Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
Egan’s article would be stained. Everything that had come before would now be put under a microscope. My goals, aspirations, my very character, were all about to come under major scrutiny because of two completely separate parts of my life that would soon be connected forever: the fact that I had been a Marine and the choice I made to appear in porn films. Now even I questioned my choices.
I didn’t know I was gay when I joined the Marines, or rather, I hadn’t consciously admitted I was gay, even to myself. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had taught me that homosexuals were evil people; therefore, I could not be a homosexual. Occasionally, I had sexual thoughts about other men, but because I could not be gay, I assumed most men were just like me and also had these thoughts. I was adept at mental gymnastics.
I joined the Marine Corps for the same reasons most people join the Marine Corps: I loved my country and wanted to do my patriotic duty. I also needed money for college, and I joined in 1985, just after Congress had just passed the new GI Bill giving tuition assistance to men and women who had completed their service commitment.
Subconsciously, I felt deficient in my masculinity and wanted a boost to my manliness. I also wanted to be around a lot of men. Wanting to be around a lot of men is not a homosexual desire; many heterosexual male Marines prefer to work in an all-male environment. For me, however, my desire to be around men was both sexual and nonsexual.
I also wanted a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of something larger than myself. I wanted to be a part of “The Few, the Proud.”
2
THE GOOD SON
When people are trying to get to know me, asking me questions, attempting, I guess, to find out why I made the decisions I’ve made and what led me to become the man I am—I look back over my childhood. At the time, nothing seemed all that unusual to me. It was all I knew. I had nothing to compare it with. But reviewing my life as an adult I can understand—so clearly—that my decisions, my inhibitions, my exhibitions, the person I am today, all have their roots in that small Southern town where religion was such an integral part of my existence. A place where I always tried so hard to please and live up to the expectations that everyone had for me—my parents, my family, my teachers, God, but most of all myself.
I was born in the early fall of 1967, just at the end of the fabled “Summer of Love.” The “Summer of Love” was as foreign to my birthplace as the Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. I was born at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, appropriately beginning my existence at a church-affiliated hospital. I always perceived my upbringing as middle class, now I think it may have been lower middle class.
To get to my house, you went ten miles south of Greenville and took a nondescript exit off the freeway onto a narrow, winding, rural country road. On a hill off the road, there was a big plot of land that my granddad had purchased years before. As any Southerner will tell you, family is of utmost importance. Grandpa Merritt’s house was there, and right next to it was our house, and right next to that was the house of my aunt and uncle. Our house was small; my grandpa built it in 1963 for my parents. We had a big front yard and a driveway, which we shared with my aunt and uncle. There was an extensive wooded area behind our houses that sloped steeply down to a winding river. If you kept on going down the road another mile you would come to a little town called Piedmont built on the banks of the Saluda River.
At the time I was born my father was working for Duke Power as a meter reader. Soon after I was born my mother went to work doing bookkeeping and secretarial stuff for a big chemical conglomerate.
I loved my mom. She was beautiful and tender and we were very close but sometimes, it seemed to me, she had trouble expressing herself. For as long as I could remember, I was always, always, always trying to do little things to make her proud of me, but she never seemed be able to satisfy my hunger for approval. She did feel proud of me for many things—my sensitivity, my thick hair, my thoughtfulness—but she wasn’t always able to express it. Or maybe I just needed to hear more than she was able to give.
In the mornings, before my mom left for work, she would take me to Momma King’s. She was my babysitter and the one person in life to whom I could do no wrong. She spoiled me, buying me the kind of apples I liked, making me pinto beans for lunch, and things like that. To this day—and she’s in her late eighties—when I visit her she says, “Richie, do you remember when you were two years old, I was dusting the light, standing on that footstool, and you came in and said, ‘Momma King, be careful. Don’t fall, you’ll hurt yourself.’ At two years old you were the most thoughtful little boy.”
And that’s the kind of thing my mom would never say to me. She would never point out that I was considerate—because she wanted me to be even better. Yet Momma King made me aware of all those little things I did right. Things like that stand out in my mind because they were so important to me at the time.
One sunny October morning in 1970, I was staying over at Momma King’s and I remember walking across her driveway as Daddy pulled up in his 1960 black Ford Falcon. Momma was in the passenger seat, looking radiant and lovely, as every mother should appear to her three-year-old child. My mother always looked that way to me. She was holding something across her chest.
Momma King had already informed me that my parents would be bringing my new little baby brother home from the hospital that day, but I was unprepared for the sight. I was overwhelmed. I had seen Mom hold babies before, but not one of her own. Seeing her sitting there, beaming with this new child, was like magic. She seemed complete. Daddy looked handsome and content, sitting in the driver’s seat with his wife and two sons within his reach. I could hardly believe it—I had a baby sibling! I was thinking, This could be fun! Jimmy, my baby brother, looked like a toy I could play with, he was so cute. We were a happy little family with a promising future ahead of us.
Sadly, although I did not realize it, Momma King would never again be my babysitter. By the time my mother returned to work several years after my brother was born, I had started school and no longer needed a full-time babysitter.
But throughout my life, I visited Momma King every few years. People frequently remarked that it was so sweet of me to visit this lonely old widow. Well, perhaps it was sweet of me, but I didn’t visit Momma King only for her sake. I also visited her for my benefit. Everyone needs someone who has known them from an early age, who loves them unconditionally and who believes that they can do no wrong. Momma King has always been that person in my life. Her love flowed freely, extravagantly, unencumbered with judgments. She just loved me simply for who I am, her “sweet little Richie.”
Years later, just weeks after I had gotten over my denial and finally admitted to myself I was gay, I went home for a Christmas visit. Just a few weeks before I took a long, hard look at myself in the mirror and said, “Rich Merritt, you’re a homosexual.” I was twenty-five, still in the Marine Corps, and I hadn’t come out to anyone else yet. While I was visiting my family I went to see Momma King and she told me a story about a relative of hers. She said, “You know he’s one of those homer-sexuals.” That’s the way she pronounced it. But then she quickly added, “But what do I know about that? He is my family and I love him—and you know we’re all God’s children, anyway.” God, I still cry when I think of that—to hear this old woman make that statement at that particular time in my life was just absolutely extraordinary. It was the first time I ever heard anyone back home say something so nonjudgmental about being gay.
Yet her gentle statement also made me somewhat uneasy because it forced me to consider whether God approved or disapproved of what I felt and of what I had done. I had pushed that issue aside for months, and now here was this saintly woman adding new dimensions to my confusing thoughts.
But that was all a long way in the future. Before kindergarten, my life had consisted of listening to my parents’ sweet voices read books to me, playing in the sandbox beneath the oak tree, catching lightning bugs at night, and curling up by the fireplace in the winter to watch cartoons and The Brady Bunch. Long summer days. Hot summer days. My cousins would come down and my mom would babysit for them. My mom’s side of the family was five miles up the road in nearby Powdersville, South Carolina, and we’d all play games under