Finally at ease.

One man's long way out of the Marines

Like a game of Scrabble, The New York Times Magazine's June 28 cover story on gay marines was sprinkled with letters. The initials offered limited but intriguing clues to the identity of the officers featured. Coming out during Gay Pride Month, the piece was sure to catch the eye of many interested parties, in no small part because of the figure on the cover. Shielded in the photo only by his salute, Capt. Rich Merritt, 31, was hiding for the last time. The article, which identified him only as "R.," was his parting shot at the U.S. military, for 12 years his employer and patron, his moral staff and private demon.

"He has a California tan, deep-set eyes and sturdy build characteristic of marines, along with a large Marine Corps tattoo--eagle, globe and anchor," read the Times Magazine piece, describing Merritt. "Aigorous, sociable man, he is full of plans"--plans that did not include the Marine Corps. "I'm fed up with having to hide," Merritt was quoted as saying. He had decided to leave the corps months earlier, and the expose was a fitting cap to his years as an agent provocateur--at least in regard to the infamous "don't ask, don't tell don't pursue" policy.

Merritt had prepared himself for the worst when the article came out. Fearing he would be investigated, he moved all of his things ("photographs, books, some porno tapes, but mostly computer") out of the home of his lover, David. His companion of three years, David is a civilian mechanical engineer Merritt met at a beach party for his loose circle of gay and lesbian service members.

Despite the preparation, Merritt was caught off-guard when his commander called him into his office at Camp Pendleton in San Diego one morning. "He handed me a faxed copy of the article [with] the sections about me highlighted, [and] he said, `This sounds a lot like you,'" Merritt recalls. For a dark second Merritt wondered if he would suffer the same humiliating fate he had described with fear in the Times: a dishonorable discharge after a bruising inquiry. But his boss was quick to allay his concerns. The officer looked at Merritt calmly and said, "I'm not going to ask you if this is you. And nobody else will. Not under my command."

Apparently not everyone was as tolerant. Friends in the Pentagon told Merritt a debate was raging over how to handle his case. "One faction wanted to crucify me, and the other didn't want any press," he says. But as his commander promised, the investigation never came, and on October 1, Merritt, like any marine retiring in good standing, was honorably discharged.

He attributes at least part of his good fortune to the backlash from the public scrap the Navy had earlier in the year with Timothy McVeigh. In an apparent violation of its own policy, the Navy went after McVeigh after concluding he was gay based on an America Online user profile. Merritt's case could be seen as a slowdown of the Pentagon's unrelenting search for gay and lesbian service members. "Basically, [my superiors were] saying, `Keep your mouth shut. We don't want any bad publicity. We can reach an agreement here,'" Merritt says. That The New York Times Magazine piece will have any impact beyond Merritt's case seems improbable, however.

Merritt is an unlikely poster boy for gays in the military. He grew up an ardently antigay Christian fundamentalist. "How prophetic," he told a gay-friendly crowd at West Hollywood [Calif.] Presbyterian Church this fall, "that I should be here today. I wanted to be an evangelist at 15." He attended a religious high school, which he called a "fortress of fundamentalism," and joined the reserves at 18 to help pay his tuition at South Carolina's Clemson University.

In 1992 he was posted on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where he remembers hearing about two male service members having sex in a bathroom stall. "The next day one of the guys felt guilty and turned himself in but said he had been forced by the other one," Merritt says. "He was let go because there's this [unwritten rule] that it's OK for it to happen once. It's the Queen for a Day Clause."

On Okinawa, Merritt also became friends with another service member who believed gays should be able to serve openly. "I had these conversations with him," Merritt says, "and he said, `Why don't you face it. Your interest in this subject is telling you something.'" It was around this time Merritt realized his sexual attraction to men was not merely a private matter. "It's not enough to be neutral," he says. "You have to actively put out the idea that you are straight." He had already begun to consciously deceive his superiors about his private life. He had "stunt babes"--female friends who posed as girlfriends--and had accepted the cynical view that this masquerade was necessary to survive.

Humor was Merritt's release. He used gay jokes both to taunt the straight world with his hidden gayness and to prove his own heterosexual bona fides. In 1997, as an aide-de-camp, he heard his commander joke about a married officer who had been discovered cruising for "queers" on the Internet "Did he contact you?" he remembers his boss asking jokingly. Without missing a beat, Merritt deadpanned that it was possible since he had not yet checked his E-mail. And in another incident: "After the Big Gay Al episode on South Park, which I knew everyone in the office would have watched, I came in and the guys asked, `How are you?' I said, `Super, thanks for asking,'" Merritt says, mimicking the character's lisp.

What he really wanted to tell his fellow marines he could do only in the November 10, 1997, "Navy Times" newsletter, using the pseudonym Buster Pittman: "Like it or not, you already shower and live with homosexual men and women. Gays and lesbians have been in the military since Alexander the Great, and will continue to be in the military as long as recruiters keep their doors open."

But neither the jokes nor the column could kill the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Merritt found himself in dangerous situations every day. Sometimes they were also insulting. He once served as military escort to the notoriously antigay former representative Robert Dornan (R-Calif.). "All I could do was be quiet, even though I was seething," he recalls. It was this discomfort that prompted Merritt to work with the Times reporter, who had contacted him through the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund, and eventually to retire from the Marine Corps.

Based on the reactions of some of the 90 marines under his command at Camp Pendleton, Merritt is hopeful that attitudes can change. "One man under my command asked me if it was me [in the story], and I couldn't lie to him," Merritt says. "He used to be quite homophobic. But now he's much better. And he's going to go places in the military."

But the biggest challenge facing Merritt may not have been in the military. The publication of his name and story in these pages presents yet another level of disclosure, since he had not come out to his parents at the time this article was written. "I have drafted a letter to them," he says. "They'll get it before they hear about the story in The Advocate."

Meanwhile, Merritt is enjoying his retirement. He not only has let his hair grow out a bit but also has moved to Huntington Beach, Calif., with David and is exploring the possibility of a TV movie based loosely on his life. He is also a student at the University of Southern California law school, with an eye on becoming an entertainment attorney. No longer does he live daily with the the paranoia and discomfort he experienced in the Marine Corps under "don't ask, don't tell."

"The military is no place for a social experiment," he says, turning the Pentagon's argument on its head. "This policy is exactly that."

Harrold is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.