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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 15, 2007)
people Let's Stay Together Film documents range of male couples by Patricia L. MacAodha he Man You Had ir. Mind, a homemade the film, but their 10-year relationship shows stay documentary that was selected for the 2006 ing power, having survived the “seven-year itch.” Portland Lesbian <Si Gay Film Festival, pro In the case of Bill and Todd, it all comes togeth files five same-sex couples from a variety of er. Fifteen years a couple, they marry during the ages, life experiences and relationship 2004 legal marriage window, and their celebration styles. Vignettes featuring each couple represent unites family and friends in joyful acknowledgment a continuum, an appealing view of relationships of this relationship, marred only by one relative between these five Portland couples. Director Jim who accepts them as a couple but just can’t handle Tuchschmidt and producer Aaron Kirk Douglas, the marriage step. themselves gay men, explore each subject’s coming These men present a face of solidity that leads out: levels of conflict from family, friends and com them through encountering family tragedy and not munity; that magical moment of each encountering only surviving it, but also succeeding. They have the the other (Eric Marcoux says, “It was just bang!”); kxtk of bedrock material for their community: and the subsequent bonding process. responsible, attractive, professionally successful— The couples in this film experience many chal men everyone can admire and respect. lenges. A former Mormon, with his lover of about Finally, the film segues to Eric Marcoux and a year, is raising his young son. His partner realizes, Eugene WtxxJworth, who graciously invited me to “Wow, now I’m a dad.” Responses by family mem interview them in their magical home, hidden tan- bers—mothers, fathers, siblings, an aunt, etc.— talizingly behind a wtxxled area. The couple have range from some refusing to communicate with the created and re-created this house during their years self-accepting gay man to parents thanking Gixl for in Portland, sharing it with a stunning blue and their son’s partner. gold macaw that trades kisses with Marcoux and is There’s also an interracial couple who have been terrified by hats. (1 left mine in the hallway upon together off and on for seven years, one of whom is entering.) HIV-positive. The rtxtm in which we talk, and the one adjoin A September-May relationship is classically ing it, are filled with Marcoux’s paintings. The portrayed, with the older partner chided for having a much younger lover (he has grown children near the partner’s age), while the younger man gets some flak, too. In fact, those family members taken aback by this relationship appear to be more disturbed by the age difference than the same-sex aspect. The question of age disparity is a gtxxJ one to examine. Many such relationships have happened in the gay community, especially among men, and frequently have a mentor ing capacity in them that goes all the way back, at least, to Plato. What happens when the wrinkles deepen on one and not the other? When generational differences—combined with unspoken, but understood, stan dards of physical attraction cause questions in the mind of the younger Eugene Woodworth (left) and Eric Marcoux celebrate their 54th partner? This was not addressed in at a benefit screening for Elder Resource Alliance. /\ >4 |\I D I I atmosphere reminds me just a hit of the photos one sees of the Paris apartment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, with art as the focus and an ambiance through which one becomes acquainted with this couple. The men met in Chicago in 1953, with Marcoux coming out of a sequestered life in a Trappist monastery and leaving the order just before taking final vows. A devoutly Catholic man, he was stniggling with what he would no longer deny about The couple moved from Chicago to Portland two years after himself while, with great fortune, their first meeting in 1953. meeting the love of his life. Marcoux was 23, Wixxlworth a slightly older 25. They met maintained this 54-year relationship. That and, as through a friend who was dating Wixxlworth. Marcoux says, “Sometimes inertia is a blessing.” Woodworth was—and remains, by nature— They made a choice, as AIDS unfolded, to lim a dancer, having developed his own company it their sexual relationship to each other, hut through an artistic center in Chicago before Marcoux insists, “It was not a noble gesture." They Marcoux entered his life. He made the choice to met at a time when relationships like theirs had give up dance as a career and take on better-paying “soft edges”—and could be that way when jealousy employment, opening the dtxir for Marcoux to or AIDS didn’t threaten what was between them. become a practicing artist. WixxJworth says, Times change, hut the relationship, as with many however, that for him, “Life is always a dance.” of their friendships, included more factors, more There is never a time elements for building an increasingly stable life when he is not “putting together—stable, but hardly boring. things together as chore Moving to Portland two years after they met, ography and art." He still they first lived in an apartment but began looking moves and appears with for something with a country feel to it. The home a dancer’s grace, evi they have built around their relationship is the dencing years of disci perfect indicator of the symbiosis that characterizes plined practice and par the unity between them. The fact that they began ticipation. Even though with no role models, no family support for becom he no longer actively ing spouses, no perception that there was ever dances professionally, anyone else to guide them in defining who they are he says he will always he to each other can be a comfort to those who a dancer. struggle today to seek legitimization of same-sex It is, in fact, the relationships. In Marcoux and Woodworth’s case, self-discipline each man legitimacy is built through the action of two people has developed through who love each other. Forget what the rest of the world thinks! © his own walk in life— Woodworth through dance and Marcoux T he M an Y ou H ad in M ind opens June 12 at through the Trappist Living Room Theaters. experience and his P atricia L. M ac A odha is a Portland freelance current practice as anniversary June 13 a Buddhist—that has writer. E-mail her at I)atmae3l@juno.com. 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