Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (41 page)

I said I understood. But, as was the norm for me, I was saying one thing and feeling something totally different on the inside. In reality, I was devastated. Torn apart. To understand why I was so distraught is to know that my biggest nightmare in life was that the Bob Jones crowd, the fundamentalists, were right. Yes, I still had that fear. What if what I was taught as a child from birth onward is the Truth? That we really are born with a sinful human nature? Only through living a Christian life could we be sure we’re on the right path. When I rejected that belief, I didn’t get away from it right away. It takes a long time. I wasn’t dealing with it all that well anyway. I was lashing out. Doing the porn was a way to strike out in the extreme against that way of thinking.

The Advocate
story made me feel like they were telling me, “See, look how evil you really are.” And it wasn’t only because I had hidden the porn from them. If you read the article it suggests Rich Merritt sought publicity. You know, I didn’t seek publicity. I wrote a newspaper article. I volunteered for an organization. They put me in touch with someone. And I agreed to do some stories.

Yeah, I like attention. I like publicity. But in this scenario I did not seek out the media. I said “okay” to people. So when I read that I was only seeking publicity, I thought it was mean and unnecessary. And I thought it was untrue. But even beyond that
The Advocate
made it sound like I had a duty to tell them about the porn. Which I don’t think I did.

To me, the article made it sound like there was something wrong with doing porn. That I was a bad person for being in porn videos. Any reasonable person would come away with that attitude after reading the piece. “Oh,
The Advocate
is condemning you for having done porn.” This wasn’t Jerry Falwell telling me that. It wasn’t Bob Jones telling me that. It was the leading press outlet in the gay community. It cut right into my deepest, darkest nightmare.

Although
The Advocate
called me for a quote, it was clear they were going ahead with the story no matter what I said. So when John Erich first called me, my instinct, once I got over the shock was, “Okay, go on with it. Give them the story.” Since they were going with it anyway, I should give them the story that I’m writing about now.

Then I contacted Tim Carter and SLDN. Their initial advice was, “Don’t talk with them; we’re going to try to tell them not to do the story.” That’s what I went with even though my instincts were telling me to go the other way. Tim is the co-chair of SLDN. But he talked to the co-executive director, Mary, and reported that Mary, who I regarded as a friend, was the one who said, “We can’t have anything to do with this. This is only going to hurt SLDN.” That’s when Tim called me back and said, “Mary is very upset. She feels like you’re chasing media attention, like Jose Zuniga did with that book he wrote several years ago that exaggerated his own story, you know,
Soldier of the Year
.”

Mary would be quoted in the
The Advocate
: “Rich was not an SLDN client, so there was no reason for us to be aware of it” even though the SLDN annual report for 1998 stated that SLDN had come to the aid of Marines at Camp Pendleton involved in the
Times
article. The
Advocate
article also states that I came to the attention of the
New York Times Magazine
“indirectly” through SLDN. There was nothing “indirect” about it. Everyone was distancing themselves from me.

Then Tim suggested, “Why don’t you call your friend Steve Zeeland and see if he has any pull with anyone at
The Advocate
?”

I did call Steven, and he said he would do what he could, but he didn’t imagine that he had the influence to sway
The Advocate
.

My instincts told me that
The Advocate
was going to do the story regardless of what happened. It was too sensational. It seemed like it would be too good for sales. The best thing I could do at this point is give them my side of the story. I could have said, “Here’s why I did this.” But I didn’t do that.

The story sent me into a state of complete shock. I like to think that I tried very hard to please people. Make everyone happy. This was the gay community telling me that I had failed. In a big way. That’s pretty deep suffering.

What helped was that right off the bat I did get a lot of reassurances. David Mixner. From the law school. But the publicity didn’t stop with
The Advocate
. The
New York Times
wrote the small article about the Marine who appeared in the magazine had been in “smut films.” The
Washington Post
ran a little blurb about it. It was February 1999, the impeachment was over with, and it said, “Looking for the next Monica Lewinsky scandal.” It listed a couple of other things that happened and it mentioned my story.
I’m going to be the next Monica Lewinsky!
The
Weekly Standard
ran a very negative article with the attitude of, “Look how stupid the
New York Times
is.”

A week later
The London Times
ran a little story. The headline was so British. It said,
MARINE’S PRIVATE ON PARADE
. I thought,
When is it going to stop?
Every day I was looking up my name on Lexis-Nexis news search to see where I was going to appear next. When the
London Times
blurb came out, I started crying. It was just too much to deal with. I was in the computer lab. It seemed like there was no end and I was thinking it would affect the rest of my life. My friend Dena was in the computer lab with me and we talked and she was very comforting and reassuring. My mentor-friend, Alan Gurd, was Dena’s roommate. He was there for me, too. Alan was angry. “This is why the gay community can’t get ahead. Look at what we do to each other. We’re our own worst enemies.”

“I can’t believe it, Rich,” said my friend Jim. “I had never ordered a gay magazine in my life, but I finally got a subscription to
The Advocate
. And I get my first copy delivered to my house and guess who’s on the cover?!” He laughed about it. ‘This is just like something you’d do, Rich, surprising me by being on the cover of my first issue of
The Advocate
!”

The law school openly displayed the current copy of
The Advocate
on a shelf in the reading room, along with thirty or forty other magazines. Each morning I came to school immediately when the library opened at 7:00 a.m. Finally one morning, the librarian had placed the one on the shelf with my photo on the cover. I grabbed it and carried it back to the archive room and buried it. Or so I thought.

A few days later, I walked by the reading room and to my horror saw that someone had dug it up from the archives and replaced it! Not only that, it was sitting on a table, so someone had obviously read it. Now everyone at the school would know. My friend Vicky was sitting with a group of students near the table with
The Advocate.
I could tell they had been talking about me, but were trying to pretend as if they hadn’t been. Vicky nonchalantly slid her Constitutional Law casebook over
The Advocate.
When the group left, Vicky left it sitting it on the table. I grabbed it and stole it from the library.

As a way to escape, I just poured myself into my studies. I was in the second semester of my first year of law school, arguably the toughest part of law school. I got the highest grades of my school career that semester. I threw myself in my studies to block out what happened. For a short while, at least, that was an effective way to cope. Eventually, however, I ran out of energy and would need some help, something a little stronger than sheer force of will to get me through my day.

“‘I
know very little about gay culture,’ R says. On a gay cruisehe and Brandon took recently with some military friends, R was mystified by a drag spoof of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
. ‘The whole place is going wild, and none of us had seen
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
,’ he says, and admits to finding the hedonism in some pockets of gay culture—the all-night dance parties, for example, which Brandon enjoys—wearying and empty.” This is what Jennifer Egan wrote. I hate to say it, but the quote was totally accurate.

The
Weekly Standard
and the
New York Post
had a field day with my statements to the
New York Times Magazine.
After the
Advocate
cover story “outing” my porn past, these tabloids included me in sections called “Bloopers of the Times” and “Truths of the Times.” They used the seeming contradiction between my lives as a “poster Marine” and a “gay porn star” to show that their nemesis, the
New York Times
didn’t know what it was doing. The further implication, of course, was that gays should not be allowed to serve in the military because, see, we all do porn.

But the truth is, when we went on that cruise in 1998, only Brandon was familiar with
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
and he had to explain the skit to the rest of us. I
still
haven’t seen it, although now I would recognize and laugh at a mocking of the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. At the time, though, I really knew very little about gay culture, unless one considers the porn industry gay culture. And I didn’t know a whole lot about that. I had done eight porn films spanning a period of four months over three years earlier. I stopped doing them because I met Brandon and fell in love. To quote myself, my dalliance in the porn films
had
been, well, “wearying and empty.”

Jennifer misquoted me earlier in the article when she said that Brandon and I would be going to the White Party that year. What I told her was that we would be going to Palm Springs for White Party
weekend
, but that we would simply barhop the night of the main event. I had been at the White Party in 1995 and hadn’t enjoyed it and had left after a half hour or an hour. In my mind, going to Palm Springs for White Party weekend was very different from going to the White Party. Seems silly now, but these distinctions I had carefully carved out were vital to my identity.

When I read now what I said in 1998 in these quotes and in other places in the
New York Times Magazine
, I am appalled at the way I sounded, but also pleased with the personal growth I’ve achieved since then. They’re like a barometer for how critical I used to be, and how accepting I am now. I caught a lot of criticism for coming across as judgmental, condescending and arrogant. I was puzzled by this criticism because I just didn’t see it then.

But that wasn’t the only criticism. After I was out of the Marines, I forwarded a copy of the article to Mrs. Langston, my fifth and sixth grade teacher at Bob Jones Elementary School. I was so proud of being in the story and I had forgotten about the seamier parts.

“I’m disturbed that you go to all night gay dance parties,” she wrote. “I can only imagine what goes on at those things.”

Shit
, I thought,
I should have reread the article before I sent it to her.
So I reread it and was thankful she hadn’t commented on the orgy in the Philippines with the enlisted Marines.

So I was catching criticism from both sides. That’s an important lesson to learn for someone who wants to be in the public eye. There’s no way to make everyone happy when you speak out about an issue. But
The Advocate
’s criticism had affected me much deeper than anything else and in more ways than I could possibly realize at the time.

When I had been a fundamentalist Christian I was judgmental and condemning about everything—in the clear-cut way that fundamentalist Christians are. After I left Bob Jones University I started shedding some of those attitudes. But, of course, you don’t drop all of your opinions overnight. It was step by step, phase by phase. By the time I came out of the closet, I believed that I had become somewhat nonjudgmental—but some of my old attitudes were still there. For example, I had real problems with effeminate, queeny guys. With drag queens. With people on the fringes of the mainstream. That way of thinking seems nutty to me now, yet it took me a long time to lose that sensibility. By 1999, however, I still looked down my nose at drugs and people who used them.

A big change occurred in me when
The Advocate
article came out slamming me about the porn and about hiding it from them. I suddenly felt what it was like to be the object of what I considered harsh, unnecessary, criticism, and condemnation. It may have not been meant that way, but that’s the way I saw it. Other than really shocking and devastating me, in another way it transformed me—and I think for the better: my attitude changed almost immediately regarding the way I viewed other people.

As I said, it seemed to me, from the tone of the article, that the editor was condemning me. Some of the feedback on that issue of the magazine followed that train of thought. A lot of the comments were particularly harsh. I remember one of the e-mails in the feedback forum said something about how I portrayed myself as a hero but in reality wasn’t one. Then it went on to demand, “We need a Rosa Parks. Where is our Rosa Parks?” Comments like that really hurt. Mercifully there were those who defended me. Someone criticized
The Advocate:
“What makes you think that just because someone tells you one thing about their life, they have an obligation to tell you everything?”

Bossy wrote a lengthy and beautiful letter to
The Advocate
. It was published online, although not in the actual magazine. He wrote about how I had done so much for my gay friends, by bringing them together and trying hard to make them feel included. He ended by writing, “For that, Rich Merritt should be admired and not dragged through the mud as you have chosen to do.” He signed the letter with his real name and rank. Considering he was still on active duty, this was a brave and loyal thing for him to do.

But of course, only the negative stuff stuck in my mind. Some of the feedback was incredibly critical and it started a process in me of thinking how I’d been judging people all these years for so many things. One of the ways I was still doing it was with my attitude towards people who used drugs. Now I started asking myself,
Who am I to judge
?

After that, the idea began somewhere in my head that if drugs were okay—or neutral—generally, perhaps it would be okay for me to…“experiment.” I started coming up with all the clichéd reasons to justify drug use: as long as you don’t become addicted and it doesn’t take over your life and you can still pay your bills, then what’s wrong with using drugs? Yeah, it’s illegal, so what? At that point sodomy was still illegal in so many states. What does illegal mean? I had been in law school long enough to know that, as one judge wrote, “laws are like sausage…it’s best not to see them being made.” What he meant, of course, is that laws are created by people as flawed and as…human…as anyone. And the process ain’t pretty. Drug laws seemed especially ill-formed.

The year before, Missouri Senator John Ashcroft stood at the front of the Bob Jones student body and declared “We have no King but Jesus!” With Bible-thumping Jesus freaks like Ashcroft making the laws of the land, it almost seemed like a duty to break them.

I also noticed that over the past few years some of my friends had stopped seeing me as much as they once had. I would find out that they’d taken vacations and I hadn’t been invited. It was hurtful and I didn’t understand why. Now I realized that they were going to different cities all across the country for the circuit party weekends, which were rapidly increasing in popularity among gay men. There certainly wouldn’t be a place at a circuit party for a guy who was opposed to drug use. I recalled the White Party I had been to in 1995. It was obvious I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it just by drinking alcohol all night because eventually I’d pass out. These guys were doing drugs that kept them up and high and happy. The part about being happy really struck me. I wasn’t feeling very good about myself and I needed something to help me feel better.

A friend described the drug Ecstasy to me. I had first heard about it in the Marines years before when some of the men had been caught using it. More and more gay men seemed to be using it. All of a sudden, it sounded really good. I needed something to pick me up out of this depression I had sunk into. I needed to feel what he was describing. I was still experiencing the numbness from the
Advocate
exposé.

My last defense against using drugs was gone. This may sound crazy now, but I had always been interested in politics. I even had a hope of someday having a political career. Before
The Advocate
piece, I had always managed to push my porn past aside, reasoning that I could still have a future in politics. Maybe Bill Clinton’s escapade had lowered the standards of what the public will accept.
Perhaps I can be a congressman from West LA or something
, was my logic. But doing drugs, it seemed, would definitely prohibit me from having a political career. I saw drug use as just one too many hurdles I’d have to overcome.

When I was in the Marines, I wouldn’t even consider drugs because I got drug-tested all the time. That deterrent was gone. The barrier of being judgmental was gone—or at least was rapidly diminishing. Finally, when I saw the way I was portrayed in
The Advocate
, I said to myself,
Who the fuck am I kidding? I have no chance of a political career. I’m an idiot to think that.
So that final roadblock was gone. I had already broken down almost every other taboo. I was reaching out for something new. One last thing. I needed something to make me feel really good, really fast.
Why not try drugs
? My red-flag phrase.
Oh what the hell!

“I want to go to the White Party in a few weeks,” I told Brandon in the spring of 1999, “and I want to try Ecstasy.” He could not do drugs because of his career, but he certainly understood that drugs were a huge part of gay culture. We talked about it. But after thinking it over, he decided that he shouldn’t hold me back from experimenting if it was something I really wanted to try. “Okay,” he said. I immediately called my friend and asked me if he could get me some.

The night of my second White Party I was most definitely in a different frame of mind than I had been in years before at my first. The party had grown in size from the hotel ballroom to the Palm Springs Convention Center. Waiting in line to get in the club felt surreal. I felt the Ecstasy waiting in my pocket. It reminded me of Eve in the Garden of Eden: “You could choose not to eat this fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or you can eat it and your eyes will be open and you will be as God.” I had that same feeling as I was standing there with that pill in my hand.
I can give this back to my friend
, I thought,
or I can take it and my life will be different forever.
Just like the scene near the beginning in the original
Matrix
when Keanu Reeves chooses the red pill over the blue. My eyes may be opened. Or I could be ruined. I had no idea what would happen.

I took the Ecstasy.

My friend had told me that it would take a while to kick in. When we got into the party I began timing it. Thirty minutes went by and I didn’t feel any different. I started dancing. I wasn’t much of a dancer but I got on the dance floor with 10,000 other guys. I just started bopping around and I still wasn’t feeling a thing. I said to myself,
This isn’t going to work. All the hype was over nothing.

I was on the dance floor for another thirty minutes when this guy behind me, wearing angel wings, brushed up against me. I always hated angel wings on the dance floor because they can scratch you. This time the angel wings hit my bare back and I suddenly had the most magnificent sensation. God it felt good. I turned around and I just smiled at the guy and he grinned back. He was this little angel. That’s when I knew the drug had kicked in. I stopped dancing and just stood in the middle of the dance floor with all this craziness swirling around me.

It was the most euphoric, fantastic, amazing feeling. I couldn’t think of anything negative. I couldn’t imagine anything bad. I was totally alert. The music sounded great. Everyone looked handsome. Everyone looked happy. I thought,
This is the way life is supposed to be. This is what being born again was supposed to feel like.

I don’t know what I was expecting but this was far better than anything I could have possibly imagined. It was like my eyes were opened.
Oh this is what I’ve been missing
! There was this secret society out there and I had finally been admitted. Gosh, walking around out there and seeing all my friends. People I had known throughout the years would wave at me in the spirit of “Hi, you’re one of us now.” I felt included. I felt a part of something. I felt totally wonderful.

The whole night went like that. I wanted to walk around. We danced a little bit but I just wanted to walk around and take it all in and experience as much as I could. The atmosphere was the experience.

Before I had looked at these people holding their bottles of water and I thought that perhaps they were alcoholics who couldn’t drink. Now I realized that you don’t want to drink when you’re on Ecstasy. Water tastes like the finest wine. Gum tastes like a feast. And you smile from ear to ear the whole time. Some people don’t experience it that way, but my first time, I sure did. You don’t shut down as you do with alcohol. You remain alert; in fact, your alertness is heightened, so you
really
know how good you’re feeling. And I remember it today like it was a movie I just watched.