Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 13.06.2005 17:19

Two authors on Queers in the military spoke June 12 at Obelisk Bookstore in Hillcrest. Rich Merritt, author of “Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star,” described growing up in Greeneville, South Carolina; attending Bob Jones schools until his second year in college; joining the Marines after his expulsion; doing porn videos with a San Diego company while still on active duty; leaving the service and falling into a drug habit before cleaning up, finishing law school and becoming an attorney. Alex Buchman promoted his two books, “A Night in the Barracks” and “Barracks Bad Boys,” describing real-life accounts of Gay sex involving servicemembers.

Yes, Virginia, There IS Queer Sex in the Military
Merritt, Buchman Discuss Books on Queer Servicemembers at Obelisk

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

Despite the attempts of the U.S. military and Congress to prevent it — first by flatly banning Queer servicemembers and then, since 1993, by a so-called “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that in practice has amounted to pretty much the same thing — members of the U.S. armed forces frequently have sexual contact with people of their own gender. What’s more, the sexual activities of servicemembers frequently cross social stereotypes of what constitutes “straight” and “Gay.” That’s the message Rich Merritt, author of an autobiography called Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star (he’s also been a fundamentalist Christian, an Ecstasy addict, a law student and an attorney in a mid-sized corporate firm); and Alex Buchman, editor of A Night in the Barracks and Barracks Bad Boys, brought to Obelisk Bookstore in Hillcrest June 12.

The genre of true-life accounts of Queer sex involving servicemembers presented as serious attempts to understand how Queers in the U.S. military handled the clash between their sexual urges and the military’s attempts to suppress them really began with the work of author and self-described “military chaser” Steven Zeeland. A Gay man who discovered his attraction to servicemembers in the late 1980’s while living in Frankfurt, Germany near a U.S. Army base, Zeeland published his first book, Barracks Buddies and Soldier Lovers, in 1993 just as the debate on Queers in the military was heating up. In this book and his three subsequent ones — Sailors and Sexual Identity (1995), The Masculine Marine (1996) and Military Trade (1999) — Zeeland developed the idea that what goes on between servicemembers, and often between them and civilians as well, challenges the notion of a fixed “sexual orientation” and shows how much one’s sexual attractions and expressions are conditioned by circumstances and environment.

Buchman continues the critique in his own books. Zeeland contributed chapters to each of Buchman’s collections, as well as a preface to A Night in the Barracks; and both of his books also feature accounts by Gayle Martin, whom Buchman describes as “one of the most aggressive military chasers I know, the closest I know to a Gay man in a straight woman’s body.” Many of the stories in Buchman’s books deal with the tensions between (mostly) “straight” and “Gay” servicemen who either have sex with each other or discover a mutual attraction. Others expose the surprising amount of stereotypically “queeny” behavior servicemembers like the pseudonymous “Dirk Flamingo” — who contributed three chapters to Barracks Bad Boys, one of which Buchman read at the Obelisk event — can get away with in the ranks.

Asked if the stories in his books were verbatim from the credited authors, Buchman said he’d had to do some editorial work on them but mostly they were in the soldiers’ own words. “They’re all true as far as I could verify,” he said. “One is from a letter from the 1940’s. They’re their own words, either manuscripts or transcribed from audio tapes.” Buchman said he got many of the stories from Zeeland’s “Banker’s Box full of stories” — one of his contributors did an interview for Zeeland’s The Masculine Marine, as did Buchman himself — and some came through his Web site,  http://www.alexbuchman.com. “A lot of the contributors wish to remain anonymous or adopt pseudonyms, but sometimes they exorcise their personal demons” by telling him their stories, Buchman explained.

Merritt’s story has attracted public attention even before the publication of his book. He was profiled in a cover story, “The Shadow Life of a Gay Marine,” in the New York Times Magazine in 1998 (his Obelisk appearance was promoted in the Gay and Lesbian Times, also in a cover story), and his account is a series of wrenching personal transformations. Describing his background in fundamentalist Christianity, Merritt said, “I grew up on the campus of Bob Jones University” in Greeneville, South Carolina — then, as his way of pointing out just how extreme the Bob Joneses (there’ve been a number of them: Bob Jones I founded the university , his grandson Bob Jones III runs it now and there’s a Bob Jones IV waiting in the wings) are, he added, “They broke relations with Jerry Falwell because they think he’s too liberal.”

For the first 20 years of his life Merritt lived in Bob Jones’s world and attended Bob Jones educational institutions: a Bob Jones grade school, a Bob Jones high school and Bob Jones University for his freshman year in college. In his sophomore year Merritt was expelled — not for anything to do with homosexuality but “for dancing with a girl at a straight dance.” His upbringing in the Bob Jones world had been so strict that when he enlisted in the Marines as an officer candidate he actually saw that as an act of liberation. Merritt served in the Marine Corps for 13 years, attending officer candidate school at Fort Clemson near Greenville and then serving first in Okinawa and then at Camp Pendleton in San Diego’s North County.

While in the Marine Corps Merritt took his first tentative steps out of the moral world he’d grown up with, going to bars, working as a male stripper and exploring sex with men. By the time he reached Camp Pendleton he was vulnerable to being recruited for Gay porn — and while he said he had nothing against porn in moral terms he made it clear at Obelisk that he was embarrassed by his history as a porn performer and didn’t look back on it as a positive step in his development as a person. He filmed eight videos in four months for All Worlds — a local company owned by Rick Ford, who makes his servicemember videos under the pseudonym “Dirk Yates” and frequently claims that his models are otherwise “straight” — and only stopped when he met a partner and entered a serious relationship.

Merritt also got involved with the Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network (SDLN) — an organization he’s had his ups and downs with but which he now regards as positive — and “through them I got in touch with Jennifer Egan,” who would write the New York Times cover story on him. Then The Advocate got hold of his story and “outed” him as a former porn star. They’d contacted him and he begged off with a “no comment” — “I didn’t talk to them, and they ran the story anyway,” he recalled — and he drifted into the Gay party circuit and started using the drug Ecstasy.

“It feels good at first,” Merritt recalled, “but it wears off and now you have the problems you started with and your brain chemistry is screwed up. “It screwed up my world and my partner’s world, and I wrote my book to come to terms with it. I started my book, ‘Our secrets keep us sick’ (a quote from one of his therapists). There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy; secrecy is an element of shame. That’s what the porn was for me.”

Merritt eventually got into recovery from his drug use, made it through law school and took a job at a mid-sized firm — “a pretty liberal law firm that gives a lot of money to the Human Rights Campaign (a moderate Queer-rights group)” — only to be let go once his book came out. “They said the things in the book would compromise my effectiveness with clients,” Merritt recalled. “I’d only had one client, and he’s the biggest queen in five states.” It wasn’t just the exposure of their associate as a porn star that cost him his job, Merritt said — the niche of the mid-sized law firm is dying out and in order to stay in business you either have to be a small firm or a giant one — and besides he says he now wants to do public-interest law instead of corporate work anyway. “I’d rather go back to porn than work for a large law firm again,” he said bluntly.

Anxious to disprove Thomas Wolfe’s famous proverb that “you can’t go home again,” Merritt began his book tour in his home town of Greeneville, South Carolina. “Two people said they’d never go back to that bookstore again,” he said, “but I got about 50 people there who’d never been there before and that sounded like a fair trade-off. … The Bob Jones people don’t want to pick a fight with me.” He said he was embarrassed when he gave his book to his mother — and she passed it along to her pastor, whom Merritt recalled from his days in summer camp, when he was 11 and the pastor-to-be was a 22-year-old camp counselor on whom he’d had a crush. (“I timed my showers to be near him,” he acknowledged.)

Merritt is particularly proud of the feedback he’s got from the book through e-mail — including one he’d just got “from a Christian mother of three in Dallas. She went through the whole experience at Bob Jones University and getting a divorce was her coming-out. She went on for four pages.” He said the reception for the book is “even exceeding my own expectations — there’s got to be a negative backlash but I’m not seeing it” — and he’s getting inquiries about the movie rights, including an e-mail from Sony Pictures. “We’re hoping for a meeting with the guy who directed Latter Days [C. Jay Cox],” Merritt said.

“I’ve got e-mails from around the world, and 99.9 percent of them have been positive, mostly from people who grew up as fundamentalist Christians,” Merritt said. “I got one snippy e-mail from a Gay lawyer in L.A. who said, ‘Who made you a role model?’” — a criticism that played right into what Merritt considers the moral of his story: that people should find their own inner strength instead of looking for “role models.” One editor, he recalled, “told me what my book needed was a mentor figure, and I said, ‘I had a lot of people who helped me along the way, but I was my own mentor.’ If there’s a message, that’s it: be your own hero.”

Rich Merritt’s e-mail:  richmerritt@richmerritt.com
Rich Merritt’s Web site:  http://www.richmerritt.com
Alex Buchman’s Web site:  http://www.alexbuchman.com

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net