'But where's the mother?'

When David Gere, brother of Hollywood actor Richard Gere, announced he'd gotten the Fulbright scholarship, his family was naturally thrilled. "Then I was like, oh my God, what have I got myself into?" says Peter Carney, Gere's partner. The couple are gay, they have two little kids. The Fulbright meant that the whole family would have to relocate to India for the better part of 2004.
"My first reaction was wow, a gay family in India.How is that going to go over?" says their friend Tom Keegan. Keegan, himself a gay dad, decided to ask Gere and Carney if they'd let him make a film about their experience. Out In India���A Family's Journey, a remarkably candid documentary, is now doing the film festival circuit.
Gere's scholarship subject was to find artists who were using art to combat HIV/AIDS in India. Carney, on the other hand, had to put his career as a pyschotherapist in Los Angeles on hold and become a stay-at-home dad. As Gere got busier with his work, Carney felt more and more invisible. "People would interact with him. He could speak Tamil. His head would start wobbling like everyone else," recalls Carney. "My sense of isolation grew as David's sense of engagement and excitement was escalating. I think I came as close as I've ever come to leaving the relationship."
Gere had spent two and a half years in India in the 1980s studying South Indian music and dance. But he says he had no idea how his family would be regarded in India. "We didn't know any comparable families though I did eventually meet a single mom who had adopted more than a dozen HIV-positive children," he says. "But there's simply no context for two men raising children together. In that sense, we were like Martians."
When Keegan, in the course of making his film on the gay couple, interviewed the care workers and the cook, they were "very cautious". "After all they were employed by Gere and Carney," he says. "I can only imagine what they said when they went home." He remembers asking a dance teacher about it. "She said she thought it would be better if the kids had a father and a mother," he recalls. "But the silence after the question, the way she looked around and twisted her hands spoke volumes about her discomfort."
"We were asked where the mother was at least once a day," says Carney. "And if we said it was a two-dad family, people would smile and nod and say 'Where's the mother?"' "But frankly," adds Gere, "the kids get asked the same questions in Los Angeles almost every week."
But in Los Angeles, there were other gay families to hang out with. In India, even in a city as cosmopolitan as Bangalore, they struggled to find their social niche. "The gay scene was pub-oriented. We were two guys with two kids who couldn't stay out late," says Carney. He says he didn't have a cell phone in India. "I had no one to call and no one to call me."
As Carney struggled with feelings of being profoundly alone in a country of over a billion people, Gere was getting immersed in the arts community. "Art against AIDS in India is much less political than art created in the US in, say, the late 1980s," he says. "Most of the artists are not living with HIV and are simply reacting from humanitarian impulses." He was amazed at the number of artists he found���shadow puppeteers, folk singers, painters, dancers. Eventually he gathered them together for a convention in Kolkata. His celebrity brother and AIDS activist Richard Gere showed up for the event. They all made T-shirts with the logo 'HIV-Positive' and marched through the city. "I looked at the sex workers, out gay people, artists, activists and finally felt I fit in," chuckles Carney. "I was not the outsider."
Now back home in Los Angeles, Carney says no matter how it might look on screen, if he had the chance, he'd do it again. "But a little differently," he laughs. "Tom captured an important part in our family's history, though I feel I'm naked in front of a mirror for 71 minutes."
The experience lives on in the kids. When the 2004 tsunami wiped away the home and studio of one of the shadow puppeteers in Tamil Nadu, little Christopher's class raised the money to rebuild his shadow puppets.
"I think the film is ultimately a gift to the kids," says Carney.