Portland filmmakers explore lives of gay couples

By Jenn Director Knudsen

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How long have you been with your partner? One year? Fifty-one years?

Either way or in between, you've probably experienced moments of starry-eyed love, fiery anger and just plain boredom.

This range of experience is not the province of any age, religion or ethnicity. These are part and parcel of any long-term relationship, and no less for same-sex couples.

A documentary film screening five times daily through July 5 at Living Room Theaters in the Pearl District profiles five male couples from the Portland and Vancouver, Wash., areas in an effort to educate audiences about the couples' lives as committed partners.

And for the next three years, the 95-minute film will run multiple times throughout Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the YES satellite network. The German government also has expressed interest in broadcasting the documentary.

Co-produced by Aaron Kirk Douglas, a Congregation Beth Israel member, "The Man You Had in Mind" illuminates these couples' day-to-day struggles that resonate for anyone in a relationship, as well as other struggles they face because they are gay men in a largely straight world.

"We have the same struggles and high points in our relationship as anyone does in their relationship" regardless of sexual preference, said David Perkins, 36, in a phone interview from his southwest Portland home.

He and partner Bill Birge, 63, are featured in the 2006 film, whose world premier was last October at the Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. "The Man You Had in Mind" took bronze at the 2007 28th Annual Telly Awards in the documentary category.

This month, Perkins, a home-health manager for Kaiser Permanente, and Birge, a retired director of sales and marketing for the Marriott Hotel, celebrate 13 years together.

Douglas, owner of Aaron Douglas Enterprises, a Portland production company, said there was a need for this film, that nothing like it had previously been made.

General audiences can see how male couples' relationships mature over time, including how the partners work through rough spots to accommodate one another, said Douglas, 46, who has been in a seven-year relationship with David Douglas, a physician.

The pair was the first gay couple married at CBI. Former Assistant Rabbi Kim Rosen performed the July 2003 ceremony.

Director and co-producer James Tuchschmidt, himself with the same man for 28 years, chose to organize the film chronologically. Elaine Miller, long-time friend of Douglas and Tuchschmidt, helped produce the documentary.

The first couple featured, North Portland residents Tyler Spurgeon and Ben Fischer, had been together one year at the time of the filming. The fifth couple, Portlanders Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth, fell in love in 1952.

"We began this project (in 2001) before the current debate about gay marriage began," Tuchschmidt, 54, said in an e-mail about his first documentary. "So this project was not motivated by the current politics of gay marriage."

Rather, he said,"We really wanted to explore intimacy."

The film does just that—from the mundane, to the romantic, and including some emotionally challenging moments.

In one scene featuring Marcoux and Woodworth, together today for 54 years, the viewer rides along with the couple to their morning haunt for coffee and TV news while listening to their idle chatter.

In another, Spurgeon and Fischer are at a Portland park, playing catch with Fischer's young son, Simon, when the couple steals a quick embrace and sweet smooch, unaware of the ubiquitous camera.

In yet another scene, Bill Birge talks about his previously tense relationship with his mother. Then the camera cuts to Loreen Birge, now 84, who struggles to confess through tears to "hating" her son for being gay.

Bill Birge said he didn't know what his mother had said on camera until he saw the completed documentary on the big screen.

"I was totally shocked and embarrassed by what she had to say," he confessed, even though he has been out for three decades, including to his two children and, later, to his three grandchildren, now ages 4, 9 and 13.

"It strained our relationship for a couple of months" after the film's release, the younger Birge said, adding, "I think 'hate' is a pretty strong word."

As painful as Bill Birge's experience was, its very occurrence sheds light on why "The Man You Had in Mind" is necessary for a broad audience to see, according to those who made the privately-funded film.

It shows some specific and wrenching challenges that gay couples face. These include living with HIV, and—in some cases—being disowned by relatives. While the film addresses these issue, its focus remains the lives of these otherwise every-day couples.

"It shows how important an ongoing relationship is that is healthy," Marcoux said. "Loving through boredom and irritation bring out parts of one's humanity that I don't think can be expressed in any other way. Just like the straight people in the suburbs."