up. Yet. But before I had a chance to mention money, he said, “I think we had a real connection last time.”

I just looked at him wondering,
What the fuck are you thinking here? I had sex with you because you paid me.
But I didn’t say that, of course. We started to kiss. We weren’t completely undressed. I realized,
This guy really thinks I’m into him
. Suddenly, I backed away, saying, “You know, I really can’t do this.” And then I left. Simple as that.

A few weeks later I heard that the escort service had gotten busted by the San Diego vice squad. That was a close call.

“Y
ou’ve got five minutes to pack your shit,” Wes said through the phone. “We’re going to Palm Springs.”

I had been preparing for a quiet weekend at home alone, maybe going out to the bar, maybe not. “Okay,” I said. Five minutes later I climbed into the back seat of Roy’s truck, another “TED” friend of Wes’s, and we were headed out to the desert for a weekend of God-only-knew-what.

The most popular gay bar in the Palm Springs area was the Cathedral City Construction Company, or CC’s. Like West Coast, it had a large outdoor area which I liked. Especially in a place like Palm Springs. The dry night air was still cool, as it was early springtime. Easter weekend.

Not long after we arrived, Wes introduced me to his friend, Jim. This was the same Jim who was Dana’s ex-boyfriend and Gary’s flight instructor. Dana had told me some negative things about Jim but, within minutes, I developed a fondness for the guy and we felt a mutual connection. I realized I had only gotten one side of the story from Dana.

“I’m glad we finally got a chance to talk,” I said to Jim. “This clears up some things.”

“I am too,” he replied. He changed the subject. “You aren’t at the big party?”

“What big party?”

“Every Easter there’s a big circuit party out here now, called the White Party. It’s not my scene; I’d rather come here to CC’s.”

“Never heard of it,” I answered. “What’s a ‘circuit party’?”

“Just a big dance party. All the queens from LA drive out for it. It costs a lot of money to get in.”

“How big? How much money? Why do they call it the White Party?” This party had my curiosity going.

“Okay, how gay is this?” Jim began. “You have to wear all white. Because it’s Easter. That’s why they call it the White Party.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s Saturday night so technically it’s not Easter yet. So all those queens are technically out of fashion because they’re all wearing white
before
Easter.”

“Okay,” Jim said laughing, “it’s pretty gay that you know that!”

“Not gay,” I explained, “it’s a Southern thing.”

“Same thing,” said Jim, a native midwesterner. He smiled, “You can be my queeniest friend. Just like a Marine!”

“Asshole,” I laughed. I was really warming up to Jim. With Philip and Wes and Roy and all the others I had met, this was starting to feel like a family. The other thing I really admired about Jim was his refusal to say anything negative about his ex. Coming from a family where negativity was the norm, it was refreshing to hear someone say only nice things about people, even people who may have wronged them.

Jim continued telling me about the mysterious event taking place across town. “And they’ll have a couple of thousand people at the White Party. And a thirty-dollar cover or more.”

“Thirty dollars! Are they fucking crazy?” I didn’t have thirty dollars to spend on a cover charge. “Does that include drinks? I assume it does.”

Jim didn’t know. A friend of his standing nearby said it did not. That was insane. Who the hell would pay thirty dollars to get into a party and still have to pay for drinks?

“Why would anyone go to that?” I asked.

Jim just shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. But a lot of guys go.”

A lot of gay men were insane, I had concluded. The White Party and these…these circuit parties proved it.

The first six months of 1994 were devoted to getting my men ready to go sea for the last six months of the year. In the middle of these workups, I got a call from the barracks telling me I needed to come down there. The call was from the military police, the MPs with dogs. The K-9 unit had found drugs in one of the men’s rooms in the barracks.

My experience with drugs had been nonexistent. I had seen pot once from a distance at an antidrug lecture. I had never used any illegal drug nor had I been around anyone using drugs, to my knowledge, except maybe the guy at the Hyatt. This news came as a shock to me, especially since I considered this particular Marine to be among my best. I had hand-picked him to be my communications man during our shipboard deployment.

The MP showed me the paraphernalia and explained that she had found brochures all over the room, advertising raves. She also said she found special lights used to enhance the effects of acid. She explained that a rave was a large dance where the kids took a drug I had never heard of, called Ecstasy. It gave them a euphoric high and they wanted to dance and use glow sticks. The whole thing sounded very strange. Like some parallel world. Sure enough, they found tabs of acid in one of the rooms. And a few months later, one of my Marines had to be flown home from Guam because they found traces of crystal meth in his urine.

Who knew Marines were such druggies?
I thought.

The months before our six-month deployment, I flew to South Carolina for ten days. My mom and dad and I visited Hilton Head Island over the weekend where we rented bicycles and rode along the beach for the afternoon. It was another pleasant visit for the most part.

Over dinner, my mom asked, “Richie, so you still haven’t found a girl to date…not anyone you like?”

Goddamn, I HATED this question!
It came up at least once every visit.

“Nope,” I said in a very matter-of-fact tone as I grabbed a piece of bread from the basket in the middle of the table. Mom didn’t bring the subject up again.

I visited Mrs. Langston, my fifth and sixth grade teacher. I took her out for lunch. Both of us enjoyed catching up on everything and the time flew by. As we were saying good-bye, she casually asked, “Do you have any more sightseeing road trips planned before you depart on the ship?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, my friend Philip and I are going to San Francisco for Memorial Day weekend.”

“Oh, San Francisco, you know Reverend Innis was speaking in chapel one day, and he has a church in San Francisco, and the gays and lesbians were standing outside his church saying the most awful things, like ‘we want your children.’ I would never have believed it, but he played a tape for us in chapel and we heard it!”

“Yes, I’m…familiar with Reverend Innis,” I said. My face reflexively reverted to its frozen smile, the one that was serving me so well on active duty. “Well, I better be going. I have to get ready to head back to California.”

“Oh, well, thank you very much for lunch. Be sure to send me your address on the ship!”

I couldn’t wait to get back to San Diego and get on with the float. I wanted it over already.

Philip picked me up at the San Diego airport. He quickly introduced me to Jack, a Marine friend on leave from Okinawa. He also asked about my trip, but cut me off after thirty seconds. He was grinning like a little kid with something on his mind.

“I’ve got something to ask you,” he said. “Do you mind if I date your doctor friend?”

“Of course not,” I said. “John? He and I never even went out. Why would I mind?”

“Well, good, because I’ve already started going out with him!”

“A lot of good it did to ask me, then didn’t it?” This was
so
like Philip. I shook my head as I put my luggage in his trunk. “I’m not Wesley, Philip. I’m not going to get mad if the two of you want to go out.”

Philip was excited. “Good, well, because I know how much you liked him…and, well, that first night you met him at West Coast…he really liked me. Not you.” Philip gave me a smile similar to one a crocodile would give its prey. “I just want to protect your feelings.”

We hopped in the car and drove out of the airport parking lot. I gave him some cash to pay the attendant. “Okay. First of all, you don’t give a shit about my feelings…”

“Well…okay, so you’re right…” Philip giggled at my honesty.

“And second you’re an ass for even telling me he chose you over me that first night.” I wasn’t mad at Philip. I had just learned that this was who he was. But I was definitely going to call him on it.

I had learned to put up with Philip’s ego for the most part, but he knew how to push my buttons when he wanted to.

“I think Gary’s gay,” Philip said to me one evening when we were watching television in my apartment.

“Gary’s not gay, Philip. God! You think every good-looking guy’s gay and wants you to fuck him.”

“It’s not just the good-looking guys,” he said with a smirk on his face. “They
all
want me to fuck them. How could they pass this up?”

“Well, Gary’s not gay. Believe me, I’d know.” I recalled a conversation Philip and I had had in Okinawa. “That’s what you were smirking about on the Rock, isn’t it? When you saw I had that picture of him in my room?”

“Well, between the pictures and throw rugs and paintings, you were practically screaming ‘Help! Help! I want out! Someone let me out of the closet!’”

I laughed and threw a pillow at him. “But Gary’s not gay.”

“This really bothers you, doesn’t it?” he asked. “It would really piss you off if he turned out to be gay, but went for me instead of you, wouldn’t it?” Philip looked at me intently.

“Fuck it, Philip! Everything has to be a contest with you!” But he was right. If Gary had been gay, but had gone for Philip instead of me, I would have to kill Philip, no question about it. “Gary’s not gay. Now shut the fuck up and watch TV.”

I knew six or seven gay Marines going on the Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU. The Saturday before most of the ships left, I threw an afternoon farewell party at our beach place. Raul was away in Twentynine Palms on deployment. Not that he would have minded that much, but having thirty drunk gay men in your home is enough to test even the most open-minded straight person’s patience.

I loved it. At last, I had my family. Jim and Dr. John showed up on the beach that afternoon and I introduced them to each other.

The week before I left, I received a letter from Mrs. Langston. She wrote that she had something to ask me, but didn’t know how to word it. She wanted permission to ask me something very personal. I called her immediately.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“I thought I detected a very strong emotion when we were discussing Reverend Innis,” she said.

“Really? I thought my act was better than that.”

“Not to me,” she said very sweetly. “I’ve known you far too long.” Mrs. Langston also informed me that she had a good friend who was a lesbian and that, while Mrs. Langston was a fundamentalist and couldn’t condone homosexuality, neither could she forsake the individuals she knew who were gay.

I was growing more militant in my attitude about “coming out.” People thought of themselves as being so gracious by “accepting” and “tolerating” me, or in Mrs. Langston’s case, loving me while rejecting my sin. I didn’t need anyone to tolerate me! As Gary had said at Clemson, “I need food, I need air, and I need water.” What I didn’t need was a bunch of straight people loving me while they were hating my sin. I was doing fine without them.

Mrs. Langston stopped writing to me. Perhaps my ever-increasing militancy was beginning to seep into my relationships with people from my past. I kept telling myself that it was because her career as a novelist was taking off and that she was busy with her family. No matter what I tried to tell myself, though, a nagging voice always made me think it was because I was gay.

A year or so later I received a letter from her. “Your high school band director mentioned you the other day. Do you remember Bill Christopher?”

Of course I remember Bill Christopher. I was in love with the man.

“Well, he made the comment that he heard you were living the stereotypical life of a young man in southern California. I assume you know what he means by that. I didn’t know what to tell him…he could tell from my hesitancy that it must be true.”

I wrote her back and told her that I honestly didn’t care who knew what about me, except my parents. I wanted to tell them in my own time. But I also told her to tell Bill Christopher that no, I was not a surfer, if that’s what he meant by the “stereotypical life of a young man living in southern California.”

In June, our ships left the port of San Diego and headed across the Pacific for a routine six-month deployment. We stopped in the usual places like Singapore and Thailand, then went on to conduct our missions in Somalia and the Persian Gulf. I was fortunate in that, due to a logistical snafu (snafu is a military acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up”), I had a small room to myself most of the cruise and only one roommate for the remainder. This type of privacy was unheard of. By the end of the cruise, my roommate had figured out I was gay, but had let me know in unspoken ways that he approved.

I received a letter from Philip after a month or so. His ego was destroyed. Doctor John had dumped him and had begun a relationship with Jim. Somehow it was partly my fault because I had introduced them on the beach. Philip was furious, his pride was hurt, and he ranted and raved about the both of them. He made it sound like back home had turned into a gay version of
Melrose Place
.

Sure enough, Jim and John started dating and sent me letters about it. They were always careful to use the correct feminized names and pronouns. Jim’s sometimes stand-in lesbian date, or “beard,” also sent a lot of letters and packages. I asked her to address some of the letters because it looked good to receive letters with a woman’s handwriting on the outside. This is how paranoid I was.

Just before the cruise, I had purchased the Bob Perris workout book. Bob Perris was a well-known, openly gay professional bodybuilder and, throughout the book, he used his then boyfriend as an example of his workout plan.

I worked out according to Bob’s plan and got into the best shape of my life. So did my roommate. He let me know he didn’t care that Bob was gay; all that mattered was that he obviously knew how to work out.

When we reached the Persian Gulf in August, the temperature was around 120°. And it was humid, a surprise to me as I thought the region would be dry. With the climate so hot, the commander of the MEU gave Marines the option of wearing the beige-colored shorts worn by Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs. The UDT shorts were extremely short and skimpy, and many Marines didn’t wear underwear with them.