Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (27 page)

It was a shipload full of nineteen- to twenty-one-year-old men wearing tight, skin-colored skimpy shorts with their balls hanging out. It was like being on the set of a very high-budget gay porn film. Only it was real.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed the homoeroticism of the shorts. A first sergeant, a senior Marine, refused to wear the UDT shorts, a fact for which I was grateful.

“I hate those faggotty-ass-lookin’ UDT shorts,” he said, with disdain. “Reminds me of when I lived in North Park and I had to ride my bike down University Avenue through Hillcrest to get to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego every morning. Those faggots would be out there at five o’clock in the morning, still high from their drugs the night before, wearing their skimpy shorts, looking to get someone to fuck their ass!”

Hypocrite
, I thought. I was really sick of these antigay insults, mostly from men of dubious sexual orientation.

“Um, First Sergeant,” I said, with a growing anger that made me feel bold, “you
had
to ride your bike down University? Hmm. Couldn’t you have ridden down Washington Avenue instead?”

One of the lieutenants standing in our group laughed. “Ha ha! Lieutenant Merritt called you on that, First Sergeant.”

“Yeah,” said another E-8, the same pay grade as the first sergeant, “it sounds to me like you
wanted
to ride your bike through Hillcrest!” There was general round of laughter. The first sergeant grew visibly flustered. Perhaps I hit him a little too close to home. He glared at me, crushed out his cigarette, and stormed back into the interior of the ship. Sure, I worried—but only a tiny bit—that I had overexposed my knowledge of gay San Diego.

Gunny Williams, the African American who had earlier defended gays in the military, was the senior enlisted Marine in my shipboard detachment. He and I became friends, as friendly as officers and enlisted men could become. After evening chow, he’d update me on the status of the men and the equipment and sometimes we’d chat about personal things.

One night he confided in me, “You know, Gunny Green came up to me before we left…he said ‘Gunny Williams…I think your boy, Lieutenant Merritt, is a fag.’”

I didn’t look at Gunny Williams, rather I stared across the back of the ship as the sun set on the Indian Ocean. “What’d you say?”

“I told him to mind his own damn business…and that I’d rather work with a fag than a drunk-driving, wife-beating worthless asshole like him!”

I smiled and said nothing.

We went all the way across the Pacific and stopped in Singapore. After that, we had another ocean to cross, the Indian Ocean. We crossed that one, too, and stopped in Africa. We were in Mombasa, Kenya, and on our way to complete the pullout of United Nations troops in Somalia. Things had gone badly there a year before. They would eventually make a movie about it called
Black Hawk Down
. None of us were looking forward to Somalia.

Our ships crossed south of the equator and we had the Navy’s fabled “crossing the line” ceremony where all the servicemen on ship who have “crossed the line” before—the shellbacks—harass the hell out of those who haven’t—the polliwogs—or simply “wogs.” The fattest nastiest shellback becomes King Neptune and holds court, and some sailors dress up in drag and vie to be his queen. All the wogs have to slime around on the decks of the ship with the crud left over from the galley for several days. It smelled horrible as all the men crawled through days old food garbage.

At the end, the old tradition had been that all the wogs stripped out of their clothes and were hosed off on the flight deck, completely naked for God and everyone to see. By 1994, however, the military’s allegedly “politically correct” culture meant that the “crossing the line” ceremony was much tamer than in years past. There would be no naked romp around the flight deck.

I was pissed and refused to participate. My official reason for being a party pooper was that I was opposed to the harassing nature of the ceremony. Secretly, I was furious that the modern navy was no longer the homoerotic playground it had once been. I felt deprived.

Off the coast of Somalia, I received an interesting handwritten note mixed in with the stack of letters from back home. It was a yellow piece of paper with cryptic poor handwriting in pencil. It began, “Dear sir, you don’t know me, but I am a ‘friend’ of Dana Copeland.”

On this cruise, “friend of Dana” was the same thing as the old “friend of Dorothy.” The Marine was on the USS
Cleveland
, one of the four ships in our little armada. It would be tricky, but I was determined to meet him. Who knew? Maybe he was cute. Maybe we’d hit it off. Maybe he’d become the love of my life.

I caught a flight over to the
Cleveland
, which I had been meaning to do anyway. As the air defense officer, I had to check the ship out for air defense missile positions. I decided to combine business with a little bit of pleasure. After all, I had legitimate reasons for being there. Still, it would be considered strange for an officer to ask about a lance corporal in another unit, so I made up some story about knowing some friends of the guy’s friends back in Oceanside who had asked about him because he hadn’t written.

His platoon commander got him for me. Well, he didn’t turn out to be the love of my life, but I happily chatted with this “friend of Dana” for a short while. He told me that he didn’t know any other “friends of Dana” on the boat and that he was very lonely for that kind of companionship. I told him that there were lots of us “friends of Dana” on the
Tripoli
and I gave him the names of some of the guys he could look up at the next port call.

We left Somalia and sailed into the Persian Gulf. We had to go through the Straits of Hormuz, a very narrow water passage between Oman and Iran. I put my missile gunners on the top of the ship with our Stinger missiles, and our ship steamed very close to the Iranian border.

Soon Iranian F-4 fighter jets, jets that we had sold them when the shah was still in power, were approaching us. I was more scared than I’d ever been. Any minute, one of those jets could fire on us and our ship would be at the bottom of the gulf before I could get a missile off. The jets just kept circling overhead like bees, but they never stung.

We pulled into the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich sheikdom that is one of the most America-friendly countries in the region. If ever I was in need of releasing some pressure, now was the time. I think we all felt that way. There was a seamen’s club near the port, and some other officers and I got shit-faced drunk by a pool where hundreds of Marines and sailors temporarily put their fears aside, let off some steam, and just generally had a rip-roaring time.

After a night of drinking liquor, a lieutenant I had just met looked at me and exclaimed “Admit it, Merritt, you’re a homosexual!” He laughed and said he didn’t care, but to him it was obvious. I was gay. He did seem cosmopolitan enough not to care, but the other lieutenants gathered around our table didn’t know how to take it.

Despite being very drunk, I turned the whole thing into a joke and said, “Man, you’re just jealous because I think Lieutenant O’Reilly’s cuter than you are.” That seemed to lighten the mood somewhat, although it was enough to keep O’Reilly a healthy distance from me for the rest of the cruise.

We did some exercises in Oman. Unlike the UAE, Oman does not have any oil. Its citizens are among the poorest in the region. We did ship-to-shore operations and I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday in the Omani desert with camels roaming freely around and openly stealing our food.

I must say, I was truly overwhelmed at the sight of thousands of Omanis lined up to get medical and dental treatment from our navy doctors and dentists. That would be their only treatment ever, the limited services we could provide during these operations. The poverty I saw was unlike any I had seen since my time in the Philippines.

Suddenly, the exercises were cut short. We were ordered back to the ship. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. Finally they gave us the grim news. In a surprise move, Saddam Hussein had moved 150,000 of his elite Republican Guard units into positions adjacent to the Kuwaiti border. An invasion was inevitable. Our situation had quickly gone from routine to serious and our little group of 2,000 Marines was to be a speed bump in his expected path on the way to Kuwait City.

Amidst the rapid repositioning to a wartime mode, we were hit with another piece of tragic news. In all the haste, a Marine had fallen overboard on the
USS Tripoli
and a search party would be looking for him.

We were shocked with how quickly everything had changed. We became convinced that many of us would die if things went as planned. How could they expect 2,000 of us to stop 150,000 of them? We went into Kuwait harbor and began preparing for orders to the Iraq-Kuwait border.

CNN came aboard and we watched the broadcasts on satellite television. To watch CNN, you’d think the entire Seventh Fleet was in Kuwait harbor already with an eager division of Marines. After two weeks of intense waiting, Saddam returned the elite forces to Baghdad. We would live! But because of the delay, we were screwed out of our Australia visit. Ah well.

Unfortunately, the Marine who had fallen overboard was never found. Corporal Steven Mosier, our Marine brother, had died in this round of Saddam’s aggression. Complaining about missing an Australia excursion seemed in bad form.

On the trip back to the United States, there wasn’t a whole lot for the Marines to do. I lifted weights twice a day and tanned every afternoon on the flight deck along with most of the Marines. The sailors were responsible for running the ship; we just had to sit there and not break anything. Not breaking things is difficult for Marines, but we managed.

On our last night in Singapore, while waiting for the bus back to the boat, I overheard half a phone conversation. It was obvious the Marine was gay. Not that I was surprised. Staff Sergeant Powell was one of the most effeminate men I’d ever met, in or out of the Marine Corps. I hadn’t had a chance to ask him, but now that I’d heard this conversation, my strong suspicions were confirmed.

Powell and I met every night at the top of the ship at 8:00 p.m., under the cover of darkness and out of the sight of anyone else. He insinuated that although he had a boyfriend back in the U.S., it would be okay if we had sex. Even after five months at sea, I wasn’t interested. But I would have liked to meet and chat about gay stuff, so starved was I for gay companionship. So we met and talked about his boyfriend and what life would be like when the ship got back in a month.

If only I knew! I would probably have stayed on the boat.

Powell also let me know that a few of the Marines thought I was gay.

“Why?” I asked, shocked. It seemed that from my earliest memories, no matter how I tried to disguise what I was, people were always seeing through me. I had kept to myself for most of the cruise, working out twice a day and reading a lot of books and writing a lot of letters.

“Well,” he said, hesitantly, “you…they say you always time your workouts when they are in the gym and that you lie out in the sun when they go out there.” He named the specific Marines.

“Fuck them!” I exclaimed. “
They
are always in the gym when I’m there. And
those two
are always sitting there in UDT shorts, with their legs spread and their balls hanging out.”

I had to laugh at that. I’m sure that I had stared. How could I not? Two Marines wearing tight, short shorts and black combat boots, with their scrotums hanging out, openly displaying their genitalia to each other and everyone else including me, working out together. It was the beginning of a porno movie for sure. Of course they knew I was gay. Of course my eyes were glued to their performance. That’s exactly the effect they were hoping for.

I read a lot of history books. Churchill’s voluminous
History of the English-Speaking People.
I had a lot of time to think about my own beliefs and why I held them. Even though I had been expelled from Bob Jones and had come out of the closet, I was still a fairly conservative Republican. But after seeing all the poverty around the world, like in the Philippines and Oman, and thinking about the way our corporations had entered the Middle East and purchased oil from a small number of sheiks without any regard to that society in general, I seriously reevaluated my opinions. It started a chain reaction of thoughts inside my head.

The world was a big place. It didn’t fit into the narrow constraints that I had been taught it fit into. It seemed to me that what was defining conservatism were fixed and dogmatic ideas about the way the world worked. The older, wiser, and more experienced I became, I realized the world didn’t work that way.

In October 1994, I decided to become a Democrat.

Great timing! A month later, the Democrats lost control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in half a century. I had switched sides just in time for defeat.

This was devastating news for us “friends of Dana.” What this meant was that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” would be the law at least until 1997 and probably beyond. We were distressed, to say the least. My gay friends on the ships and I felt like, here we were, halfway around the world in a virtual combat zone, willing to die for this country that hated us so much it didn’t even want to acknowledge us, didn’t want our service.

Fuck them
, was all I could think of. It was something my mind was starting to exclaim more and more. Who “they” were, I didn’t really know for sure, but I hated them and wanted to get back at them for rejecting me and my friends. The fundamentalists, the Republicans, the powers in the military that had wanted “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Fuck all of them.

On the way back to San Diego, we stopped in Pearl Harbor for one night. I managed to find the gay bars by following a lone Marine around Honolulu. Sure enough, he led me right into Hula’s, an indoor-outdoor gay bar on Waikiki. I didn’t hook up with the Marine, but was happy to find a sailor for my one night in port.