Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Brandon and I kept thinking that maybe The Advocate wouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. Indeed, the next issue didn’t have anything about it at all. I breathed a sigh of temporary relief. Jennifer called me feeling the same way. “Maybe they decided to drop the story,” she said. I could only hope.
    But two weeks later, on a Sunday, I received an e-mail from a friend of mine in DC. The e-mail simply said, “I just saw The Advocate ! Fuck ’em.” So I knew something was coming. Yet no one was talking to me. The silence was deafening.
    Monday night I came home and Brandon said, “Tim Carter just called—You’re on the cover.” Oh my God. Now I was identified as THE MARINE WHO WAS ALSO A PORN STAR . I was just mortified. How was I going to deal with this?
    Everything I struggled to accomplish in becoming a Marine would now be questioned. All the good things I had hoped would come out of Jennifer Egan’s article would be stained. Everything that had come before would now be put under a microscope. My goals, aspirations, my very character, were all about to come under major scrutiny because of two completely separate parts of my life that would soon be connected forever: the fact that I had been a Marine and the choice I made to appear in porn films. Now even I questioned my choices.
    I didn’t know I was gay when I joined the Marines, or rather, I hadn’t consciously admitted I was gay, even to myself. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had taught me that homosexuals were evil people; therefore, I could not be a homosexual. Occasionally, I had sexual thoughts about other men, but because I could not be gay, I assumed most men were just like me and also had these thoughts. I was adept at mental gymnastics.
    I joined the Marine Corps for the same reasons most people join the Marine Corps: I loved my country and wanted to do my patriotic duty. I also needed money for college, and I joined in 1985, just after Congress had just passed the new GI Bill giving tuition assistance to men and women who had completed their service commitment.
    Subconsciously, I felt deficient in my masculinity and wanted a boost to my manliness. I also wanted to be around a lot of men. Wanting to be around a lot of men is not a homosexual desire; many heterosexual male Marines prefer to work in an all-male environment. For me, however, my desire to be around men was both sexual and nonsexual.
    I also wanted a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of something larger than myself. I wanted to be a part of “The Few, the Proud.”

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T HE G OOD S ON
    W hen people are trying to get to know me, asking me questions, attempting, I guess, to find out why I made the decisions I’ve made and what led me to become the man I am—I look back over my childhood. At the time, nothing seemed all that unusual to me. It was all I knew. I had nothing to compare it with. But reviewing my life as an adult I can understand—so clearly—that my decisions, my inhibitions, my exhibitions, the person I am today, all have their roots in that small Southern town where religion was such an integral part of my existence. A place where I always tried so hard to please and live up to the expectations that everyone had for me—my parents, my family, my teachers, God, but most of all myself.
    I was born in the early fall of 1967, just at the end of the fabled “Summer of Love.” The “Summer of Love” was as foreign to my birthplace as the Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. I was born at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, appropriately beginning my existence at a church-affiliated hospital. I always perceived my upbringing as middle class, now I think it may have been lower middle class.
    To get to my house, you went ten miles south of Greenville and took a nondescript exit off the freeway onto a narrow, winding, rural country road. On a hill off the road, there was a big plot of land that my granddad had purchased years before. As any