A Gay Marine

When he became the embodiment of undercover gays in the military by having his picture on the cover of the New York Times Magazine last summer, Rich Merritt, 31, was a Marine Corps captain still living half in the shadows.

On the magazine’s front, Merritt stands at attention in uniform--an off-kilter, white-gloved salute covers his face.

Inside he told of his 12 years as a gay Marine but insisted on remaining anonymous.

Now, three months into his retirement from the Marine Corps, Merritt is stepping forward. In the Dec. 21 issue of The Advocate, a national magazine addressing gay issues, the Huntington Beach man reveals he was the Marine who skirted the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy.

Although the upcoming magazine piece is a sort of debut for Merritt, the truth is that while he was in the military, many people already believed him to be gay. Also, military officials had pinpointed him as the subject of the New York Times article even before the June 28 story was published, he said.

“They figured out how many captains are at Camp Pendleton, how many had served as aides to generals and some other things--it wasn’t that hard,” Merritt said Thursday.

A lieutenant who worked for him approached Merritt with the article in hand and said there had been rumors about him for years.

Prepared for the worst, Merritt had removed all traces of gay references--books, pictures and other items--from his apartment. In his wallet he kept a yellow scrap of paper with the names and numbers of his lawyer and the journalists involved in the story, all in code.

“That’s how paranoid I was,” he said.

His anonymity in the article saved his career. Because he was not identified by name, his superior told him, military lawyers determined he had not actually declared himself to be gay and therefore could not be asked directly.

Nonetheless, the fractured life he had lived--pretending to have girlfriends, making homophobic jokes, returning to base after visiting gay bars--was too stressful to continue.

“It is not enough not to be gay in the Marines, you have to be straight,” he said, explaining the cover-ups. “There’s no such thing as neutral.”

Believing in the Marine Corps’ emphasis on honesty and integrity, Merritt decided he could fulfill the mandate only by leaving.

He still believes gays have the right to serve openly.

Being a Marine is belonging to something larger than yourself, he said. It is natural for everyone to yearn for the meaning and structure offered by the corps. And while gay people might give up some freedoms to belong, he said, everyone in the military gives up significant personal freedom.

In a way, life in the military helped him recognize his homosexuality.

He joined the Marine reserves to pay for college, but the new experience awakened him to new beliefs and new ways of living, he said. It weakened his ties to fundamentalism, challenged racial assumptions from his conservative Southern upbringing and led him to the truth about his sexual orientation.

As for the hostility and censure sure to follow his loss of anonymity?

“Four or five years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it,” he said. “But now I believe people have a right to believe what they want to believe--even if they believe I don’t have the right to exist.

“As a Marine I was willing to die for people to have that freedom.”