Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (33 page)

Philip and I stopped talking. A few weeks later he called. “Let’s get together for dinner,” he suggested.

I agreed to have a meal with him.

We went to dinner and he basically said that he had forgiven me for what I had done to him.

I smiled and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” I didn’t ask for his forgiveness. I didn’t particularly care for it or want it, but if he wanted to forgive me that was okay by me. But he kept saying, “You put me in danger by doing this.” He was acting like my mother. “How could you do this to me?”

“This isn’t about you, Philip,” I said. “How do you think I feel? I could go to jail.”

I think in Philip’s mind, his forgiving me had patched things up. But our relationship was never the same after he blew up at me a few weeks earlier. Philip always had this Svengali-like effect on me. He manipulated me. I don’t completely blame him—I let him do that. When he threw that melodramatic fit over my choice to appear in porn films, I felt free of his control. And it felt great! We stayed in touch a little bit, but not very much. I felt that our friendship had reached its end, something rare for me. After my expulsion from Bob Jones, I clung to every friendship I had, fearful of the intense and excruciating pain of loneliness. But now I sensed that my time with Philip had run its course. Besides, at this point Brandon was the center of my life.

You know how it is at the beginning of a relationship. You’re so into each other that the rest of the world sort of disappears. Your life begins to revolve around what you and your partner are going to do together, whether you’ll go to dinner and a movie or sit at home or maybe meet other friends out. Or have sex. Again and again. That’s how it was with Brandon and it was the first time I had anything like it and I was completely happy and content.

I was doing my job Monday through Friday and on the weekends I was staying with Brandon. For the first time in my life I understood what living for the weekends meant. Before him I dreaded the weekends because I was lonely. Now, every Friday at noon I would get so excited. I would sneak out early and drive up to Long Beach and spend the weekend with Brandon and Buster.

After I moved to my new apartment I was seeing my San Diego friends, including Philip, less and less. Which was fine with me. I had a lot of residual guilt about the porn and San Diego was where that aspect of my life had been initiated. Most of the people who knew I had done it lived there. More and more I was being recognized when I went out, or at least was paranoid enough so it seemed like I was recognized. I wanted to forget about it so I needed to get away from them.

Plus, San Diego was where my sexual history was. When Brandon and I would go out there, I would run into guys I had tricked with. Brandon would say, “Not another one.” Finally he asked, “How many guys
have
you slept with?” I didn’t want that, so I tried to avoid going out in San Diego.

Spending the weekends with Brandon, meeting his friends, and hanging out in Long Beach, LA or Orange County is what I needed to do at this point.

One spring afternoon, Brandon and I went to the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach. After a quick scan we spotted one of the Marines I had unsuccessfully dated briefly before my porn career. Kenneth, whose father was a very homophobic republican politician, approached us. “Oh wow,” he said, “there’s
two
Marine officers at this gay bar.”

“Really,” I replied curiously, scanning again “who’s the other one?” I didn’t recognize anyone. Kenneth pointed out a very attractive, well-built, guy wearing a baseball cap and a white T-shirt. He walked us over and introduced us. This was when I met Bossy. When you first meet someone, you can never be sure what role that person will play in your life. Most of the time, not a very big role. However, Bossy was different. Right away, I expected that knowing Bossy would change my life forever. Little did I know how true that would become. We started chatting and hit it off immediately.

Bossy had just moved to the area and we soon became good friends. It was wonderful to have a connection with another gay Marine officer who didn’t know about my porn past, although within a short period, I would share this with him. My relationship with Philip was virtually non-existent now, so meeting Bossy allowed me to reconnect with the gay military community that meant so much to me.

Bossy and I would e-mail each other at work through the Local Area Network, or “LAN,” the military’s email system. I was so paranoid. The policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” actually had a third part called “Don’t pursue” but somehow the military overlooked that part. They snooped, and they pursued. I shared a computer with a few other people and everyone could see easily trace the history of what had been done on the computer.

I was a captain and one afternoon another captain asked, “Why are you e-mailing a second lieutenant at El Toro? That’s kind of odd.” It really was—that’s just not the way military relationships are structured. On a social level, you’re supposed to only associate within your rank. Well, maybe one rank up or one rank down, because people get promoted and stay friends. But for a captain and a second lieutenant to be communicating, that was unusual.

But Bossy and I would use a code for everything. Philip and I had done the same thing. We developed this code-speak. For example, we had to be really careful about gender. We always refered to guys as “she.” It got to be complicated sometimes because if one guy broke up with another guy, it didn’t work out because we would have been saying things like, “Well, she broke up with him, to go out with her.” We had to stay on our toes with this code stuff.

Not all of our correspondence was romance gossip. In one of his e-mails Bossy told me that he had been asked to go interview for the position as the El Toro base general’s aide-de-camp, which is something like a personal assistant. Every general gets one.

In another correspondence Bossy suggested that I take a look at the back page of the
Navy Times
, which was looking for writers because the military guy who wrote the regular op-ed column was retiring. “Who knows?” he wrote encouragingly, “You’re a good writer—you could put a positive spin on the column.” I had to admit it made sense—and I was serious about doing some writing. This could be an opportunity, so I took Bossy’s suggestion, wrote a couple of eight-hundred-word columns, and submitted them.

A few months later, Bossy introduced me to a former Marine he had recently met, named Tim Carter. Tim was co-chair of an organization called the Service Members Legal Defense Network, SLDN. SLDN provided legal counsel to military people facing problems under “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Any day I was supposed to find out the results of the funded law program. This was a pattern I’d started to notice—every year it seemed I was waiting on the results of some type of selection program for the Corps. Talk about external validation! The Corps provides ample opportunities for that—very detailed performance evaluations, awards, promotions, officer retention boards, and, if all those weren’t enough, I had to go for extras and apply for this legal officer selection program. The anticipation built daily—was I good enough for them? I had to be.

But the funded law program was a very good deal, or so I thought. The USMC would pay for law school
and
pay my salary as a captain while I attended classes. All I would owe them would be six years as a judge advocate after law school. That was all—a total of nine more years in the Corps.
Hell
, I thought,
I could gut that out.

It’s hard for me to fathom it now, but I had grown so accustomed to being a gay Marine that it didn’t frighten me that I would be committing myself to nine more years of hiding my sexuality. After all, I was used to it. What’s even more impossible for me to comprehend is how I dealt with the porn. I somehow managed to shove that fear into a corner of my mind and convince myself that it would never come to light, never be a problem—even if I was to spend nine more years in the Corps.

So that was my plan. Then, as usual my apple cart got turned over. My battalion commander dropped a bombshell—“Captain Merritt, you’re going to be the battalion’s nominee to be the aide for the new commanding general.” This was the same kind of nomination that Bossy had received, only he was being considered as an aide for the other general at El Toro. Being a general’s aide was not part of my plan at all.

“Um…sir,” I stammered. “I’m…going to law school…”

“I know,” he said, “we’re going to lose you anyway, so I figure it’s the smartest thing for the battalion to do since we’re under-manned as it is. Besides,” he added, “these Air Wing generals always want a pilot to be their aide so he can fly them anywhere the general wants to go.”

So the battalion commander’s strategy was to send me because there was almost no chance that the general would pick me. This strategy made me uneasy. I’d been in the Corps long enough to know that a general gets what a general wants. If the new general wanted me, and I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t, he’d get me, law program or no law program.

At the headquarters of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, the chief of staff screened the six nominees from the various air groups and air support groups in Third MAW.

“A general is looking for an aide who will someday be an air-group commander, or in your case, an air-control group commander,” said the chief. “Remember that when you interview.” He was visibly disturbed that I was in the running for the funded law program and not a perfect candidate for the aide position. “You let me know as soon as those board results come out,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bossy informed me that he had just been selected to be the aide for General Fratarangelo. How ironic it would be, we laughed, for both of the generals at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro to have gay men as their personal hand-selected aide-de-camp? But that was just a joke. It wasn’t going to happen, I assured myself, because I would soon be packing my bags for law school.

I didn’t get the funded law program.

The board results came out a few days after my interview with the chief, and I was only the first alternate. Deep down, I knew what had happened. My DUI, which was a part of my permanent record at Headquarters Marine Corps, had caught up with me and was preventing me from achieving what I wanted. But I didn’t want to admit it, so, like a jilted lover, I called HQMC and demanded an explanation. I had been accepted to law school at a University of California law school in San Francisco. No one who had been accepted to the program had been admitted to a law school nearly as highly ranked as mine.

“You know, Captain Merritt,” the major at HQMC said, “the program requires that you be admitted to a state law school.”

Didn’t he know? Hastings Law School
is
a state school! I was totally exasperated. To think I might have been shafted from the program because some idiot in Washington, DC, didn’t know that Hastings was part of the University of California system, a fact I had made very clear in my application. “Hastings
is
a state school…sir,” I retorted testily.

“Really?” the major said. “Then why is it so friggin’ expensive? I mean, come on, Captain, most of the guys who got the program are costing the Corps about four thousand dollars a year…Hastings is over ten thousand dollars a year. That’s a lot for a state school.”

Flabbergasted, I scanned the list. “Yeah, and look where they’re going…the University of Toledo Law School, for Christ’s sake!” My comments and tone may have crossed the line with this superior officer, I realized. I didn’t care. I was livid. How dare they reject me!

“The Marine Corps doesn’t need Stanford or Harvard Law grads,” the major said. “The University of Toledo is just fine.”

The “lowest bidder” concept was even a part of the funded law program.

I held out faint hope that someone would decline and, as the first alternate, I would slide in. I called everyone on the list. But it seemed pretty hopeless. My little personal investigation uncovered a minor scandal involving double-dealing and political favors that were against regulations, but to no avail. No one would listen. As one of the officers said to me, “Who’s going to turn down a deal like this?”

My dreams of funded law school now crushed; I wondered what I should do. I couldn’t remain stuck in this obscure battalion on top of this desolate hill in the middle of nowhere. My building was in what was called the “32 Area” of the base—even other Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton had never heard of it! I had to get out of there. While I had been ecstatic to transfer here three-and-a-half years earlier, I now felt as if I was wasting away in no-man’s-land. As much as I enjoyed working with the Marines I had gotten to know over the years, my restlessness was growing and growing. I wanted more. More
what
, I didn’t have a clue.

The new general would be arriving from North Carolina any day now and would be interviewing the various nominees to be his aide. His name was Fred McCorkle. Maybe I should give that my best shot. Perhaps if I had a successful year as his aide, he could get me into the program. Every officer in the Corps hated the fact that officers who had been generals’ aides went to the head of the line for just about everything. The wheels began spinning in my brain.
If I could pull this off, I could have my way.

I was in the running now. Now I wanted the position—it was a way out of Camp Pendleton. The chief scheduled my interview with the general. “He’s got a very dry sense of humor,” he warned me. “Don’t let that put you off.”

The general’s suite was on the second floor of Third MAW headquarters building in the back corner. The building was at the edge of the flight line, and the noise from the F/A-18 jets landing and taking off was thunderous. Most of the jets had moved to Miramar in San Diego at this point as El Toro was closing soon, but some remained to remind everyone that for a few more years, at least, El Toro was still a player on the world stage in the universal battle for freedom.

I had done some research on the man I might be spending the next year of my life with. Every aviator is given a “call sign,” or a nickname—think of
Top Gun
’s “Maverick,” “Goose,” and “Iceman.” General McCorkle’s call sign was “Assassin.”