Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
me that I had grown to detest the things that my own people did, like picking green beans, corn, and okra in the blazing summer heat with bugs attacking our flesh, mowing the huge lawn or cleaning the house. No wonder no one took pictures of us for the World Book Encyclopedia. We were mundane.
I was drawn to the sections on the military, especially the Navy and Marine Corps. I also enjoyed looking at maps and wanted to go to other countries so it became a synergistic fantasy to think of myself standing on the deck of a Navy ship wearing the same crisp white officer’s uniform I saw in the pictures, charting the vessel’s course over the world’s oceans. I would tell the captain how far he needed to turn the wheel to get to whatever port we wanted to visit. The fact that Navy ships no longer had steering wheels was an inconvenient point I overlooked in my fantasy.
But there was something mystical about the Marines. My attraction to the Marine Corps at this age was not easy for me to understand. My vague imagination had me in a group of men just like me. That was so different from where I felt myself now, so emotionally separated from the rest of my extended family and ridiculed by the boys in my class. In my reality, I was lonely, but in my Marine Corps vision, I was happy being one of a group of peers. These Marines wouldn’t scorn me like the boys on the soccer field because I would pass whatever test was necessary to become one of them. They would have to like me then.
My favorite novels were the “Hardy Boys Mystery Series.” I read every one of them and begged my mom to take me to the Kmart whenever a new one was published. The mysteries these teenage boys uncovered were intriguing and their lives seemed infinitely more fascinating than my own. I wondered when Frank and Joe Hardy had time to do their homework.
However, it wasn’t just the boys’ sleuthing that caught my attention. Frank and Joe’s adventures frequently took them to remote destinations in the woods where they had to cross a body of water. Sometimes they swam across a river, other times they might fall into a lake while boating or they might simply find themselves caught in a rainstorm in the middle of a forest. Inevitably, the brothers would strip naked and wait for their clothes to dry. They would use this time to ponder the clues they had uncovered or talk about the next step of their investigation. But I couldn’t get the visual out of my head.
They were naked!
I didn’t recognize this image as something sexual and the fact that they were brothers made it seem okay that they were standing around outside without a stitch of clothing on talking to each other. Their clothes were wet and they had to wait for them to dry and they were detectives discussing a case. It was okay.
But they were naked!
I read and reread those parts. Yum! The idea of dark-haired, eighteen-year-old steady and thoughtful Frank and blond, seventeen-year-old short-tempered and impetuous Joe posing nude in the woods by the river gave me goose bumps. I liked this feeling. I wished that I had a brother I got along with enough to do things like this. Jimmy was just too wild and different. Besides, Joe always did what Frank told him to and Jimmy never did what I told him to. I sighed. This would just have to be my dream.
There was a similar line of Christian adventure books for boys. These books weren’t as interesting as the Hardy Boys books and quite often the “preachiness” of the story overwhelmed any intrigue. These were called the Danny Orlis books.
The Danny Orlis books weren’t as well written as the Hardy Boys books. Frank and Joe seemed so…alive! Danny Orlis wasn’t real. Besides, Frank and Joe had each other. I really liked that part. Danny Orlis was…well, he was alone. Plus, he could be really bitchy sometimes.
Most of all, I started reading the Bible. Not just stories adapted for children from the Holy Scriptures, but the actual text of the King James Version itself. I wanted to know first-hand what God said about things.
My favorite character in the Bible, after Jesus, was David. Not the old David, who, after he became King turned into a sleazy, murderous adulterer. My hero was the young David. Out of all the men in the Promised Land, David was the one handpicked by God to be the next King of Israel. I pictured the young David as tanned and handsome, playing his harp while he watched over his sheep. I imagined that he was shorter than the average man, but muscular, and that he had curly light brown hair with a golden tint caused by constant exposure to the sun. My David had a robust and manly scent, made fresh by a constant outdoor breeze.
I could relate to David. He wrote poetry; I wanted to write stories too. He was musical; I played the piano and the clarinet. He seemed gentle and kind, like me. But he was also a fierce warrior and I got revved up every time I heard the story about how he killed the giant, Goliath, armed only with a slingshot. David was a tender soul, but he was no sissy.
The best part of the David story, though, was his relationship with Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of the reigning monarch, King Saul. King Saul learned that God had anointed David to be his successor instead of his rightful heir so Saul tried to kill David. Jonathan was aware of these facts, but he loved David so much, he didn’t care that David was going to be king instead of him. In several places, God tells us that Jonathan loved David as he loved his own soul.
Because of King Saul’s murderous plot against David, Jonathan and David were forced to meet secretly in hidden places. It was so romantic! Each time they met, they kissed, removed their clothes, wept, or made promises to each other. When David learned that Jonathan had been killed in battle, he tore his clothes, mourned, wept and fasted until evening. David publicly paid special tribute to Jonathan by wailing, “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
I wouldn’t understand the true nature of the relationship between these two young men for several more years. Right now all I knew was that I wanted my very own Jonathan.
As my mind was developing at a fast rate, so was my body. I remember watching a made-for-television movie about the Bible. At the very beginning of the film, as in the book it was based on, God created Adam and Eve. Suddenly Adam was there and was completely naked. Of course, this was network TV; all they were allowed to show was the appearance of nudity, so all you saw was the side of him. Yet you could see his bare ass—not the back of it, and definitely not a full-frontal shot, just his naked side. I noticed he had the most muscular thigh and leg. And he was stooping down as if God was just about to create Eve out of his rib. I remember being so taken with that image. Wow. The first man and he’s so beautiful! He was like a statue.
Soon after, I took a shower. I was hitting puberty. I recall catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, of my bare butt and my bare side. My leg had started to develop. I no longer had just a little boy’s limb; I was starting to get some muscle definition. I remember stooping down like that image of Adam and looking in the mirror and thinking, Wow, this feels good. I like looking like a man. I like looking at this. I wondered how much I had looked like that image on the TV show.
Looking in the mirror, I was attracted to what I saw. So I guess my first sexual attraction was to myself. That’s the type of thing that’s hard for me to admit. It sounds so narcissistic. I’ve heard that homosexuality is the ultimate form of narcissism because by wanting to have sex with someone of the same gender, we are really wanting to have sex with ourselves. Whatever. I just thought I looked hot.
Sometimes my penis would get hard and I didn’t know why. I came up with the theory that grown men’s penises were this big and hard all the time and, that since I was growing up, soon mine would be big and hard like this all the time. That didn’t seem very comfortable but if every man in the world dealt with it, so could I.
I also remember my second sexual attraction. All the boys in my sixth grade class took swimming lessons. I felt a strange sense of excitement inside me about changing clothes in the locker room with them, but I didn’t have a clue what that excitement meant, where it came from, or what it was about.
After a swimming lesson I was in the locker room on the bench getting dressed. I looked up and found my face inches away from the butt of a nineteen-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, buff college swimming coach. He was buck-naked and a hot feeling ran up and down along my backbone and to my chest and down my legs and back to my head. I couldn’t take