What would you do? You’re on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Magazine — a gay Marine officer, whose face is barely hidden behind a strategically placed salute.

You have agreed to speak, along with your Marine buddies, also gay, about a life of skulking around under the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. You tell the woman reporter that you sometimes go on pretend-dates with "stunt babes," that you miss the sort of hugs-and-kisses from your lover that greet almost every other Marine when he steps off a battleship. Yet to be honest, you and your buddies love the Marine Corps with all your hearts and souls.

Being a man of honor, the kind the Marines are adept at molding out of earthy country-boy stock, you bristle under a policy that requires you to be a hypocrite, to never have permission to simply shoot the breeze with another Marine about what your life is really about. So you and your buddies have agreed to speak out within the confines of that law: anonymously.

Your first shock comes when the Times story appears. Though you have introduced the Times reporter to your tight-knit circle of buddies, she makes you the centerpiece of her lengthy cover story. It comes out on Gay Pride weekend, 1998. The piece causes a sensation. Where you have always been a model Marine that could have stepped out of a recruiting poster, you are now a model of what’s wrong with the military. The piece details how the military is squandering some of it brightest kids on a policy that never did fit, that pleases neither right nor left.

Not everyone is overjoyed. The Pentagon for one is righteously pissed to find itself exposed, to have its special rules held up in the light of common sense. And it’s pretty clear to your immediate superiors at Camp Pendleton that the Marine named "R" in the the Times piece is you, Captain Rich Merritt. Will you make the next couple of months to your scheduled honorable discharge? This is the worry that makes you erase every item on your hard dive. But you do make it. The Pentagon does not want to cause a fuss. Not with your top-of-the-grade record.

Out of the Marines, you get a call from the New York Times. They want to do a follow up — this time using your real name. You agree but inform them you will be breaking your anonymity more appropriately in the Advocate. There is talk of a political career. You’re accepted at the University of Southern California Law School. Coming out in so public a way has filled your life with shining prospects.

And then suddenly a black orb eclipses your summer sky. The Advocate discovers your last and darkest secret — you had a porn career. Not a career really, something you did for four months in 1995 — eight porn films, total. Suddenly the New York Times loses interest in a follow-up. The courageous ex-Marine is not quite the square-jawed superhero of gay rights that the fairytale media was dreaming of. Porn — amazingly — still has the power to squash a career in America, a country both utterly sex-driven and yet sex-ashamed.

Or does it?

Therein hangs a curious tale, boys and girls, all laid out in Rich Merritt’s new memoir Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star — a riveting and, given the gimmicky title, unexpectedly substantial read. Nightcharm editor John Calendo recently asked Rich Merritt about that "fatal" porn revelation, as well as coming out in the Marines and his days at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Bible college.

Nightcharm:You write that you did porn films partly as a response to the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. How did you connect the two?

Rich Merritt: I felt intense anger – rage really — at a new law that was targeted directly at me and my friends. Also because of the policy, I had no outlet for my rage. Any psychologist will tell you that an emotion as intense as what I was feeling has to be dealt with — or it will deal with you!

In my case, it dealt with me by clouding my judgment completely. I think most gay men have watched porn and wondered what it’s like to be in a video. But most gay men do a quick cost/benefit analysis in their heads and reach the conclusion that the potential costs of doing gay porn aren’t worth the expected benefits.

The extreme nature of the emotions I was feeling caused me to rationalize away the danger, potential costs and risks I was taking. That’s primarily how the passage of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell helped push me over the edge into the porn industry.

NC: Still, wasn’t doing porn ever just a little bit of fun? Or, in it’s small way, glamorous?

Merritt: Oh sure, it was very fun and exciting. Like most things, porn is neutral morally. It’s what we do with it or how we approach it that adds the moral dimension. It can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on what we choose.

Unfortunately, most of my reasons were not from a healthy place. I could have gone to jail – a military prison — for a very long time. One of my reasons for doing it was the chemical rush in my brain from even the anticipation of the next video. Would the guys be hot? Would the scene go well? And yes, being in porn is hard — pardon the pun — work! But it is fun hard work. If the guys are really into it, it’s the ultimate male bonding experience. We’re all young, horny, sexy, hot, muscular guys doing this exciting and daring thing together.

Glamour is a funny word to me, because every time I feel I’m in a glamorous place, it suddenly crosses the line into camp or contradiction. Like when we were shooting Bullseye and they had one of the top makeup artists in Hollywood on the set getting us ready — with all the blood and gore in that video it was very make-up intensive — and I thought "Wow! A real makeup artist! This is so … GLAMOROUS!" but then I looked at myself in the mirror after Chad Knight and I had our makeup on, and I looked like a drag queen without the wig!

NC: Your parents, who were not wealthy, sacrificed a great deal to send you to to evangelical Christian schools. You went to Bob Jones Elementary, Bob Jones Academy, and finally Bob Jones University, a notoriously anti-Catholic, Holier-Than-Thou Bible college. Do I detect a certain affection in your book for the insular Bob Jones world you grew up in?

Merritt: Oh God, I hope not! I mean, I was glad for all the strict rules that kept the sexes separated because that had the unintended consequence of making it easier for my sexual desires to remain hidden. But no, I would definitely not describe my feelings for Bob Jones University as affection. Maybe the perverse sort of affection that Patty Hearst developed for the SLA stemming from the Stockholm Syndrome, but not real affection.

Oh, I suppose I do have some grudging respect for the moral grounding I received. I don’t mean moral like not swearing or abstinence-only. For me, morality means an understanding that there is a purpose that is larger than ourselves and only when we get that realization can we be happy.

Our popular culture doesn’t help people get to that place — with the me-first-ism of modern society and celebrity worship and worship of the beautiful, youthful body — hey, I didn’t say I didn’t partake of some of that too! Most people stay trapped in what has been called the bondage of self and that’s a lonely prison. At BJU and in fundamentalism, at least we were taught that God exists. Even though I love a very different God now, I am glad I had rooted in me a strong belief in God’s existence.

Morality also means honesty and I did learn honesty at BJU. Most reviewers have described my book as extremely honest and ironically, it was at BJU where I learned that level of honesty.

NC: In your book, you also make it clear that the Bob Jones world was an artificial, self-contained universe, shut off from the outside world and in conflict at certain key points with human nature itself: There was no masturbation, no sexual displays such as dancing, and, of course, no gay people. You were always a smart child yet you took it all seriously, even more than other boys you knew. What was it like growing up as a true-blue believer who would obediently not masturbate even in his hormone-rampant teen years?

Merritt: Oddly, it wasn’t as bad it sounds because I didn’t know what I was missing! Once a friend asked a group of us if we ever jacked off. I was the only one who said yes. His comment was that every guy does it, but no guy admits to it. I totally ruined his point because I admitted to it, but the funny irony is that it wasn’t true! I HADN’T jacked off! — but I thought I would be ridiculed if I didn’t speak up!

I was more concerned in my teenage years that I didn’t have a girlfriend. I just didn’t find girls interesting, intriguing or attractive. I kept telling myself it was because I hadn’t met the right girl yet and when I did, I would suddenly get what all the fuss was about love and sexual attraction.

In some ways, fundamentalist teaching and homosexuality help each other out. I was never tempted to fornicate with a girl, or even hold hands with a girl, which was strictly forbidden as well. Once I got in college I did more than hold hands, but that’s only because the girl was pretty aggressive. For the most part, the strict rules and teaching against HETEROSEXUAL promiscuity were great. I felt like I must be more pious than anyone else because I never had problems with my thought-life when it came to wicked sexual thoughts involving women.

Men, of course, were another story.

The concluding part of this interview can be found here.

Rich Merritt has his own website and would be happy to receive email from our readers. His book Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star can be ordered from Amazon.

Special thanks to B. Andrew Plant. Top-most photo by David Hubert.

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