Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
skinny ass kicked at this moment. I looked at her, my eyes pleading for mercy.
“Okay,” she said, resigning herself to the hopelessness of my situation, “you can go back inside now if you want.”
With lightning speed, I darted inside the building. I went to the boys’ bathroom and cried my eyes out. I tried to remember that good feeling and wondered what I could do to get it back. I wanted the boys to admire me again. If only there were something I could do, something that I could be good at, that would make them like me. But right now, I couldn’t think of anything.
4
SHOW MY PEOPLE
“The American Society of Interior Designers 2004 Strategic Environmental Report observed, ‘Gay activists view the Supreme Court ruling of 2003 overturning state sodomy laws that prohibited a number of sexual acts…as the first step toward the implementation of new, more friendly gay rights laws.’”
Over the years, Melanie tortured me by reading sections from the BJU Review, the alumni newsletter of Bob Jones University, aloud to me over the phone. She had just received the Summer 2004 version and couldn’t wait to share Dr. Bob Jones III’s personal letter, “The President’s Corner.”
“Why the fuck is Bob the Third reading ‘The American Society of Interior Designers’? He’d probably say it’s just for the articles.”
“Good point,” Melanie responded. “I swear Rich, ninety percent of his rants in these articles are against homosexuality! And it gets better. Listen to this. He writes ‘Housing complexes dedicated to gays are springing up all across America. Advertisers of mainstream American products and services are rushing to buy space in the gay press. They are suddenly aware of the cold hard cash represented by the homosexual community. America is headed for an early grave.’ Ooh, he just makes me so mad…”
“Where are these housing complexes and how come I wasn’t aware of them?” I asked. “Dammit, I’m going to fire my realtor!”
“You’ll love this part! ‘God will not allow America to survive the legitimizing and legalizing of sodomy and same-sex marriages. The homosexual community in seeking it, the courts in pandering to it, and the legislators in legalizing it constitute an infantry assault against the God of Heaven…’”
“What the hell does that wuss know about an infantry assault?! And no court has ever pandered to me, that’s for sure.”
“The best part is at the end…‘We appeal to the people for your prayers, financial support, and for the sake of your young people…’”
“Why are you still getting that rag?” I asked. “They haven’t blacklisted you yet? I mean come on, all I do is suck dick, but you—not only are you divorced, you remarried, which you know to them makes you an adulteress because ‘what therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder!’ Remember that? Anyone who gets remarried is committing adultery in God’s eyes! I hope they at least stamp a big scarlet ‘A’ on the address label. Then you go and get another divorce. That would be like me dating a black man. Two strikes all in one!”
“Nope. They let blacks and whites date now.”
“So Bob Jones has finally made it into the sixties. I’ll be damned.”
“Yes, according them, you will be,” Melanie said.
“I’ll save you a spot when I get there.”
“I can’t believe this!” she exclaimed. “They didn’t send it to ‘Melanie Runyan’ they sent it to ‘Mrs. Melanie Runyan Burtner!’”
“‘Mrs.?’ And I didn’t know you had ever taken your second married name.”
“Neither did I. But apparently someone at Bob Jones thinks I should. Just like they insisted on putting my first married name on my university diploma when I specifically told them I wanted it to say ‘Runyan.’”
“I can laugh at all of his fucked up dogma in that letter, Melanie, except for that last part. Those poor kids who don’t know any better. I mean, most of them…fine, they want to be there, let them. But there’s ten percent that are lonely, scared and thinking there’s no one there like them, but their parents or somebody’s forcing them to be there…he’s just poisoning them.”
“Well,” she said, “look at us. We survived.”
“Barely,” I added. “And only by the grace of God. The real God. Not this asshole’s version.”
Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, given the prolificacy of his homophobia, the first time I recall hearing the word “homosexual” was from Dr. Bob Jones III on the university’s Sunday morning television show. We didn’t go to church as much after Elizabeth died so if we stayed home on Sunday morning I watched it. It was called “Show My People” after the verse in the Bible where God commands one of the prophets to “Show my people their transgressions!” That’s what Bob Jones III intended to do. Show the world where it sinned.
One show “Dr. Bob” talked about Anita Bryant—who I knew as “the orange juice lady”—and how he thought she was a courageous woman for taking a stand in Florida against the sodomites. He sneered that you couldn’t call them “sodomites” anymore but had to say the more proper “homosexuals” instead. He talked about how homosexuality was against the Bible and anyone who said otherwise did not understand Scripture. I didn’t know what a sodomite or a homosexual was and there certainly wasn’t anyone in my life I could ask.
Bob Jones the Third’s contempt wasn’t limited to the act of sodomy. For whatever reason, he also detested effeminacy or anything remotely relating to it.
Dr. Jones showed this contempt after the conductor of a nationally acclaimed orchestra displayed wildly flamboyant feminine mannerisms. The conductor and his orchestra had given a special concert one evening on the Bob Jones campus as part of the school’s annual “Artist Series.”
During chapel service the following day, Dr. Bob Jones III said, “Wathn’t he jutht such a thweet fellow?” Dr. Jones exaggerated a lisp and made a limp-wrist motion. The students laughed and laughed. I laughed, too. At least Dr. Bob wasn’t making fun of me. The joke was on Dr. Bob, however, because the guest conductor was in the audience. At least that was the rumor that went around the campus.
Dr. Bob Jones III’s opinions on homosexuality made nationwide news. His grandfather had chosen alcohol as the scourge of the nation and his father had chosen to beat up on Catholicism. For Dr. Bob Jones III, America’s curse was homosexuality. In March 1980, he and other fundamentalist ministers went to the White House to deliver petitions to President Carter opposing extending provisions of the Civil Rights Act to homosexuals.
“I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted,” Dr. Bob said to an Associated Press reporter, “but it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem posthaste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.”
I loved to read anything I could get my hands on. I read so many books the ophthalmologist said that’s why I had to get glasses. The glasses, of course, made me look nerdy and unattractive, which didn’t add to my already low self-esteem. But now I could see further and I began to realize that there was a world that existed beyond a three-foot perimeter surrounding me. Eventually I would have to learn to occupy that world; for now, though, I put on my glasses and buried my face, my mind, and my imagination in my beloved books.
If there were no new books in the house I would read the World Book Encyclopedias my parents had purchased soon after I was born. I especially enjoyed reading the sections on other countries and tried to imagine myself in those places, amidst the people I saw in the photographs doing the things that were described in the narrative about that country. The people looked so happy doing whatever it was they were doing, whether it was fishing in the South China Sea, bathing in