Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star

Some books just have irresistible titles and Rich Merritt’s Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star was such a book for me.

It turned out to be an engaging personal story that manages to encapsulate many of the tensions of modern American life, how divergent the roles one person can play. Particularly when raised in a social milieu where being true to one’s nature is not an acceptable role.

Rich Merritt was raised in a deeply religious Southern family. He went to Christian schools from kindergarten to the Bob Jones University (from which he was eventually expelled). The theory of evolutionary psychology that the human capacity for religious belief is a form of group identification certainly gets strong support from Rich Merritt’s experience of Southern Pentecostalism and Baptism, where an unforgiving sense of “them” and “us” is all-pervasive. His deeply religious Grandpa Schrader on his deathbed agonizing over whether he was eternally damned (p.30) came to epitomize the narrow, fearful, judging religion of his upbringing and its costs.

And being same-sex oriented makes one very much not “one of us”. Rich Merritt describes his family and school life very vividly. There is the familiar pattern of feeling wrongly different – his father telling a very young Rich he hoped he was not a sissy when he found him playing with girls (p.28) – and compensating by trying to be “the best little boy in the world”, with sometimes erratic results. However difficult things got with his family—sometimes very difficult—it is clear that there were salving connections of love.
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His decision to join the US Marines was somewhat unexpected, but became a source of pride to members of his family, particularly when he became an officer (he rose to the rank of Captain). Experience at boot camp put the narrow, unforgiving exclusivity of Bob Jones University in a much more critical light. He even heard – for the first time ever – someone (a female African-American lance corporal) defend gays (p.99). After Rich was expelled from Bob Jones U (for cursing, listening to rock music and going to a dance club) the Marines became his new home. He had also become friends with fellow (straight) marine Gary Fullerton, someone whose profoundly supportive friendship clearly provided a major emotional anchor in Rich Merritt’s life. After the loss of his Bob Jones networks, Gary restored his faith in friendship (p.136).

The marines also became the place were he admitted to himself that he was homosexual. Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star provides an excellent insight into the gay networks in the US Armed forces – there are 194,000 people in the Marines, part of the US Armed forces of 1.4m active and 1.5m reserve service personnel. If the same-sex oriented are about 4% of the population (roughly 5% of males, 2% of females) then that means that likely about 60,000 active and the same number again reserve service personnel are same-sex oriented. Of course they form networks: for friendship, relationships, sex – networks that also provide places of safety and support, given the ban on homosexuals being in the US military.

Two years into Rich Merritt’s service “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (or, as it has been called, Hide-and-Lie) became the policy. Nowadays, it is a policy which increasingly lacks popular and service personnel support – even conservative US journals have run pieces calling for the policy’s abolition.

But it still is official US military policy and the contradictions in trying to be a good Marine while passing as heterosexual (to the extent of arranging “stunt babes” as escorts at major Marine social functions) are conveyed vividly. Since all the monotheistic religions have traditionally held that the same-sex oriented should not exist – and certainly have no legitimate social place – there were also no accepted models of how to be same-sex oriented available to Rich Merritt as he was growing up. Like so many same-sex oriented men and women, he had to make it up as he went along.

Stationed in California, the party-club-dance-rave networks were the most obvious model of “how to be” gay. Rich Merritt was increasingly drawn into that. Which led to his brief (eight films) career as a porn star: if one was “breaking out”, one may well break out all the way. There is, in fact, a niche industry of gay porn by serving US service personnel. One which generates scandals every few years (p.229).

Rich Merritt reports that he understood what he was doing was risked his career as a Marine officer. But he was also an adrenaline junkie: something that was to be a continuing, and deep, problem in his life.

Doing porn acquired another layer of risk, as about that time he met Brandon, who became his lover for several years. We follow the emotional highs and lows of his life: military career, gay life, family life – a deeply tension-filled package. He came to appreciate the words of “a wise therapist”: our secrets keep us sick.

Eventually, Rich became the anonymous front marine (“R”) for a New York Times magazine piece (pdf) on the effect of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on gay service personnel. A risky thing to do but one he felt comfortable with as he came to trust the NYT journalist doing the story.

But not enough to tell her of his porn career: something that caused major problems when The Advocate, a gay magazine, published the extremely juicy news story (pdf) that the lead anonymous marine was also a porn star. (It excited some reader comment (pdf) also.) Which causes major ructions in Rich Merritt’s life.

It also confirmed his decision to resign from the US marines. He graduated from law school, became a highly paid (and highly indebted, due to his party-party life style and student debts) lawyer. His relationship broke up, he had drug problems, family members died or got very sick. It was a time for much angst, emotional roller-coasters and therapy of somewhat erratic quality. The book ends on both a tragic (due to the death of someone close to him) and hopeful note.

When The Advocate broke the story about Merritt’s porn past, some conservative journals had fun at the New York Times’s expense, including mocking what they thought were implausible contradictions in “R’s” story. But the joke was more on them, because people are complex and different and do have unexpected juxtapositions and tensions in their life. So Rich Merritt could be a party-boy gay man who was missing lots of “normal” gay cultural references since he had a highly fundamentalist religious upbringing.

Patterns of bigotry

All bigotries are, in some sense or other, wars against human diversity. Whether diversity in race, sex, religion, belief, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or whatever. The reality is, humans are varied things. To be a war with the variety of the human is to be at war with the reality of the human. Such wars have costs, both on those who such wars are waged against and those who wage them.

Being heterosexual does not define the human, despite heroic (and horrific) attempts to pretend it does (or ought to). Variety in sexual orientation is likely a straightforward feature of human evolutionary biology. Yet there are few people more isolated, more vulnerable, or more lonely, than a same-sex oriented boy or girl growing up in a deeply religious family and community that rejects the legitimacy of their existence. Hence the higher suicide and attempted suicide rates among them.

A long war has been waged by monotheist religions against the same-sex oriented: a war that propagated and kept alive the notion of God-the-exterminator. In the Christian tradition, that has included adopting and propagating Philo of Alexandria’s reading of Genesis 19 (a reading none of the other Scriptural references to the Sodom and Gomorrah story support) – at Sunday school, Rich’s class was told that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because they let men marry men (p.22).

It has also included putting out publications as the medieval Golden Book, compiled by a beatified Archbishop of Genoa, which claimed that Jesus insisted that all sodomites be killed before He would incarnate. (So, Christmas Day as Massacre Day, celebrating Jesus insisting on mass extermination.) It included brutally suppressing same-sex orientation (and marriage) among conquered Amerindian cultures. And, indeed, in Europe.

At its simplest, it has sold an effortless sense of virtue that people can feel for not doing what most have little or no interest in doing anyway: virtue without effort—an easy sell for the hucksters of faith.

If the legitimately human is defined more narrowly than the set of actual humans, then the resulting gap has to be dealt with: typically by exclusion. Including that ultimate form of exclusion, extermination.

In our own time, there has been the fights not to have the love lives of the same-sex oriented criminalized; to not be social outcasts; to not be barred from various employments; to able to be positively portrayed in books, film and television; to serve their countries; to have the lives they build together protected by the law. A long struggle upwards from the nadir of the default social policy being God-approved (indeed mandated) extermination: extermination to turn aside the wrath of God.

Which is a big story made up of millions of individual stories. Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star is just one of those stories, but a striking and engaging one.