Lounge of Tomorrow - Maybe Stella's got Groove, but he ain't Groovin'

I guess you can only get it back on loan.

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By HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Terry McMillan and Jonathan Plummer So that groove that best-selling author Terry McMillan got back? Not really so groovy after all.

The hot young Jamaican stud McMillan married, who inspired the plot of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and gave romantic hope to millions of middle-age single women, is, it turns out, gay.

A tale as steamy and dramatic as any McMillan ever wrote is being filed in serial form at Contra Costa County Superior Court in California.

That's where McMillan, 53, is divorcing her husband of six years, Jonathan Plummer, 30, accusing him of marrying her under false pretenses so he could get his hands on her millions and a U.S. citizenship.

"It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit," she said in court papers.

"I was humiliated," she said. "Jonathan has manipulated me from the very beginning in his scheme."

Plummer is trying to void the prenup he signed, McMillan is trying to annul the marriage so Plummer can be deported and both have obtained restraining orders against the other.

She wants him to stay away from the $4 million mansion they shared in the Bay Area. He says she has flung both objects and epithets.

"She is an extremely angry woman who is homophobic and is lashing out at me because I have learned I am gay," Plummer wrote in court papers.

He told the San Francisco Chronicle she wrote on a bottle of Jamaican hot pepper sauce: "Fag Juice Burn Baby Burn."

She says he waited to tell her he was gay until he knew his citizenship was going to be approved.

Plummer says he didn't know he was gay when he met McMillan in June 1995 when, recuperating from her mother's death, she visited the Negril resort where he worked.

"I was a 20-year-old kid when I met her and had no idea that she was anybody other than an attractive older woman," he said.

Back in 1996, McMillan told critics that "Stella" - the story of a 42-year-old career woman who finds love with a 20-year-old resort worker - started out as a poem for Plummer. It became a best seller and a hit movie. She dedicated the book to him, then married him, put him through college and set him up in a dog grooming business.

McMillan filed for divorce in January, but the ugly split didn't become public until a story in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

The author is about to embark on a book tour for her new novel, "The Interruption of Everything," but her personal drama is likely to overwhelm the fictional one.

She had no comment, but her publicist said in statement that "she will not let this detract from the many blessings in her life." A judge has ordered McMillan to pay Plummer $2,000 a month in spousal support until the case goes to trial in October.

Originally published on June 30, 2005