Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star by Rich Merritt Read Free Book Online Page A

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