Richard Wayne Merritt (born September 26, 1967) is an American LGBT activist, adult film actor, writer, and attorney.
Merritt has been a public figure since he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine on June 28, 1998, in an article by Jennifer Egan entitled Uniforms In The Closet: The Shadow Life Of A Gay Marine.
The diagnosis and the nature of the illness prompted Merritt to give up his San Diego law practice in early 2004 and return to the South to be near his family in this time of crisis.
According to his memoir, Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island was the first time he had any significant experience away from the fundamentalist enclave of Greenville and the BJU campus.
When he left his initial active duty training assignments and returned to BJU, Merritt began having problems with the rules and policies of the school.
That fall, a freelance writer named Max Harrold, approached Merritt about interviewing him for a story he planned to pitch to The Advocate, the leading national news and interest magazine serving the lesbian and gay community.
[11] From 1996 until his resignation from the Marines in 1998, Merritt wrote an op-ed column for the Navy-Marine Corps Times, a Gannett-owned newspaper[12] distributed on US military installations throughout the world.
In January 2008, to launch the media blitz for Code of Conduct Merritt was interviewed for CBS News on Logo (TV Channel) by Itay Hod.