Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (35 page)

Military generals spend a lot of time with each other. As if dealing with a bunch of egomaniacal active-duty generals wasn’t bad enough, a disproportionately high number of generals retire to Southern California near the bases. They enjoy the golf courses and club, use the hospitals and exchanges, and occasionally stop by their old offices for visits. One of the sadder functions of being the aide was attending funerals for retired generals.

One general died relatively young, however. I accompanied General McCorkle to the funeral at the recruit base in San Diego for a general who had died of a rare disease around the age of sixty.

Another retired general delivered the eulogy. “It’s a shame that our dear departed brother had Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, and not…and not that
politically correct disease that gets all the attention!
”

With all due respect, fuck you, general.
This asshole was using the funeral of his friend to make an antigay, anti-AIDS statement. A disease was a disease. Never mind that, in the first six years of the AIDS epidemic, Reagan had failed to call the disease by name even one time in public. Never mind that thousands became infected before the federal government spent one penny on research or services.

What a fucking asshole
, I thought.
What the hell is “Lou Gehrig’s disease” anyway?

Just like my family, the Marine Corps had its share of sex scandals long before I came along. Two of them happened to be the year I worked for the general and coincidentally both involved lieutenant colonels and homosexuality, or at least allegations of homosexuality.

A male subordinate, a very youthful handsome blond lieutenant, accused his superior, a lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton, of sexual harassment. Another lieutenant colonel had used his military computer to solicit sex with men online.

“Hey, Rich,” said General McCorkle from the backseat of the official sedan, “did this lieutenant colonel send you an e-mail?” He was reading about the sex scandal in the press clippings from the Pentagon.

Why the hell had he asked me that?
Even the driver looked at me, puzzled.

“I don’t know, General, I haven’t checked my e-mails today.” That was all I could think of to say. Hopefully I had deflected his sarcasm with my own.

“Heh-heh,” he muttered. “With that piece-of-shit server we got, you’ll probably never get it.”

I laughed with relief. The coincidental comment had led to nowhere.

General McCorkle’s career wasn’t exactly scandal-free. He made an inappropriate comment to a female admiral at the Miramar Officer’s club. In the car, I told him that was a huge mistake.

He replied, “I know. Don’t let me do that again.”

General McCorkle liked to visit his seven subordinate unit commanders. The problem for me was that they were scattered all over Southern California and Yuma. The general loved to fly the helicopters as he had flown them for almost three decades. I sat in the back like a piece of cargo as we went from base to base.

We had a meeting in Yuma, and the Santa Ana winds blowing across the desert like a hurricane across the Caribbean didn’t stop us. We took one of the larger aircraft, the CH-53. At one point in the middle of the desert mountains, a strong wind knocked the helicopter across the sky like a Frisbee. The aircraft slid sideways and began to tilt dangerously to the right, which is not a good position for a helicopter.

I panicked for about ten seconds. My pulse shot over two hundred, I almost wet my pants and I wanted to scream, but didn’t.
This is it! We really are about to die.

Suddenly, a sense of calm and peace washed over me like I’d never known.
There is nothing I can do to stop this helicopter from crashing. I’m going to die. It’s not going to hurt. I’ve lived a good life and had a great time. I will be missed and I’m leaving a lot of love behind.
I thought about Brandon and the only painful feeling I had was how much I’d miss him and my friends. But there was nothing I could do about that now. I closed my eyes for a second, then decided that no, my last view was going to be spectacular and like no other. I found a spot by the little window. As the aircraft continued its downward glide, I waited for death.

As suddenly as the wind had hit us, knocking us downward, the CH-53 seemed to steady itself and resume its forward journey. When I realized I wasn’t going to die, then I really did have to piss, but decided to hold it.

“Were you scared back there in that canyon?” asked General McCorkle when we landed in Yuma.

I had to sound tough. “No, general, I knew you had it all under control.”

“Then you’re a goddamned fool,” he said with genuine terror. “There ain’t no reason in the world we should be alive right now. And I surived fifteen hundred combat missions in Vietnam!”

Nice.

One of the problems with being the aide was that I quickly became the most recognizable captain in the Third Marine Aircraft Wing. I was always within an arm’s reach of the general and because Marines were always looking at the general, they saw me in the vicinity. Everywhere we went, people sought me out for access to the general. Marines I didn’t recognize, most of them high ranking, spoke to me like we were friends.

One of the colonels we visited had something he wanted to show General McCorkle. I took my usual position nearby, but out of the way.

“Captain Merritt, if you’ll excuse us,” the Colonel said to me.

I watched as the Colonel grabbed a video tape to put in a VHS player. He had something on tape he had to show the general.
Without me!
I freaked out. No one ever dismissed a general’s aide, except the general! Everyone knew that. The only reason I could think of that this colonel was telling me to leave was because someone in his command had given him a tape of me doing porn! And that he had recognized me. I was an emotional wreck, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Nothing came of it, but the fear remained. What had he been so eager to show the general without me in the room? Odds are that it was nothing at all relevant to me, but even today, I wonder.

The Marine Corps’ new tilt-rotor aircraft crashed on a test flight killing the test pilots and evaluators. I asked General McCorkle what he thought about the Osprey.

“The Osprey is the future of Marine Corps aviation. And the future of Marine Corps aviation is the future of the Marine Corps.” Wow, I thought. His position is set in stone.

Several years later, after I was out of the Marines and he had been promoted to the rank of three-star general and was in charge of all Marine Corps aviation, an Osprey crashed in the Arizona desert, killing nineteen Marines.

Sixty Minutes
did a segment about how pilots had been told to lie on reports about the safety of the Osprey or congress might cut off funding.
Sixty Minutes
left viewers with the clear implication that Lieutenant General Fred McCorkle had told or insinuated to subordinate commanders that they were to falsify these mishap reports.

The investigation cleared General McCorkle of any wrong-doing.

“I
was at Ripple’s last Sunday,” Brandon said, referring to the oceanfront gay bar in Long Beach. “And this really hot guy was hitting on me. What would you have done if I’d gone home with him?”

I had been in Korea on a trip with General McCorkle. Brandon and I were apart for over three weeks, the longest we had been separated since our relationship began a year earlier. I think almost every time lovers spend a length of time away from each other there’s an uneasy feeling. A feeling of, “What’s he doing without me?”

Logic told me it was bound to happen. Brandon was a handsome guy with a lot going for him. I was proud people found him attractive, yet he belonged to me. The fact that this “very hot guy,” had made enough of an impact on Brandon for him to bring up the incident, brought up an immediate sexual jealousy in me.

“I’d leave you,” I said angrily. The severity in the tone of my reply left a hole in the conversation. Silence.

“Yeah, Brandon,” I said finally. “Why do you ask? Did you do it?”

He told me he hadn’t gone home with the guy. But the mere fact that we were having this discussion brought up the issue of what type of relationship we had. And where it was heading.

“I just don’t want us to be dishonest with each other,” he said. “Would you have given me permission if I had asked in advance?”

My duplicity hit me full force. I know that I was constantly coming in contact with men who aroused my sexual interest, but the thought of someone having sex with Brandon infuriated me. I wanted his love and desire for me to stay strong, exclusive and unchanging, even if mine grew to include others. “Let me think about it,” was all I could say.

I thought about it. Maybe Brandon had a point. I was very confident in the fact that he loved me very deeply. If he went to bed with another guy, it would be just…just
sex
, wouldn’t it? No falling in love with someone else or chance of him leaving me. Maybe we should have sex with other people. To me, that’s what he seemed to be suggesting.

Although I kept my mind on the “love and sex” issue, it was a very busy week on base. General McCorkle was entertaining about a dozen generals in a conference at El Toro, including the Marine Corps’ only female general, and a bigwig three-star from Hawaii.

Late one night after a long day of conferences, meetings, social events and dinners, it fell to the protocol staff, of which I as the aide was a part, to get the three-star and his wife back to Camp Pendleton from El Toro. I looked at the list and saw that the driver assigned to this task was a lance corporal named Jessie Kent, a young, handsome, well-built Marine stationed at Tustin. Through Marine gossip, I had heard that Jessie was gay. I had met him before, but only as my being a captain and him being a lance corporal, a vast rank difference in the Marines. Our interaction had been very formal. Naturally, though, I wanted to check the rumors out.

Fate stepped in. “I’m worried that Lance Corporal Kent won’t know the way to get the lieutenant general back,” the protocol officer told me.

“I’ll go with him,” I volunteered, keeping down any eagerness that might creep into my voice. “I know where the VIP quarters are at Camp Pendleton.” My calculations told me that it would be after midnight before we’d return home, but by now I was burning with curiosity. I needed to find out if this young driver was gay.

I needed to know if he was gay, in part, because I was always looking for members to add to my growing family of gay and lesbian military people. I had been expelled from Bob Jones, my own family was distant, and the Marines would discharge me if they knew I was gay or imprison me if they found out about the porn. All that protected me from an avalanche of isolation was Brandon and our friends. Considering the strength and power of the loneliness I felt, there weren’t enough gays or lesbians in the military—or in the world—to numb the fears I had that I would be cast aside again. So I was always looking for more friends.

No doubt, there was a bond that only gay military people shared. It made me feel good about myself to help others who had been where I was just a couple of years earlier: just coming out, scared and alone. I could guide and mentor them. Maybe Jessie was that way.

So there was a good motive behind my quest to find out this guy’s sexuality. But as always seems to be the case with me—and maybe it’s this way with most people—I also had motives that weren’t so good. The problem is, I let myself into this situation because I kept telling myself that only the good motives were in play here. I convinced myself that I had no ulterior reason for finding out whether Jessie was gay—I was just trying to help. What a crock of shit that idea is!
I was just trying to help.

I was trying to get in this man’s pants. But just as I had denied to myself for so many years that I was gay, now I was denying that I wanted to cheat on my wonderful husband. I was utilizing denial at its fullest potency.

The problem was that I had built my relationship with Brandon the only way I knew how—on the basis of fundamentalist Christian dogma. I loved Brandon and he loved me. Therefore, I would never look at another guy again with lust in my eyes or in my heart. Unfortunately, I
did
lust after other guys. That led me to the mistaken assumption that I might not really love Brandon after all. What if I had just been using him this past year and a half to make me feel good about myself? What if I had made a mistake with Brandon but had been too stubborn to admit it, like when I chose to major in accounting and didn’t change majors even after I realized that accounting was the worst major in the world for me? What if I just didn’t know what love was, and I just plain got it wrong with Brandon?

Maybe I should just jam a pencil into my forehead and give myself a lobotomy. Maybe that would stop this downward spiral of stupid thoughts and emotions.

I had heard about open relationships, or about guys who cheated on their partners all the time for many years. Somehow those relationships “worked,” whatever “worked” meant. A relationship liked that seemed weird to me, so I told myself that’s not what I wanted.

In reality, an open relationship was
exactly
what I wanted. Looking back, I loved Brandon dearly. But I wanted to have sex with other guys occasionally. I just couldn’t admit that, because it was so antithetical to all I’d been taught about “marriage.” I equated “opening the relationship” with admitting I was a failure in love and that it would doom the relationship.

Rather than deal with all of these inner conflicts, I just denied they were there. I went back to my idea that I was just trying to find out if Jessie was gay so that we could bring him into the fold.

On the way to Camp Pendleton, the lieutenant general’s wife talked incessantly about nothing while complaining about everything, including the early rain that had hit southern California. A few miles from the base, she asked her husband, “Have you been sleeping the whole way?”

Without opening his eyes, he muttered, “How the hell can I sleep with you yakking away the whole time?” Jessie and I looked at each other, and by the faint glow of the dashboard lights, we could tell we were thinking same thing. Generals are viewed with godlike reverence in the Marines but, late at night after a busy day, they had the same family squabbles and issues that we all had. We were all alike. And the joke was on this general and his wife. They were being escorted around southern California by two homosexual Marines, two men who weren’t supposed to be good enough to be here. It was at that moment Jessie and I bonded. We had silently endured the lieutenant general’s wife’s chatter throughout the trip; now we snuck glances at each other as we suppressed our laughter.

When we had dropped off our VIPs, the mood in the car changed 180 degrees. We found the closest thing we could to a pop station on the radio. Yes, Jessie was gay and was as out as a young Marine could be, which wasn’t very out.

I called Brandon and told him that Bossy had been right, that we could add this young Marine to our list of gay military friends, a list that seemed to be growing exponentially.

“Well, don’t you have sex with him!” Brandon said. I convinced myself Brandon was saying one thing but what he really meant was the opposite, that what his comment in fact implied was that I could have sex with Jessie if I wanted to. It seems crazy now, but that’s what I thought. He had sounded as if he was joking, so that meant that he really didn’t care. If he had really not wanted us to have sex, he wouldn’t have mentioned it at all. That’s how I would have handled it if the roles had been reversed. The fact that he had put it out there meant he really didn’t care. Where I came from, if you felt really strongly that something might be bad, you never ever talked about it. Talking about something gives it validity. No one in my family talked about drugs or sex or anything like that. We were a good Southern family. By bringing it up, Brandon had indicated a willingness to talk about it, meaning it was negotiable. We’d work out the terms of the deal tomorrow.

So now I started seeing that going to bed with Jessie was in the cards for me. It seemed like he didn’t want to take the long drive back to his barracks at Tustin. As we got closer to El Toro, I suggested he stay at my apartment in Irvine. I hadn’t yet officially moved in with Brandon. I only had a one-bedroom, but I told him he was welcome to sleep on the sofa.

Of course when we arrived at my place, making up the couch seemed like a lot of trouble to go through. Why waste a big bed that would be half empty anyway. We both got naked and crawled in between the sheets. Of course there was much tossing and turning and very little sleep. After awhile our bodies were touching and there was that familiar heat. A heat that’s wonderful with someone you love, but which brings on a different excitement when it’s generated by someone new. Before long we were touching and stroking and kissing. We gave each other blow jobs and, eventually, we both came. By our commander in chief’s standards, we did not have “sex.” I could make every justification in the world that what Jessie and I had done really didn’t constitute sex. In my heart, though, I knew that I
did
have sexual relations with him.

I played it over in my head so many times that I somehow managed to convince myself that the encounter would be okay with Brandon.

The next night was Friday and I drove up to Brandon’s house for a quiet night alone together—the kind of nights that had grown to mean so much to me, especially at the end of such a rough week. Near the end of dinner, I told him what Jessie and I had done.

His reaction was immediate and severe. He was livid. He said our relationship was over and that he didn’t want to see me again. He stood up from the table, stormed off into the bedroom, and slammed the door. He wouldn’t let me speak to him.

I was confused. I truly thought that, when he brought up the fact that a hot guy had been coming on to him, he was the one that was looking for our relationship to become more “open.”

Now I realized that I had misread him. I took full responsibility. I had ruined everything. I had been a fool. In the heat of the moment I had rationalized my way into doing something I wanted to do, and, “fuck the consequences.” Now I was fucked.

Eventually, Brandon forgave me, but I never felt completely forgiven. I would always be the one who had cheated in our relationship. And as much sorrow as I felt that night for hurting Brandon—I realized a door had been opened. The real lesson I learned was that, if I was ever going to have sex with another guy, I’d have to keep it a secret from Brandon. I probably knew that it would happen again. What had happened with Jessie had been too exciting and it had made me feel desired again, something I was feeling less and less with Brandon.

As long as I don’t fall in love with another guy, it’s okay
, I felt.
I love only Brandon.
But I wasn’t getting all I needed. I couldn’t admit that. I didn’t want to take a chance on having to be alone ever again. I’d just have to get my thrills in secret.

The November election was especially heated in Orange County. Bob Dornan, the right-wing conservative Republican and notoriously homophobic—to a point of being absurd—congressman from the northern part of the county had lost to a political neophyte, Loretta Sanchez, by less than a thousand votes. Sanchez was the first politician I had ever given money to.

Dornan fought the results, vowing a recount and a lawsuit, threats he carried out. His bombastic style had won him few friends, lost him some old ones, and, when all was said and done he looked like an idiot, even to Republicans.

“Rich, Bob Dornan wants to fly a jet with the training squadron on Monday,” the staff secretary informed me.

“Well, that’s special,” I said. “And I want to fly on the shuttle to the moon.”

“No, you need to tell the general that this thing has been okayed by the Pentagon. Dornan will be here Monday afternoon.”

Fuck!
I was on the growing list of people who hated Dornan with a passion. And now I was going to have to kiss his ass.

In a movie about the life of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, there’s a scene I’ll never forget. When Wallace was at the peak of his racism in the Southern battles against integration, he was at his kitchen table eating alone with only his servant present. He was ranting aloud, just to hear himself talk, about the “nigras” and their inferiority. The camera focuses on the elderly black servant in the background. Wallace has his back to the servant. The servant reaches behind his back and grabs a huge, sharp knife from the kitchen countertop. The epic battle that is taking place in the servant’s mind is evident on his face. Tears begin to stream down his face. He takes a step toward Governor Wallace. He raises the knife and appears certain to stab the neck of his master.

Just as suddenly as it all began, the servant drops his hand and returns the knife to its original position on the countertop. Wallace continues his rant, oblivious to how close he just was to death.