Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (38 page)

“What do you mean?” asked Brandon.

“The original screenplay really showed how hateful and ugly homophobia can be. But they cut those parts to make it more palatable to a wider audience.”

Considering I was a poor kid from Piedmont, South Carolina, I was beginning to feel pretty A-list myself.

General McCorkle kept in touch with me as much as his schedule would allow. He called from his car the day my resignation appeared on the message board.

“Rich!” he exclaimed, “what the fuck are you thinking? You won’t have nearly as much fun being a lawyer as you will a Marine.”

As calmly as I could, I told him that I had made the decision that I felt was best for both the Corps and me. He wished me the best with my plans and added, “Hey, I’m gonna invite you and Burton and Monroe over to have dinner with Kathy and me next month.”

Shit.
Craig Burton had been General McCorkle’s aide before me, and Trent Monroe was my replacement. Both of them had wives. My singleness would stick out like a sore thumb.

While I was tired of the whole “stunt babe” routine, a dinner at a general’s was exceptional. Besides, this might be fun. Having just met Hedy, I came up with an idea. Who better to play the role of my date than an actress? Besides, her brother was a Marine pilot and he would be impressed that his sister had dined with the top aviation general on the West Coast. Just as with Tami four years earlier, Gary would be my source for a “stunt babe.”

Hedy played the role wonderfully. Both the general and Kathy adored her and, I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe one of the wives might be jealous. Probably just my ego. The general served us huge, juicy steaks. He set a plate down in front of Hedy. I saw the look of horror cross her face. I knew instantly what was wrong.

“I’m a vegetarian!” she whispered.
Goddammit!
Why hadn’t I thought of this? Hollywood and El Toro might be less than a hundred miles apart, but they were light years removed when it came to things like eating meat.

Hedy ate almost every bite of her steak and pretended to enjoy it. I wish I could have given her an Academy Award. The following day, General McCorkle e-mailed me. “Marry her!” he demanded.

Once again, I was playing a role, using my friends, and doing it wonderfully well.

“C
all me when you get a chance. I’ve got some very interesting news,” Melanie’s e-mail said. “It’s about Bobby.”

“Bobby” was Robert “Bob” Jones IV. Melanie kept me informed about our old classmates, often against my will. I was genuinely interested in news about Bobby, however, the type of interest one can only have in the affairs of an old rival.

“How did you find this out?”

She laughed. “Oh, you’re gonna love this. I was at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport when I saw Bob the Third and Beneth.”

“You’ve just described my nightmare scenario,” I said. “Most people worry about keeping up with the Joneses—I worry about running into them at the airport.”

“I spoke to Mrs. Jones,” she said, “while she waited on Dr. Bob to get their luggage. I asked for Bobby’s phone number.”

“I bet she loved that…married women aren’t supposed to call men, remember?”

“Especially a married woman who’s also been divorced and is wearing shorts in public,” Melanie reminded me.

“You vixen!” I hissed. “Did she give it to you?”

“Only after I practically demanded it. Anyway, the big news is, apparently he’s leaving the university to write for some magazine in Washington, DC.”

After his expulsion and fall from grace, Bobby had spent two years with relatives in Indiana. After graduating from high school there, however, he returned to Bob Jones University as a student in journalism. This was about the time I was expelled, though, and we hadn’t resumed our old rivalry/friendship. There was an uproar among the fundamentalists when he went to Notre Dame to pursue a PhD in journalism. Despite the school’s anti-Catholic views, Dr. Bob Jones III publicly supported his son’s choice.

This was even bigger news. “I was in Greenville a few years ago and bumped into our old high school classmate Mary Nester,” I said. “She told me Bobby was going to take over for his dad and become president of the university. I told Mary I thought Bobby would have had higher aspirations than that. She said ‘Hmmpf!’ spun around, and walked away. Just like that! She actually said ‘Hmmpf!’”

So Bobby wasn’t going to be taking over the school after all. “I bet that cadre of Bob the Third’s underlings is happy about this,” I said, recalling the personalities I hadn’t dealt with in years.

“I wonder why they never liked him,” mused Melanie.

“He’s too independent,” I said, “and this just proves it. Not that he cares what I think, but I’m very proud of him for doing this.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” Melanie teased. “You want his e-mail address?”

She told me his e-mail address. “I could have guessed that!” I said, laughing over the secret name Bobby had used when we were younger.

Brandon had recently shown me how to use the Internet and had set me up with an AOL screen name. I programmed Bobby’s screen name into my buddy list. The following evening, I saw that he was online.

Shit, what do I do? Do I “IM” him? What does he know about me?
My curiosity got the best of me. I clicked on his screen name and sent him a message identifying myself, coyly asking if him if he remembered me. Within seconds, he responded. “Of course I remember who you are!”

Our “instant message” session was on.

As it was late on the East Coast, we signed off. If we were going to resume a friendship, I had to be completely honest with him. I sent him a long e-mail coming out to him and telling him about Brandon. The next evening, I had a response.

“Although I can’t say that I condone homosexuality, I still think it’s great that you have a partner,” he wrote.

Wow, no wonder the administrators didn’t want him around
, I thought.
Too bad he’s not taking over the school from his dad
. While most gays and lesbians might be offended by Bobby’s comment about not approving of homosexuality, his attitude was light years ahead of most fundamentalists’.

“I always thought it was duplicitous for fundamentalists to condemn gays for being promiscuous while at the same time denying them marriage, the one institution designed to promote monogamy,” he wrote.

You really have left the school, haven’t you?
I couldn’t believe I was reading this from someone named Bob—or even Rob—Jones.

“I think every Christian should have at least one gay or lesbian friend,” Rob’s e-mail continued. “Neither group is going away and the country would be better off if they just got along.”

“I’ve said the same thing to some gay friends recently,” I responded.

And I thought I’d never agree with a Bob Jones about anything again!

I had been writing my “Buster Pittman” column in the
Navy Times
, waiting anxiously for the opportunity to write a pro-gay piece. I was waiting for the issue of gays-in-the-military to pop up in the news so I would have a “hook” for getting the story into print. Even though my editors at the
Navy Times
protected my identity, I was fearful that if I wrote a pro-gay piece out of the blue, they might suspect I was gay, especially since my primary editor was a Bob Jones University graduate.

In the year I had been writing the column, nothing arose that would prompt a pro-gays-in-the-military piece. I was beginning to worry that I would get out of the Marines before I had a chance to write something.

Finally a retiring federal appeals court judge gave a speech where he blasted the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” law. It was almost unheard of for a judge to comment on a pending hot topic issue, even a judge that was soon to retire. This story was a weak hook, but maybe it would work.

It did. On November 10, 1997, ironically the same day Marines celebrate the birthday of the Corps, my op-ed piece “Time to Change the Rules on Gays” appeared in the Back Talk section of the
Navy Times
and its Marine Corps Edition. It was reprinted whole or in segments in gay and lesbian newspapers and magazines all over the country. As far as anyone knew, however, the author was Buster Pittman. Buster, of course, was an overweight Jack Russell terrier.

Soon afterward, I went to an SLDN fund-raiser in San Diego, where I met the co-executive director, Mary. Mary had also been an air defense missile battery commander in the army, the same job I presently held in the Marines.

“So that was you who wrote that piece,” she said. “We were wondering who had written that.”

I was hasty in using the retiring justice’s speech as my “hook.” The issue of gays in the military was about to explode.

A chief petty officer in the Navy stationed in Hawaii, Timothy McVeigh, (no relation to the Oklahoma City bomber, as every news article was careful to point out) was being discharged for being gay. Kicking a homosexual out of the military is commonplace; what made McVeigh’s story so unique, however, was the high-tech way the Navy caught him. Actually, the Navy found out he was gay by a very low-tech method—by lying. Naval investigators lied to a company to find out his name. But the company they lied to was a very new technology company—America Online.

The Timothy McVeigh story touched a nerve in the gay military community. If the Navy could lie to AOL to find out the identity of an AOL subscriber, we were all in danger.

While the Internet and the online services had revolutionized the entire business world, it had especially revolutionized the lives of people who wanted their private lives to remain just that—private, while at the same time putting them in touch with a much broader base of like-minded individuals. This applied to gay military people more than anyone else. Guys who would never think of going to a gay bar, to a bathhouse, or to anything remotely gay felt safe enough to venture into one of the thousands of “military m4m” chat rooms on any number of Internet sites. They could chat just enough to be fairly certain the person they were chatting with was also military (it’s very easy for a true military or former military person to tell a faker) and they could meet in the privacy of one of the guy’s homes.

Apparently the military was wising up to this. A navy investigator had called America Online and used false information to obtain the identity of an AOL user who had identified his marital status as “gay.” They used this information to discharge McVeigh just before he was eligible for his retirement pension. This news caused an uproar all over the country, not just in the military or in the gay community. People were outraged with the notion that their own privacy might be invaded next.

This also caught the attention of the
New York Times Magazine
. If gay people in the military had to be worried about what they typed into the Internet, what else did they have to worry about? Maybe “Don’t ask, don’t tell” wasn’t such a good deal after all. The magazine decided to run a story about what everyday life was like for gays and lesbians in the military. And it was at this time that SLDN put me in touch with Jennifer Egan who was investigating the story for the
New York Times
.

I was delighted to be part of any story that would expose the injustices of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” I threw myself into the project with zeal, venting all my pent-up frustrations, and involving everyone I could by introducing them to Jennifer. My main goal was to expose, to inform, to help.

Personally, I was infuriated with the way the military handled the Timothy McVeigh matter. I wrote a letter to the editor of the
Los Angeles Times
comparing the military’s treatment of the two Timothy McVeighs. Later, when my battalion commander was informing me that many suspected me of being the “R” in the
New York Times Magazine
, he also informed me that the group commander, his boss, had seen my letter to the editor of the
LA Times
and had been quite upset. By then, that letter would be the least of my worries.

For Jennifer’s second visit to San Diego, I planned a smaller dinner than the initial one with twelve people. This time I included my friends Jim and Bossy, who had been unavailable before. Bossy entertained Jennifer, but she really connected with Jim, the former fighter pilot who had been one of Gary’s instructors.

“I sense a lot of sadness in him,” Jennifer said. “He cares deeply for people, yet the military’s treatment isolated him from his fellow pilots, the ones he’d really like to be close to.”

“That’s one thing Jim and I have in common,” I said. “We want to get close to people, but being gay makes us feel different to begin with, and the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ law just reinforces it. Some people don’t mind being an island. But not us.”

The other reason for Jim’s sadness was that he and John had just ended their relationship after almost four years together. I didn’t like their separation; it made me feel as if my little family was coming unglued. At the age of thirty, I was experiencing things for the first time that most people felt in high school. Only in the last couple of years had I felt what it was like to be in love or to feel the extreme guilt that comes from being unfaithful. Because I was finally in love, I could somewhat understand the pain that comes from a breakup. Before I came out and fell in love with Brandon, I didn’t have sympathy for people going through rough times in their relationships because I couldn’t feel love, guilt, or pain. Now I could and the ability to empathize was making me a much kinder person. At last I was “getting real.”

While my friends and I were cooperating with Jennifer Egan on the
New York Times
article, I was applying to law schools but not having much luck. I was rejected by two schools and on the waiting list for two more. One of those schools I thought I was guaranteed to get into, but California’s new anti-affirmative action plan had changed the way admissions were done all over the state. University of California schools had lost most of their ability to be subjective, a fact that disadvantaged me, an average white guy with a compelling personal story. The admissions directors couldn’t consider that anymore. I was growing fearful that I might be getting out of the Marines without a plan for the future.

In May I visited West Point, New York for my cousin’s graduation from the military academy. After the graduation, my family headed south to my aunt and uncle’s home in Maryland. I missed the reception, however, because I took a detour through Manhattan on a Sunday morning to have brunch with Jennifer Egan. She said the editor-in-chief of the
Magazine
had wanted to meet me. At the last minute, he decided not to, she said, because it might not be the best journalistic integrity for the editor-in-chief to meet the subject of a story directly before publication. So, she explained, he wanted to set up a meeting after the story came out.

I stayed with my aunt and uncle for a night before I departed on a whirlwind tour visiting friends in the Maryland—Virginia—DC area. Before I departed, however, my uncle had a serious talk with me. This was the uncle who, years before, had encouraged me to go into the military.

“Richie,” he said, his dark Native-American eyes piercing mine, “I think you know that this lifestyle you’ve chosen for yourself is wrong.” He maintained the solid stare of a colonel to a captain, or an uncle to a nephew.

His comment shocked me into silence. He wasn’t southern; he had married into the family. Southerners were never this direct. Didn’t he know that? I was angry, stunned and confused. His daughter was one of the few relatives who knew I was gay. Had she betrayed my trust? Or had my uncle just figured it out on his own? I didn’t care. I was mad because he was judging me and he knew absolutely nothing about me or my life. What lifestyle? What choice?
Fuck you
, I thought, although I dared not say it out loud.

Instead, I simply excused myself and left the hills of eastern Maryland for those of northern Virginia.

Finally I got to meet the editors at the
Navy Times
and put faces to these names. Cathy, the BJU grad who I had worked with for a year, was a friendly, non-descript woman, who looked like she was in reasonably good shape, but who, like most women at BJU, wore her hair five to ten years behind the current style. Before our meeting, she had hinted that she had something very important to ask me. I knew that could only mean one thing. Briefly, I thought about coming out to her. After the confrontation with my uncle, however, there was no way was I going to let my guard down. Besides, it was just too dangerous to tell someone remotely affiliated with the military about being gay. It was a blatant violation of the “Don’t tell” part of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Especially dangerous considering the
New York Times Magazine
piece was due out in less than a month.