Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
was all relative to what’s in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. But even our American history had a very slanted version to it. Psychology also had a very religion-based teaching. I took some psychology classes at Bob Jones and I didn’t learn a damn thing about psychology. Years later, when I started therapy I felt, Oh, this is what psychology is! The unconscious. I never heard of the unconscious. I took three psychology classes at Bob Jones and I never heard of the unconscious.
In the early classes I remember that the Old Testament was our history book for that particular period of history. Since then I’ve done a lot of reading on my own and I’ve found out that every Old Testament King of Israel would have the Old Testament completely rewritten to suit his political need. Yet we use this King James Version as “this is what happened in history” type of thing.
In the second grade I met a classmate who had the same name as the school. His great-grandfather had founded Bob Jones University, his grandfather was the former president and current chancellor, and his father was president. Like everyone else, I was extremely impressed with my classmate, Bob Jones IV—coming from the family of the school’s founder gave him a built-in popularity and an automatic aura of esteem. We were both bright, over-achievers, and I viewed him as something of a rival. Yet, he always seemed to be able to one-up me. My first conversation with him had something to do with the presidents of the United States. Our teacher had posted pictures of all of them on the wall. I pointed to the one I recognized and expressed admiration for this authority figure.
“He’s a liar!” Bobby declared.
How could the president be a liar? To me, the Watergate hearings had been an annoyance preempting Bewitched reruns that summer. I hadn’t understood their significance.
Over twenty years later Bob Jones IV, by then a reporter for a Christian news magazine in Washington, DC, would send me an e-mail about a different president. “Apparently there’s proof that he’s been having sex with a woman staffer in the White House. He’s going down!”
“No way,” I wrote back in defense of my Democratic president. “He’s not that stupid.”
But back in the second grade we didn’t worry so much about things like corruption in politics and sexual affairs. We learned about the U.S. mail system and played post office—the literal kind—with the other second grade class. I did my best, was always studious and polite, managed to be the teacher’s pet, but there was something—that unspoken something—that prevented me from being popular. When Valentine’s Day rolled around, Bobby’s little cardboard box was filled with Valentines from girls in both classes. The teachers rigged it so that every student got at least one Valentine’s Day card. Their system failed me. I didn’t receive a single one.
In third grade I had a shot at getting the “Student of the Month” award. I won it twice. I felt wonderful inside. Now they call that “validation.” Back then I just felt very proud of myself. As an adult, I often looked back at why I overachieved, why this “validation” of my worth was so important to me from such an early age. Maybe it was because there were no Valentines in my box. Maybe it was because my uncle and father referred to me as a sissy. Maybe it was because I couldn’t play ball with the other boys. Probably a combination of all of those things, mixed in with the extremely sensitive nature I was born with. And then there was Momma.
Momma still dominated my life, just as my brother Jimmy and I dominated hers. Because of the logistics of our academic situation, we spent a lot of time in the car with her. She was sacrificing a lot for us; I was always very aware of that.
She was caring and self-sacrificing and I wanted so much to please her. I also liked the way Mom looked. I thought she was beautiful. Yet, I never got the feeling that she believed I was proud of her. It made me sad that she was self-conscious and had somewhat of an inferiority complex. Early on I sensed this vulnerability in her and I tried to help her.
She was uncomfortable, for example, about her weight. When she was a young girl, Grandpa Schrader told her she looked like one of the cows on their dairy farm. That of course left a lasting wound in her. Now, she turned to me to help her control her hunger. After a trip to the grocery store, she’d give me the jar of peanuts she’d bought and tell me to hide them from her. She didn’t want to spoil her diet, but it was comforting for her to know they were in the house. I would hide them. Days later she’d beg me to tell her where I’d hidden them. I’d laugh and tell her no. She’d grow very serious about those peanuts and begin to cry—eventually I’d cave in. I couldn’t stand to see her cry. I’d cry, too.
She expressed her lack of self-worth in other ways. If she perceived one of my classmates’ parents as being smarter than she, or being a better speaker, she would just clam up. She would just stand there without saying a word. I tried harder to show her that I was proud of her, that she meant the world to me.
I also sensed that, if my mother didn’t feel pride in her own accomplishments, she wanted to experience it through me. So she always wanted me to be at my best. My mother wasn’t the type of person who pushed me overtly. But she knew how to get her way by being very passive-aggressive. In that sense she pushed very hard. I knew what she wanted and I knew if she didn’t get what she wanted she was going to pout. To keep her from pouting I would try to keep her content because if she was happy I was happy.
Maybe because she didn’t think much of herself, I tried all the more to allow her to take pride in my good qualities. I liked to hear my mom tell other people what a fine student I was. Her approval made me feel wonderful. As long as I got high grades she could brag about me, and that made me content.
I started doing things specifically to please her.
For example, I had never given much thought to how I wanted to wear my hair. At the time, I never really considered how I wanted to look at all. When I was a kid I had big puffy hair, really thick. It was the seventies and big hair was in, even on little boys. My mom liked my thick, wavy hair. As a result, I began parting it, brushing it, styling it in a way I knew pleased her. She was always complimenting me on my hair and pointing it out to other people: “Look, isn’t his hair just beautiful.” And she wonders why I turned gay.
But when a mother and son are as close as we were, complications are bound to come up. With us, they started relatively early.
Because we were so close, she felt comfortable asking me to help her in the kitchen. I wouldn’t do it because even I realized that, in the South at least, that was considered woman’s work. She wanted me to cook or clean up and I refused because it was starting to cross the line into overtly doing what a woman does. For once I stood my ground and would just let her pout. At some point, she succeeded in making me do the dishes. Okay. I would do the dishes but I would never help her cook. Eventually she quit pouting about it because she came to realize it was something I just wasn’t going to do. Now, of course, I wish I knew how to cook.
There was an unspoken, maybe even an unacknowledged, burden of having to fill too many needs in my mother’s life. Needs that no one else in the family seemed to be able to meet.
Her relationship was strikingly different with me than it was with my father or brother. She would confide things in me. She would tell me things, especially about her sister Lydia, how she drove her crazy. She would tell me about her mother, about how her mother overlooked her and favored her brother. I was her confidante about a lot of things.
She was easily upset and needy. My dad didn’t show emotion and my mom wanted to know how people felt. She wanted people to express themselves, so she could express herself, and I was the only one who did that. I also did almost everything I could to ensure she was happy. My dad wanted her to be happy, too, but he didn’t go to the lengths I went to to make sure it happened.
She probably trusted me more to be sensitive and to understand her fears. She herself was very sensitive. She knew I was very sympathetic. Jimmy didn’t seem to be sensitive to anything. Looking back I think he was, but I think he dealt with it in a very different way. He dealt with it by acting out; instead of crying he would fight. He would rebel. Jimmy deliberately antagonized her.
My brother was more typically a “boy.” That’s