R.I.P. Tom Spanbauer
The legendary queer writer Tom Spanbauer died September 21 in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 78. His novel The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon set many people’s heads on fire, including mine, when it was published in 1991. Set in a brothel in Pocatello, Idaho, in the late 19th century, its central character was raised as a berdache by the brothelkeeper Ida, whose motto is “I am what I am, don’t ask me to change.” Berdache – now a contested term for “two-spirit” or non-binary or queer, but at the time radical faeries and gay spirit scholars had been reading Walter L. Williams’ The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, catching up on our ancestors among Indigenous peoples. Spanbauer incorporated these discoveries into his entertaining tale, which also serves as a manifesto for the pleasure and power of anal sex.
In a passage that I jokingly call “the missing page from Robert Bly’s Iron John,” Spanbauer makes the case that getting fucked is the most masculine sex act there is. The hero of the novel, Dellwood Baker, tells his young protégé a fable about a mythological character he calls the Wild Moon Man.
“Story goes he takes you to the bottom of the lake to his home, and teaches you how to breathe water instead of air. If you don't trust him and do what he says - you drown and they find you floating the next morning. But if you do trust him and do as he says, story goes, when you start breathing water, that muddy old hairy goat turns into a beautiful, strong warrior and he teaches you many secrets about the true power of being a man.
“When the Wild Moon Man takes you underwater, to the hairy rusty mud, he's taking you to your asshole. To the place that's as female as a man can get. You find your natural male power through your asshole, not your dick. You find your prostate. Fire down there under all that mud and hair and water. You find in yourself what most men love women for: their ecstasy, their hole into the other world. By receiving a man into you, by receiving a man like a woman, by being as female as a man can get, what you find -- if you don't drown -- is the beautiful warrior in yourself who knows both sides.”
"Men like us are lucky," Dellwood says, "We've learned to breathe water.”
I crossed paths with Spanbauer only once through our mutual friend, the edgy German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim. In 1988 I took Harry Kondoleon to the New York premiere of Rosa’s film Anita – Dances of Vice, and we wound up going to dinner afterwards with a bunch of people including Rosa, his star Lotti Huber, and Spanbauer. His first novel, Faraway Places, came out that year. His later, more directly autobiographical novels were few and far between, but I devoured them all: In the City of Shy Hunters, Now Is the Hour, and I Loved You More. He wrote frankly and shamelessly about sex, death, and living through HIV/AIDS.
Another favorite passage from The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon :
First thing I learned by my own self, without anybody else telling me, my own first truth was this: fucking was the same way as with everything else -- what you thought you were doing was not what you were doing. What you thought you were doing was sucking and penetrating and kissing, holding, and ejaculating. What you were doing, though, was telling a story.
First off, thing is, you got to know you got a story. Then you got to have to tell it. Knowing how to tell your story good is important, but the secret to good fucking is how well you can listen. Fucking only gets good when the two stories start being the same story -- the human-being sex story -- when the two bodies stop being two bodies and start being the big excruciating, the one heart beating.
Most men, most sorry men, always tell the same old hard-dick ejaculation story, and always got to be the one who leans hard onto. Most women, sorry women, tell this story -- which really isn't a story: you talk, I'll listen, tell me when you're done. They always end up being the one who gets leaned hard on. Doesn't work that way when you're fucking. Good fucking is bartering, wrestling, swapping tales back and forth, and telling lies til you get to the truth.
Spanbauer was also a revered writing teacher who knew how to pass along what he’d learned about the craft, about imagination, about being an artist, as he had been taught. He once wrote:
When I was about seven, my red-haired maiden aunt Alma, who lived with an artist named Theresa in the big city of Portland, Oregon, came to visit us in Pocatello, Idaho. When Alma and Theresa drove their Chevy coupe into our yard, those two women splashed pastels on the heat. My mother put a bow in her hair and sat on the sofa with her sister and they laughed til their gums showed. Theresa, the artist from Portland, took her paints out onto the picnic table. I sat next to her and watched as she set up her canvas. I sat next to her and watched as she painted the flat expanses of sagebrush onto the canvas. When Theresa was finished, what she had painted, where there were no mountains on the horizon, Theresa had painted beautiful green mountains onto the canvas.
I have so much to thank Theresa, the artist from Portland, for. She gave me a dream, a vision. I have spent my life looking for where those beautiful green mountains came from. I haven’t seen them yet, but I always know they are there.
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