Asked And Told

This book is another one from my TBR pile. I have had it for a while, and the pages have even started to yellow. I remember buying this book, too. And what sold me on the book? The salacious title: "Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star." I had visions of this book being so hot hot hot.  But I also remember starting to read it and found it to not hold my attention. So the book just ended up in my ever-growing pile. But as I started to look at that pile and pull out things, I chose this one. I started reading it, and it actually made a lot more sense to me, being that DADT was just revealed and he talks about his experience with that during his tenure. I thought that part was pretty interesting - the struggles for him to hide his sexuality in a DADT environment. It almost came naturally from him - he grew up and struggled in a fundamentalist Christian background, going to school, and later being expelled from the infamous Bob Jones University.  However, when he writes about the rest of his life, his struggles in dealing with the WeHo gay life, the book lost steam for me. We all have our struggles, we all have our issues, but he was getting up there and went from one hot mess experience to another. It became repetitive and he just became a gay cliche. Plus, this book needed some serious editing. Weighing in at almost 500 pages, there are stories upon stories that got in the book just because. At some point, they became minutiae. And I know I would have liked more to read on the "porn star" but it was pretty scant because, well, truthfully he wasn't much of a porn star: he did 4 scenes from semi-obscure studios. And really, for him to pump this up on the title is close to false advertising. That said, the book is pretty well-written. You can really sense that Mr. Merritt has a passion for writing.  I just question whether we really needed to read about every single wedding he ever went to. This book did open my eyes on a lot of things. I know that before, I really wasn't into the political issue of DADT, and now I can understand how very important for that policy be repealed. It's history now, but our history defines us. 

BC/5