Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (5 page)

“It’s an Atlanta school bus goin’ over a cliff with an empty seat in the front!”

The meaning of the joke was obvious to any Southerner. The city of Atlanta was 64% African-American. Its public school system was even more overwhelmingly African-American because many white students attended private schools. The punch line was that an empty seat on an Atlanta school bus going over a cliff was a wasted opportunity to remove two or three African-American children from the human population and gene pool.

My uncles and cousins and sometimes the preachers used to sit around telling “nigger” jokes. I’d laugh because that’s what I was supposed to do, but the older I got the more it bothered me. I wish I could say it annoyed me enough to speak up, but the most I ever did was storm out of a family dinner in protest when I was a teenager, already letting out some of the budding drama queen that was lurking inside of me.

“Well, you really showed yourself today!” Momma said. I told her I didn’t like what her brothers and the others were talking about. She was somewhat sympathetic, but felt that making a grand and sweeping exit from the table wasn’t the way to make a point.

Division, strife and conflict were everywhere. After Preacher Jim’s affair with Hattie May became public knowledge, he was forced to resign from the pulpit. The new preacher brought Christian rock music—including electric guitars—into church. Daddy immediately disapproved. In a major family schism, we left the Pentecostal Holiness Church and became Baptists. Not just Southern Baptists—they were too liberal. We joined an Independent Baptist church in the city. It had over three thousand members.

Right after we joined, our new church admitted its first interracial couple. My folks didn’t approve of interracial marriages, but at the same time, they didn’t think an interracial couple who were already married should be denied membership in the church. Bob Jones University, however, had major problems with it and there was another big schism in the Christian community in Greenville, South Carolina.

Daddy and Momma said that by 1972, when I started school, the state was going to start forcing integration. The schools would have to lower their standards so that the blacks could pass. They wanted high standards for us so the way to get that was to send us to an all-white school, even if we didn’t have the money for tuition.

Even though I kept the paddlings from Mrs. Hand I had received at Tabernacle Kindergarten a secret, my parents had grown dissatisfied with the quality of my education at Tabernacle. They told me that the following year I would be transferring to a new school on the east side of town. My new school’s name was Bob Jones Elementary School and it was on the campus of Bob Jones University.

I
began first grade at Bob Jones Elementary School in late August 1973. Tabernacle had very much been a country church, with a country school. Hell, we were country people. Everything was country on our side of town. Bob Jones, on the other hand, was fifteen miles away, on the other side of town—the more affluent side. There was no bus that went that route. Instead, my mom got a job near the school so she could drive me there, go work, and then pick me up in the afternoon so we could go home together. She centered her whole life around me being at this school. I was very much aware that both my parents really sacrificed a lot to send me—and later my brother—to Bob Jones.

To my young eyes the school that calls itself the “Fortress of Fundamentalism” was quite imposing. It indeed felt like an exclusive place for the chosen few. First there was the tall, vine-covered fence that hid the school from the prying eyes of outsiders on the boulevard. That has since been replaced with an even more imposing wrought-iron fence, sort of like the new “Iron Curtain.” Then there was an enormous gatehouse where genuine guards stood at attention, monitoring every person and vehicle that passed through the entrance. A large lawn separated the fence from the nearest set of buildings on the campus, giving the guards plenty of time to aim at and shoot an intruder or a potential escapee, or at least that’s how I saw it through the eyes of a five-year-old. But it wasn’t all bad; in contrast to Tabernacle’s asphalt playground, Bob Jones had an expansive grassy playground and a huge swing set.

Bob Jones, Sr., was a famous evangelist in the early 1900s. He traveled the country from city to city preaching to men and women that they were worthless sinners in the hands of an angry God. Thousands of people crowded underneath huge outdoor tents each evening to hear Reverend Jones’s sermons when he came to town. Jones’s fiery message followed the same formula as most evangelists. Jones began by convincing the listener he or she was a sinner in need of a cure. Jones finished by convincing that listener that Jones had the only cure. No hustler ever peddled an elixir with more zeal than Robert Reynolds Jones. Over the years, tens of thousands of souls accepted Jones’s version of Almighty God.

Each generation has specific demons and the three generations of Reverend Bob Joneses reveal much about American culture and history in the twentieth century by the demon each man chose to exorcise from society. Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., was a leading spokesman for the temperance movement and prohibition. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., achieved notoriety for his tirades against the pope, the Catholic Church, and quite often specific Catholic individuals. Although Dr. Jones III followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by sermonizing against both Catholics and alcohol, he would eventually stress a third evil in this axis.

“You know,” said University of Southern California Law School professor Charlie Whitebread, “what the temperance movement and prohibition were really all about was Protestant subjugation of the Catholic minority in this country.”

“Really?” I asked. “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“Oh yes, yes indeed! Think about it. Protestants were established and had their grand churches and positions in society. Most Protestants also didn’t drink alcohol, as you know very well from your time at Bob Jones. The immigrant Catholics, on the other hand…where were they supposed to meet? Nowhere, except the bars and taverns. Shut those down and you’ve quelled a likely source of disruption of the current and accepted social order!”

“Wow, that makes a lot of sense,” I exclaimed.

Bob Jones, Sr., focused his travels on the heavily populated cities, rural areas, and farms of the Midwest because that was the center of the nation’s population in his day. In the wake of his revivals, where converts hit the “sawdust trail,” indicating they had walked down the sawdust-covered dirt aisles to buy his brand of religion, Protestant churches sprang up to perpetuate Jones’s version of salvation. Jones, however, was from the South, and that’s where he started his school.

As a child, I sat through many programs dedicated to the memory of “the Founder” after his death in the late 1960s. The programs stressed that when Bob Jones, Sr., founded his school in Florida in 1927, he absolutely refused to name the school after himself. Those close to him, however, insisted that the only way a new academic institution would succeed was if it were named after the world-famous evangelist. Bob Jones, in an act of extreme humility, chose not to do what he wanted, which would have been to name the school something else. Instead, he gave in to his advisors who insisted that the school be named “Bob Jones College.”

Bob Jones College quickly outgrew remote Florida and, in 1933, it moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. In the spring of 1947, the Reverend Fred Phelps, armed with his Bob Jones education, began his illustrious career as an evangelist persecuting homosexuals. Using his pulpit in Topeka as a base, Phelps has picketed gay and lesbian events all across the country. His fiery “God hates fags” brand of religious homophobia has even propelled him to protest at funerals of AIDS patients and victims of gay-bashing such as Matthew Shepard.

Personally, I don’t think Reverend Phelps is either homophobic or a minister but is simply the world’s most convincingly misunderstood performance artist. Regardless, Reverend Phelps and I got our start at the same place—Bob Jones.

Eventually Bob Jones College became Bob Jones University and in 1947 moved to its current location in Greenville, South Carolina, fifteen miles from the area where my ancestors had lived for five or more generations. Lots more generations, if you count my Cherokee Indian ancestors. Despite its southern location, the school has a heavily midwestern flavor. A majority of the students trace their roots to places like Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, the same places where Rev. Bob Jones, Sr., evangelized.

Dr. Bob Jones III started the elementary school just before his daughter, Roxanne—who was a couple of years older than I was, and his son, Robert Reynolds Jones IV, who was in my class—started school. So the elementary school was relatively new. Many kids would complain a lot about South Carolina because their parents had brought them from somewhere else to attend Bob Jones. I took it personally. I thought,
Well, if you don’t like it, go back to where you came from or shut up and quit complaining about it
. The worst insult Momma could give someone was to call them a “Michigan Yankee.” She pronounced it as she had been taught to speak—phonetically, like “Mitch-i-gan.” There were lots of “Mitch-i-gan Yankees” at Bob Jones.

There was only one person I recognized at Bob Jones Elementary School—a girl named Melanie who had been to Tabernacle Kindergarten with me. Melanie was very pretty with large golden-blond curls and her eyes sparkled with energy and enthusiasm as she talked a mile a minute. I was happy to know her and we would become lifelong friends, but I also clung to her presence because we were two of the few in the school who were actually from South Carolina. Not only was Melanie from South Carolina, she was from my hometown in the country, Piedmont. Other than Melanie, I made no friends at first. Everybody else on the campus had their whole life intertwined with Bob Jones. Their families all ate in the same dining hall. They all went to church on the campus. My feelings of being separate and alone intensified. I went to school Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 2:30, and then fled to the safety of my house.

Although I recognized Melanie from Tabernacle Kindergarten, she and I weren’t formally introduced until the summer when we had to take an entrance exam to get into first grade at Bob Jones Elementary School. The exam was stupid, I thought, because we had just taken it at the end of kindergarten.
How could these grownups be so inefficient?
I was furious that they were wasting my precious time, so I hurried through the answers so that I could occupy my time with more worthwhile endeavors like looking at the pretty pictures all over the wall of the classroom.

To my horror, the lady giving us the exam approached me. After a year of Mrs. Hand, I expected the worst.

“Young man, we are only on question five; you’re very far ahead of us.”

The old lady looked sweet enough, but I didn’t trust her. I was too frightened to answer. I glanced over at Melanie. She had already turned six and was older than I was; hopefully she would say something.

In a pattern that would continue for the rest of our lives, Melanie called it like it was.

“We already took this test, so we already know all the answers!” she said, slamming her blue plastic pencil onto the small desk.

Today, the Web site for Bob Jones says, “Our school stresses high-quality academics with sound moral and spiritual values based on the Word of God. Our teachers are dedicated to the student’s welfare, and they are skillful in the handling of God’s Word to shape the life and character of each child.”

In Al Franken’s recent bestseller,
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
, he devotes an entire chapter to a clandestine visit he made to Bob Jones University. I almost fell out of my chair reading it. After the 2000 presidential election and George W. Bush’s ill-fated visit to BJU, most people developed a misguided perception about Bob Jones. Franken gets it right when he writes, “We’d come to Bob Jones expecting to encounter racist, intolerant homophobes. Instead, we found people who were welcoming, friendly, and extremely nice. A little weird, yes. And no doubt homophobic. But well-meaning. Kind of.”

Years later it would be very easy for me to reject the overt, hostile, ugly redneck racism, homophobia, and intolerance demonstrated toward other people by my relatives. However, BJU’s kinder gentler form of bigotry would take years and years of therapy, medication, and moving to the other coast to get it out of my head. Even now I’m afraid it still lurks in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind.

What stands out most in my mind about Bob Jones is that we were told what we should believe about why we were born, what happened when we died, and everything in between. We were told what we should believe about God. Sure, that’s true of any religious school, but at Bob Jones we were as strict on ourselves and on each other as our teachers and parents. Most of us were really as devoted religiously as the adults. Of course there were a few who were rebellious, but they were the ones you noticed, who stood out. At Bob Jones if you so much uttered a sentence that was not acceptable by the school, you knew that someone was going to report you.

A common defense for the school is, “Well, no one is forced to go there.”

I was five years old, okay, so don’t give me that fucking bullshit. I went where I was told.

My first grade teacher was named Miss Kline and we were the first class of her teaching career. She was perhaps twenty-two years old but she looked even younger. She was quiet and calm and friendly. She didn’t get angry or yell. We all loved her; I know I did. After the terrible year I had in kindergarten, I would do anything for Miss Kline. The last thing I wanted to do was to disappoint her.

First graders did not have desks that opened from the top; rather, they were open in front enabling us to slide books, pens, and papers in and out of them. These desks were welded onto two metal legs on both sides of the desk. From inside the desk, you could feel an opening into the hollow interior of the desk’s legs.

We had to write with large blue plastic pencils that used replaceable lead, which we obtained in small, round containers. During a class lesson, my left hand was inside my desk, sliding my canister of lead along the bottom of the desk’s interior. To my dismay, the canister of lead fit perfectly inside the leg of the desk, and the canister slid all the way down the leg. There was no way I could get it out; the leg of the desk must have been a foot and a half long!

To a first-grader’s mind this was a life-threatening dilemma. My thoughts were only on that canister and what I was going to do to supply my pencil with lead. Worse, I was afraid that losing my lead might be bad enough to cause Miss Kline to give me a paddling. Mrs. Hand would have paddled for a lesser offense.

At the next break, I nervously approached Miss Kline’s desk, explaining that I couldn’t find my lead.

“Does anyone know where Richie’s lead is?” Miss Kline asked the class. I didn’t expect that! I simply wanted her to give me another canister. Of course no one knew where my lead was. It was trapped on the inside of the leg of my desk!

Miss Kline pressed the issue. “Did anyone take Richie’s lead?” Upping the charge to thievery made me feel even worse. Miss Kline ordered everyone to empty the contents of their desk. She walked around and inspected the students, looking for the culprit with two canisters of lead. This search, of course, turned up nothing.

She returned to the front of the classroom and told us to put our heads down on our desk. “Before I come around and begin searching your pockets,” she said in her calm, sweet voice, “I’m going to give you one last chance to confess what you have done. One of you took Richie’s lead. Jesus knows who did it. If you don’t confess that you are the one who took the lead, Jesus will be disappointed in you.”

This hadn’t started out as a lie. I simply wanted my canister of lead back. I kept silent about what happened to it, thinking that the truth would fade away and Miss Kline would simply give me a new piece of lead. Now my silence had turned me into a liar. The entire situation had turned into a complete dilemma. I could tell her the truth, or let her search every student in the class. I raised my head and walked up to her large desk at the front of the room.

Between sobs I managed to say, “I did it.” I still thought she might paddle me, but I could not lie to her any longer and I added, “It’s in my desk.”

“Why did you tell me that you didn’t have it?” She was disappointed in me, I could tell.

“Because…” I cried harder, “because, I got it stuck in my desk.”

She walked over to my desk and knelt down on her hands and knees beside it. I showed her the hole in the bottom of the desk where the leg attached. “It’s in there,” I said. Now, everyone’s eyes were on me.