Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
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.