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

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.

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B ORN A GAIN AT B OB J ONES
    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 chosen few. First there was the tall, vine-covered fence that hid the school from the prying eyes of outsiders on the boulevard. That has since