Rich grew up in an ardently antigay Christian fundamentalist family, and attended a religious high school, which he called a "fortress of fundamentalism". He joined the reserves at 18 to help pay his tuition South Carolina's Clemson University.
In 1992 he was posted to the Japanese island of Okinawa, where he remembers hearing about two male service members having sex in a bathroom stall.
In 1998, he was profiled anonymously in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the stresses of living as a gay officer under the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
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 everybody 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 in 1999, Merritt, like any marine retiring in good standing, was honorably discharged.
Rich, a 12-year veteran of the Marine Corps, retired and was subsequently profiled both in The Advocate and the Los Angeles Times; later it was revelead by The Advocate that Rich (under the name Danny Orlis) had also been moonlighting as a gay male pornstar while he was still an active-duty Marine. He has written a book which hit the bookstores Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star (2005).
Rich is now enjoying his retirement. He not only has let his hair grow out a bit but also has moved to Huntington Beach, California, with his lover David (a civilian mechanical engineer Merritt met at a beach party for his loose circle of gay and lesbian service members) and is also a student at the University of Southern California Law School, with an eye on becoming an entertainment attorney.
