Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
between the naked man, the tingly feeling inside, and my penis getting hard, but I wasn’t sure. I knew, though, that through no intention of my own, I was attracted to this man’s body.
Slowly, I was learning about the sexual world. One evening while watching the evening news, the anchor talked about something called rape. I had assumed rape was the same as murder, but one night they talked about rape and murder. At the dinner table I asked what the difference was.
Momma gave Daddy a very serious stare and said “Paul, you need to talk to him.”
Daddy called me into his bedroom a few hours later, something he never did. He had an open encyclopedia in his lap. At once, I was frightened and excited. I had long suspected that the world was full of secrets adults hadn’t told me. Now I was about to find out what one of those secrets was.
He pointed to a diagram of a nude male figure and said something about semen and sperm coming out of the penis. Then, he turned to a diagram of a nude female figure and said something about the semen and sperm going into the woman’s opening between her legs. That’s how a baby was made. It was okay for a man and woman to do this if they were married but, if not, they weren’t allowed.
He said that when a man sent the semen and sperm to the woman when she didn’t want it, that was called rape. Daddy explained that when the penis was hard, it couldn’t pee, that that was when the semen and sperm came out. He said that maybe I’d noticed my penis getting hard already when I was around a pretty girl. I nodded even though I hadn’t observed quite that correlation.
I was more puzzled, though, by how the sperm and semen made it from the man’s penis into the opening between the woman’s legs. Daddy had left out a pretty important piece of the puzzle and I was left to my eleven-year-old imagination to fill in the gaps, so to speak. I reached the conclusion that sperm went through the air like hair spray from an aerosol can and found its own way into the woman. What that meant to me was that when my penis got hard, I needed to stay away from the girls.
As I entered puberty, staying away from girls would be the least of my worries.
Considering how many books I read, it’s only natural I would learn the nature of my dad’s omission—“the missing link” of sex—by reading about it. My junior high school history teacher encouraged us to read historical novels to learn history so I found a copy of a book called The Bastard by John Jakes. Probably not the book she had in mind. I became addicted to reading about this strange family of American Revolutionaries. They did wild things. The men took off the women’s clothes and played with their body parts. The women did the same to the men. Finally, one scene used words like “semen” and “thrust his penis into her opening” and later she had a baby. Finally, it all made sense. It sounded gross, but it fit with what Daddy had tried to explain to me.
The second or third book in the series talked about two men on a ship during the War of 1812. One man attacked the other and tried to “thrust” into the man’s butt-hole. The man who was to be the “thrustee” spotted the bulge in the “thruster’s” pants and fended him off before he could execute his sex act. The word “sodomy” was used. I read and reread that part several times. A light dawned and I became further enlightened to these adult secrets.
I campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980. When he came to the campus of Bob Jones University, I got to hear him speak and, after his speech, I got to shake his hand as well as Nancy’s. I was the happiest twelve-year-old in the world that day.
The late Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., was the former president and, in 1980, the current chancellor of Bob Jones University. We referred to him affectionately as “Junior.” He was world-renowned for being a loose cannon. He was old and didn’t care what came out of his mouth. Quite frequently his comments in our daily chapel service earned him ridicule or condemnation on the national news at night. He called Betty Ford a “slut” and prayed that God strike Al Haig dead. I and the other five thousand students, faculty, and administrators in the building joined him in that prayer.
“Dr. Bob [Junior] will fool you,” reported the Washington Post in the eighties. “He’s not at all what the media has put him up to be. You’d think he was some backward hick who barely knew his English. He’s not like that at all. He’s multifaceted…he’s a fine Shakespearean actor.”
The paper contained a 2,500-word story on the seventy-two-year old Dr. Bob Junior and his passion for the arts. “A painted portrait of the chancellor hangs just outside his office. It shows Bob Jones dressed as Shylock. There is a Bible in the painting—and a statue of the Bard.”
The story was that Dr. Bob Junior had wanted to be a professional Shakespearean actor, but that his father, the fire-and-brimstone turn-of-the-century evangelist, had persuaded his only son to sacrifice his passion for the stage and serve the Lord. While Junior may have not become a professional actor, every year he performed in at least one Shakespeare play and all of the students, staff, and faculty were required to attend. His sermons were also much more of a theatrical monologue than a theological discourse.
At the formal plays and concerts, which were also part of the “Artists Series,” all of the members of the audience showed their respect for the Jones family by standing when the Joneses arrived and took their seats in the special box reserved for the university’s “first family.”
Junior’s talents were not restricted to the stage. He was an avid art collector and today visitors come from all over the world to admire the University’s art collection. The Washington Post story focused primarily on Junior’s taste in paintings.
“Art feeds hunger in the hearts of men,” Dr. Jones Junior is reported to have said.
The Post noted the seeming contradictions presented by Dr. Bob Junior and his artistic preferences. “Protestant fundamentalists, whose wood churches are as spare as white china doorknobs, whose unpretentious hymns are shoveled out four-square, traditionally oppose pubic [sic] ostentation. Yet these Baroque pictures—with their ecstasies of passion, their flesh and writhing limbs—are some of the most sumptuous in the history of art.”
Al Franken had this to say about Dr. Bob Jones Jr.’s art collection in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: “You see, Dr. Bob II had spent some summers in the late 1930s as a tour guide in Rome, Paris and Vienna, and had acquired a taste for fine art. Luckily, when he returned to Europe in the late forties, he was able to acquire quite a bit of it at very reasonable prices.”
The Washington Post story concluded with a revealing tidbit about Jones. Dr. Bob Junior had a personal requirement that all of his paintings feature a Biblically-based subject. However, one painting that was thought to have been about Pharisees was about a “heathen subject” instead.
“I thought [Jones] would be dismayed, but not at all,” said the collector who discovered the mistake. “When I told him they weren’t Pharisees he said, ‘That’s all right. We’ll just call them scribes.’”
Dr. Bob Junior told us about a new disease that only sodomites could get and it was deadly. This was proof that God strikes dead those who mock His name. I thought Junior had finally gone crazy. How could a disease know if someone liked sex with men or women? It turned out Junior was right, sort of. This was how I learned about AIDS.
I had problems of my own. I got pubic hair way before any other guys in my junior high gym class. It embarrassed me. But suddenly I was the third tallest guy in the eighth grade. That was different. My voice also changed, but not in a good way. Instead of becoming deeper and more masculine, at first it had a higher pitch, like a woman with a deep voice, but still a woman’s voice. When I answered the phone at home, no one asked for my mother anymore, they just started in with “Hello, Ruth…” or even worse, “Missus Merritt…” I felt like shit. My voice was changing, but into a woman’s voice!
In the South, any hint of effeminacy in a male was not about to go unnoticed. Randy was a fat, typical bully type and he had his little sidekick Brent. Randy and Brent. One day I was walking and Randy and Brent were standing on the side—which wasn’t allowed—loitering was forbidden, but Randy and Brent were doing it anyway. I was walking toward the