We sat down with Rich Mundy and Kevin Long on a brisk January day.Their photos from their wedding ceremony were the catalyst to get to know them and Rosemary Ragusa, their wedding photographer. After gabbing about the iPhone and a few other things, we got down to their story, who they are, why marriage equality matters to them and some surprising revelations.

id Magagazine: Tell me a little bit of background about both of you, what’s your profession, how did you meet…

Rich: I work for Jazzercise in sales, and I own two stores here, one in Portland and one in Gresham.

Really? Are you the one with the commercial on T.V.?

Rich: Yep – That campaign ended yesterday unfortunately.That keeps me very busy, and I work out of my house mostly unless I’m at one of my centers. Kevin’s a veterinarian.

Kevin: Right…I’m a small animal veterinarian in Tigard. I commute.

Small animals as in?

Kevin: Dogs and cats mostly, sometimes rabbits and ferrets – 99% dogs and cats. It’s a small practice; there are three full time doctors, two part time doctors.
And we met on the Internet, actually.

Really?

Rick: Match.com (they both laugh)

Now I get confused with those services, because…I think it was E-Harmony was anti-gay?

Rick:They were.When we were using those services, E-Harmony would not accept same-sex categories. So we had to go on Match.com.You fill out your profile, it’s like writing a personals ad for your self, you put a few pictures up…it’s like shopping online for men! (laughs) It’s great, you save time; you kind of look at people, send a message and see if they have any interest.

I imagine that takes away the stereotypical-stigma that sites like Gay.com has. Like Gay.com is known for being the place to go if you want to hook-up for sex.

Rich:Yes, most of the gay exclusive ones are about sex, I’ve heard, but I haven’t personally experienced them. But yeah…Match.com is the place to go when you want to meet someone or you want to meet friends, stuff like that. It worked really well for us. A few of my friends were on it at the same time and we know two other couples that have gotten married from it.

Kevin: Straight couples. Rich: He almost didn’t call me back though…(laughter)

Oh really? Tell me about that!

Kevin:What was it? You winked at me, or whatever?

Rich:Yeah, I was the one that made the first contact.

Kevin: And I didn’t respond.

Rich: But then he e-mailed back…and we e-mailed a couple of times. It was down to like,“O.K. – I’m going to e-mail this guy one more time, this is his last chance; he’s obviously not interested.” (laughter)Then he e-mailed me back and we went out on a date. He was number three that week, I had three dates that week. He was number three…he was Thursday. (laughter) I was determined!

(Laughing) Something to tell the grandkids about!

Rich:We went out on aThursday night to Crush. And we just had drinks and it has a fun atmosphere, close to his house. In the back of my car, for my business, we do a fundraiser every year for an animal shelter and it was Christmas time. So people bring cash donations, food for pets.We get a list of all the supplies they need and I collect all that and take it out to the shelter.

My car was filled in the back, I have an SUV, the seats were folded down, and it was filled with dog supplies, cat supplies. When Kevin gets in the car, we didn’t even know what each other did, because the categories were like, mine was “Professional Sales” and his was like,“Medical, Dental.” So he says, “Well I’m a Vet,” and I kind of laughed it off, because I had explained why that stuff was in my car. So when he said that, I’m like, ”Oh yeah right! Ha-Ha-ha!” I didn’t believe him.

That was three years ago?

Kevin:Three years ago in December.

When did you get married?

Rich:August of 2009.

Do you think that marriage equality is a human rights issue or more so a religious issue?

Rich: It is for me.

Kevin: It is for me too.

Why does marriage matter to you?

Rich: I think the equality issue matters to me, just having the same rights…because I have been discriminated against because of my sexual preference. On jobs, advancement, career positions…like not getting positions, things like that. I think this brings us another step closer to having equal rights. I’m not a really religious person in the traditional sense.We have our own beliefs and our own feelings and what we follow. My church told me to go to hell, so why bother?

Kevin: Yes, my church did too.

Rich:We really don’t do it for religious reasons; it’s more for financial reasons, the equality reasons.

Kevin: Being able to visit each other or make decisions if one of us was to get sick.And not have to be worried that they can deny us visitation just because we’re not married and living in the same house.Those things…neither of our families lives close, mine live closer than his does, but if something were to happen…do you want to have to wait for one of them to make a decision on that. Do they know what the right decision is?

Both of your families are supportive?

Rich:Yes. It took them a while to come around and understand it. Maybe they still don’t understand it, but they’re supportive. Because now they can put a face with who I’m living with and who I’m seeing and he’s in my life. Before, my family lives in Ohio so they really can’t come out and visit; so they didn’t really know who was in my life – they’d hear me talk about certain people. But know they know Kevin and they love Kevin, he’s normal, he’s not some weird freak. (Kevin laughs)

It’s easier for them to accept it, although I don’t know if they still quite understand it. My mother’s 85, she thinks denial is the best way to deal with everything. My dad passed away about 15 years ago, so I didn’t have to deal with it with him.

Kevin: My family’s very religious, my parents are, not my siblings so much. I think it was, like Rich said, initially they didn’t like what I was. But when they put a face to it and saw what we meant to each other, I think that changes a lot of perceptions.

Rich: I was the first person he had taken home.

Kevin:Yeah, they’d never met anybody that I’ve ever dated. I lived and grew up in a small town, not to say anything about small towns, but it was 3,000 people. So you know everybody in the town.There was that whole…I think they were embarrassed.

Rich: Everybody’s business…

Kevin:Yes…what are the neighbors going to think, what are the people at church going to think. I think that they just realized that it doesn’t matter what other people think. I think they’ve grown in that sense, is that they don’t care…maybe they do, but we go to church when we go home. I don’t know if my mom and dad introduced us as husbands, but they don’t ask us to keep it quite.

For the wedding…I read that it was important for you to have the environmental aspect to it?

Rich: Yes. I have an electric car and then I have another car that is a hybrid. It didn’t really become that important to me until I moved out West. Because the Mid-West, and Ohio? It’s not where you go to see nature. I’ve lived in California and in Oregon, so I’ve really realized how beautiful everything is and that we should protect it.That part was important to us, to give back to the environment.We’re established, we make good money; we didn’t need any gifts.We asked people to donate to causes for animals or the environment, in our names. It was good to give back in that way.

Kevin: And I love the outdoors, I grew up on a 1,000 acres on a cattle ranch.The closest house was four miles away. I’ve spent most of my life outdoors.And we see the encroachment of people moving in and taking over farms, and now they’re small ranchettes. When you see it taken away, it hits home. So we wanted to do something like that.

Rich: We got the idea about the trees from his sister; she was married the year before.That was the party favor, in the middle of the table.We bought all these trees that people could go home and plant.

That’s great!

Rich: Yeah. His dad dabbles in Christmas tree farming so we had all the resources to get us all the trees we needed.

Did you plan the wedding yourselves or did you have help?

Rich: We did with Rosemary’s help. (Rosemary Ragusa) She was our photographer and she wanted to dabble in wedding planning, so she gave us a lot of suggestions and helped us out with bands, food and all that.

Kevin really loves Timberline Lodge, so that’s why we had it there. I would have preferred to go to Sun River or someplace…the Sun River Lodge is really nice. But it is just so remote, so for logistical purposes, we had a lot of people coming in from out of state.

Kevin: Most of our guests, over half of them coming in…

Rich:About 60%came from out of state.

Kevin:Trying to get them all into Sun River…

Rich: A lot of them don’t do small planes; they would have had to drive five hours, which just didn’t work.

We had the wedding on a Sunday, so they had to take the next day off of work, which was strictly financial because it was half price. Friday and Saturday night is double and the wedding ended up costing $20,000… so, double that for just a Saturday night? I told Kevin,“Let’s just have it on Sunday and anyone that wants to be there can be there.”
It really turned into this BIG wedding. I just wanted to have a party; you know and just have us. Like the ceremony, it was very short and tasteful; we didn’t drag it out for very long. It was fun.

Kevin:We didn’t have groomsmen.

Rich: It was just him and me, we both walked our mothers down, sat them down and we went up to the front…and it was amazingly emotional, much more emotional than I thought it would be.We could barely stop…we had to think of each other doing stupid things so we wouldn’t cry all the time… We had my friend Jan, I asked her to write a little speech about the path that we have taken as gay people, and obtaining equal rights and about marriages. So she started with all the ways you can define marriage, what it used to be about years and years ago.What it was like in the 50’s. It was kind of a way to educate our families.

That, you know, everybody doesn’t have this right.We don’t right now, we’re not really married, because we can’t. But, we’re doing this.That was our way to try and educate them about the situation.

That’s wonderful! Fortunately, there will be conversations like that across the state. Basic rights Oregon (BRO) launched a website MarriageMattersOregon.com where people can upload video snapshots of why marriage matters to our community and beyond. What will really win the hearts and minds of voters outside of Portland is one-on-one conversations with people in every county.

Kevin: Unfortunately, it’s the people on the eastern side of the state that you have to change their minds. Portland, Salem, I think the majority of people are o.k. with it.The Eastern side of the state where the farmers are at, they only see things on T.V. I’m sure they know people, but they can’t put a face to it. It’s like my family,‘We know it’s out there, and it must be something dirty’ – as soon as you put a face to it, you can’t deny us, and you can’t say there’s anything wrong with us.

Exactly. Take me through a day at your house.

Kevin: I’m up first; at 5:30am because I ride the bus, catch the bus at 6:30am. I have a Kindle, so I just read, it’s an hour commute. Most days when I’m up, he’s still asleep.

Rich: My commute is…I walk downstairs, get some coffee, go back upstairs and go to my office.Answer e-mails, do some office work, about 10am I take a shower and then keep working in my office. On the days that I teach, when I go to my centers, like today was one of them. I taught at 8:15 am at the Gresham center.Then I’ll come back and work in the office in the afternoon.Then I’ll go teach again at 4:45 pm in Portland, it keeps my hand in the business.

Which is a great business strategy.

Rich:Yes, I’ve been doing this a long time, so I’m a big draw, so it brings the people in.That’s why we couldn’t meet with you yesterday. yesterday was our big one day sale, so I was at the center most of the day, selling special membership packages on that one day.We did pretty well.

That was the whole television campaign leading up to that.

To be honest, when I saw that commercial I thought, “Huh…Jazzercise still around?”

Rich: (Laughs) Yeah – that’s what a lot of people think!

Yet, it’s very different form the Jane Fonda, leg- warmer days, right?

Rich:Yes, and that’s where we got most of our press, back in the 80’s. It’s still around and the company is doing better now than it did back then.We’re always trying to update that image, because as you know, anything that’s been around that long wouldn’t
be around if it were the same.You always have to update your product or your image. If we still wore the leg warmers, we wouldn’t be very credible in this world. (laughter)

Although I saw Richard Simmons the other day… don’t know how he does it, but he’s still wearing those short-shorts and tank-top!

Rich:What was he hawking these days?

I don’t know, but he was on the Wendy Williams Show and she couldn’t keep control of him. I didn’t see a product, although they did talk about his studio. On Bonnie Hunt there wasn’t a product either. A couple of her staff members went to his studio and were surprised how worn out they were afterwards.

Rich: We did an event in Fairbanks,Alaska where he was the headliner. Jazzersize was there as well, we taught a class, but we warmed everybody up for him, you know? So I didn’t get to meet him because I didn’t get to go to that event.They said he was a hoot and very good, very entertaining.

You know as funny as he is, he does a lot of good for people, because he really cares about those people. He gets in that emotional side…and being overweight is a very emotional thing for so many people, especially women. So, he does a lot of good, even though people make fun of him. I just wish I could get him a new image consultant.

Well yeah, everybody sees the caricature.They don’t see… although I remember when he was doing those infomercials, and he got to that emotional, serious part.

Rich:Yes, yes he did.

Kevin: Also, as far as our day, we have two dogs and two cats, so they spend the day with him.They’re little.Three of them are rescues.We rescued two, and one he got from one of his students – one of the cats, and we went and bought one together.

I usually get home about 7:30pm, and we have dinner, spend some time with the animals.

Rich: (Shows me a photo of two of the dogs and one cat in little animal bed, all together) They all have to be with me all the time, so that’s them on the desk.

Awww…

Rich:This one is Kevin on his birthday (we laugh) I can send more of those if you like.

Thank you both for taking the time to tell your story. I think our readers will find some common threads running through yours and their lives.

Rich:Thank you for thinking of us!