Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
dinner that evening, Daddy said to Momma, “Guess who I saw Richie with today on the playground when I picked him up?”
Oh good, I thought, Dad is going to tell Mom that I have some new friends.
“He was hanging around with a group of girls,” my dad said. Then he turned to me, “You aren’t a sissy, are you, son?” I’m sure he was joking and didn’t mean any harm. But there was that word again! I felt a lump form in my throat.
“No,” I replied, looking down at the table. And then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
My father’s statement was another painful awakening. It was the moment—shaded with time, but clear with emotion—when I first had the impression that maybe there’s something wrong with the way I was. I mean, before my father said that, I was okay. I would rather sit with Amy and her friends—the girls. I wasn’t comfortable trying to play ball with the boys. But once my dad pointed out to me that there was something wrong with it, I was caught in this: I’m not at ease playing with the boys, yet I’m not supposed to be playing with the girls. What the hell am I supposed to do? That was the beginning of discomfort about who I was.
The following day I was determined to solve the problem. My dad would not have to ask me again if I was a sissy. I tried to play ball with the other boys, but I soon realized it wasn’t working. My dad had been a football player and my mom played basketball. Even to this day, my mom tells a story about how, when I was a little boy, they would take me outside and throw me the ball and I just wouldn’t play. I would stand there and cry. My dad would joke around and look at my mom and say, “Who was it, Ruth? The mailman? The milkman?” I took that to mean that my dad was not “owning” me.
When, a bit older, I did try to play with the boys, I could only do it for a few excruciating minutes at a time. Then I would get their ridicule and criticism. I kept trying to play with them but I would inevitably mess up. By trying to remedy my dilemma I made it worse. Before that usually no one noticed me at all. And as long as no one noticed me I was fine. It was when they saw that I was not able to be like the other boys when it became horrible. I learned the real and terrible truth: the other boys did not want to play with me.
But it wasn’t something I worried about all the time, really. I think I had a typical child’s short attention span, along with a resourceful nature of trying to make things work. If I was rejected by the boys, it bothered me for awhile, and then I would distract myself with something else—like chasing a lightning bug—until it would be out of my mind. At least the conscious mind.
Long before my photo appeared on the cover of The Advocate—uncovering my history in porn—my little Southern community was familiar with sexual scandal. Like the time it was discovered that a woman in the church, Hattie May, was having a torrid affair with Preacher Jim, the minister. Preacher Jim’s wife was my Momma’s best friend whom I also loved dearly. She used to read “Winnie the Pooh” stories to me and I’d cry whenever Pooh got stuck in the honey tree. That made the scandal up close and personal although years would pass before I learned what had happened.
In my Daddy’s eyes, Hattie May and Preacher Jim were safe from being damned to hell for all time because he believed in eternal security, meaning, once you were “born again,” you were always “born again,” forever safe in accepting Jesus Christ. I liked the sound of that…“eternal security.” Sort of like a “get out of jail free” card. Grandpa Schrader didn’t agree with that concept. He believed that, even if you were born again, if you sinned, you “lost” your salvation. Over the years, they’d argue about this theological point for hours and hours. Momma and her younger sister would cry because Daddy and Grandpa were arguing. Jimmy and I would fall asleep waiting for the end of an argument that would never be resolved, at least not in this lifetime.
Grandpa Schrader, the godliest man I’d ever known, lay on his deathbed, terrified that he had sinned somehow and God wouldn’t let him into heaven. He didn’t believe in eternal security but he sure as hell believed in and feared eternal damnation.
Religion and relatives, like most of Southern society, are two of the three pillars of my family. Race is the third. The three “R’s” of being a Southerner. Your life revolves around them.
Your race determines where you live, where you go to school, where you go to church, where you shop and where you work. It determines whom you hang with and whom you can marry.
“Richie, what’s a cryin’ shame?” asked Uncle Herbert.
“I…I don’t know.” Uncle Herbert always made me nervous.
“It’s an Atlanta school bus goin’ over a cliff with an empty seat in the front!”
The meaning of the joke was obvious to any Southerner. The city of Atlanta was 64% African-American. Its public school system was even more overwhelmingly African-American because many white students attended private schools. The punch line was that an empty seat on an Atlanta school bus going over a cliff was a wasted opportunity to remove two or three African-American children from the human population and gene pool.
My uncles and cousins and sometimes the preachers used to sit around telling “nigger” jokes. I’d laugh because that’s what I was supposed to do, but the older I got the more it bothered me. I wish I could say it annoyed me enough to speak up, but the most I ever did was storm out of a family dinner in protest when I was a teenager, already letting out some of the budding drama queen that was lurking inside of me.
“Well, you really showed yourself today!” Momma said. I told her I didn’t like what her brothers and the others were talking about. She was somewhat sympathetic, but felt that making a grand and sweeping exit from the table wasn’t the way to make a point.
Division, strife and conflict were everywhere. After Preacher Jim’s affair with Hattie May became public knowledge, he was forced to resign from the pulpit. The new preacher brought Christian rock music—including electric guitars—into church. Daddy immediately disapproved. In a major family schism, we left the Pentecostal Holiness Church and became Baptists. Not just Southern Baptists—they were too liberal. We joined an Independent Baptist church in the city. It had over three thousand members.
Right after we joined, our new church admitted its first interracial couple. My folks didn’t approve of interracial marriages, but at the same time, they didn’t think an interracial couple who were already married should be denied membership in the church. Bob Jones University, however, had major problems with it and there was another big schism in the Christian community in Greenville, South Carolina.
Daddy and Momma said that by 1972, when I started school, the state was going to start forcing integration. The schools would have to lower their standards so that the blacks could pass. They wanted high standards for us so the way to get that was to send us to an all-white school, even if we didn’t have the money for tuition.
Even though I kept the paddlings from Mrs. Hand I had received at Tabernacle Kindergarten a secret, my parents had grown dissatisfied with the quality of my education at Tabernacle. They told me that the following year I would be transferring to a new school on the east side of town. My new school’s name was Bob Jones Elementary School and it was on the campus of Bob Jones University.
3
BORN AGAIN AT BOB JONES
I began first grade at Bob Jones Elementary School in late August 1973. Tabernacle had very much been a country church, with a country school. Hell, we were country people. Everything was country on our side of town. Bob Jones, on the other hand, was fifteen miles away, on the other side of town—the more affluent side. There was no bus that went that route. Instead, my mom got a job near the school so she could drive me there, go work, and then pick me up in the afternoon so we could go home together. She centered her whole life around me being at this school. I was very much aware that both my parents really sacrificed a lot to send me—and later my brother—to Bob Jones.
To my young eyes the school that calls itself the “Fortress of Fundamentalism” was quite imposing. It indeed felt like an exclusive place for the