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The 6/28/98 New York Times magazine profiled Merritt as a symbol of the Pentagon's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy towards gays. But like the Los Angeles Times, the NY Times did not realize that their man had been a porn star who appeared in Bad Moon Rising, Bullseye, and Reflections in the Wild. "One did not think of him as an actor," Bullseye director Michael Zen told the 2/16/99 Advocate, a magazine for gays. "He never pretended to have sex, which I think is kind of a rarity. He truly got so excited about what he was doing that he never played the character...he was literally having sex. We had to work fast just to capture what was happening. We didn't want to break into this real sex." "We thought he was wonderful," added Dak King, an associate of Zen's. "Everybody wondered why he just disappeared." Merritt was stationed at Camp Pendleton, long a connection between the military and the porn industry. In 1993, a scandal broke revealing that marine stationed at the camp had appeared in All Worlds homosexual porn tapes. The company still features news clippings from the incident on their best-selling The Few, the Proud, the Naked series which features military-style guys jerking off. (Advocate 2/16/99) "These [military-looking] guys are so authentically masculine," says Steven Zeeland, whose fourth book on gay sex in the armed forces, Military Trade, should be published in March. "But if you look more closely, you find a lot of other things gonig on. There's a fantasy o fthis kind of homoerotic brotherhoood, where there's this intensity of male bonding that's at once erotically charged...and somehow purer than the more easily available sexual pleasures we find in gay life." (Ibid.)
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