As a horribly lonely 14-year-old girl in rural Virginia, I found a book called The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and, simply put, it made me feel less alone. This sense, this promise of belonging, stuck with me long after I had forgotten the name of the man who created the work that had meant so much to me. It was a new feeling, subtle and hungry, and I have been feeding it ever since. 

Twenty years later, I found myself in a conversation with a friend about book called In the City of Shy Hunters. “No one’s work is as important to me as Tom Spanbauer’s,” she said to me passionately, almost woefully, as she listed his work. In that moment, I realized that the man who wrote a book that changed my friend’s life was the same man who wrote a book that had changed mine. I immediately set out to read everything he’d ever written, including the short but powerful Faraway Places and the classic coming of age tale Now is the Hour. I wrote to him and told him what his work meant to me, and I asked him if he’d be interested in doing something for this magazine. He wrote back to say yes and mentioned that he had a new book coming out, I Loved You More.  He offered to have his publisher send me a copy. She did. It’s epic.

After Tom agreed to collaborate on a profile for this issue, I sent him a bunch of random questions. He wrote back pages filled with depth and wisdom that spanned his entire life. What follows is part of what he wrote to me, edited and condensed.  Because of space considerations, I had to take out a bunch of great stuff, such as the first time Tom fell in love with a man while he was in the Peace Corps in Kenya; his sorrowful regrets about how he treated a friend called Sam; meeting and marrying and leaving his ex-wife; and his thoughts on drag.

What’s left is a glimpse into the life of a man who may have been born into a family that didn’t understand him but who has gone on to create a family of admirers and peers who are profoundly inspired by his quest to understand himself.

- Diana Welch

My mother’s family spoke Hochdeutsch and lived in a brick house. My mother’s father was a gentleman farmer who read Goethe and Schiller and called his daughters wilde Madchen. My mother’s father died during the depression when my mother was a young girl. There were seven children.

My father’s family spoke Plattdeutsch and there were eight children. My father’s father, Joe, was the town drunk. He was also the garbage collector and he cured meat and had honeycombs. A friend of my family once told me that when he was a little boy at midnight mass at St. Veronica’s in Blackfoot, Joe stumbled in late and very drunk. Halfway up the main aisle he dropped his bottle of moonshine. 

My mother was an ideal young woman, a virgin and a romantic, and she had very high expectations when she married my handsome father. But the way she told it: “My mother gave us a milk cow and we tethered that cow to the fence outside your father’s parents’ house.  Your father and I moved into the lean-to of that house. The next morning I woke up and started cleaning and cooking for your father and his mother and his father and since then it has never stopped.”

My sister wanted me to be a girl. A playmate she could play house and dolls with.  My father was hardly ever around during the day, so my sister and I played dress-up. My mother knew I was playing dress-up with my sister. In fact, there were times when we all played dress-up together. I remember one time, I was five years old, we were all “having tea”—cucumber sandwiches and all. All of us dressed up as “movie stars.” My father drove in unexpectedly and my mother and my sister ripped off the dress I was wearing and put me in the back bedroom with a toy truck in front of me. 

Then there was the time when my sister was in school and I asked my mother if I could play dress-up by myself.  She told me it was OK, so I went down to the basement and opened the dress-up trunk—a steamer trunk full of all those magic colors and fabrics. There were sparkling jewels and lipsticks. I was in full drag when a strange man came down the stairs. He was yelling at me. I don’t remember what he was yelling but he scared me to death. Something about not being a real boy and if your father could see you he would be so ashamed. This man, from our church, started batting me about and he tore the dress I was wearing off me. He left me lying on the basement floor with my hands covering my head. 

It turns out my mother called this man up and asked him to come over and scare me so I would stop acting like a girl.

My mother had two passions. First and foremost was Catholicism. In the middle of the day, at the end of the day, whenever or wherever, in the middle of the field, on the drive to Blackfoot, my mother would bring out the rosary and we’d pray to the virgin. I wish I had a dollar for all the rosaries I’ve prayed. She also made novenas to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Every Tuesday night we’d drive the twelve miles to town for Our Mother of Perpetual Help devotions. I can remember one line of a prayer during that service. It was “I who am the most miserable of all.” 

That was me alright. 

My mother’s other passion was playing the piano. She could play by ear and there were many nights in my childhood when we sat around with my cousins and aunts and uncles and sang all the old songs. Melody of Love, Stardust, There Is a Tavern in the Town, Du Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen, Little Brown Jug. I think my mother was most herself when she was playing the piano.

The boy with the grasshopper on his teeth was in many ways a slave. From the time I was twelve until I was twenty-two, every summer, twice every summer, I baled one hundred acres of hay, hauled the hay, and stacked the hay. In many ways the rage in me was formed in those teenage years, standing in hundred-degree weather in the hot sun, covered with a quarter inch of hay dust, standing behind the baler, waiting for another bale to come out. The way I was indentured, the way I was stuck into that humiliating, uncomfortable, repetitious hard labor day after day after day, year after year, something broke in me. I hated my father to such a degree. I hated my life. I hated myself. I hated that I was enslaved, yet I hated that I was too terrified to step out on my own.

When my brother was born, they named him John Jr. At last my father could have the son he wanted. And John was just like his dad. And at last I had somebody I could beat on. For one who’s felt bullied all his life, I must say when it came my turn I beat on him every chance I could get.    

As soon as I left Idaho, as soon as I left the town I was raised in, as soon as I left my father, I went to the place of my father’s deepest racist fear. Black Africa. 

It’s quite difficult to talk about Africa. My next book is about Africa and my time in the Peace Corps. I tend not to understand things well until I’ve written about them. Africa has had such a huge influence on me it’s hard to assess. I’m not sure I can do Africa any justice by writing a couple of paragraphs about it.  

I met my native brother, Clyde Hall, just when I returned from the Peace Corps in 1971. I got a job at Idaho State University as a counselor in an outreach program. I was given the job to be the advisor to the Indian Club. It was such a ridiculous posting for me.  When I returned from Africa, it was such a surprise to see native people all around me. Before Kenya, of course all those native people were there in Pocatello right alongside of me, but I somehow had managed not to see them. And now here I was given the job as Indian Club Advisor. 

I was standing in the Indian Club library, ostensibly categorizing books alphabetically, but really I was hiding. I didn’t have the faintest clue on how to approach any of the Native American students. So I was hiding in the library. Really I was reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. 

I was standing on a ladder and I was wearing a green pair of corduroys, 70s style, tight-fitting waist, no back pockets, and bell-bottoms. I didn’t hear the young man enter the room because I was so engrossed in the book. Then I heard: “Where did you get those pants?”

Thus began one of the most important friendships of my life. A friendship so strong that we cut one another’s wrists and promised brotherly love to one another forever. I like to joke that all this Indian spirituality began with how my ass looked in a tight pair of green corduroys, but that’s exactly how it began.  

Then one day walking across the ISU campus, I saw a bull elk standing in the middle of the football field. I stopped in my tracks because it was such a magnificent creature and I’d never seen a bull elk up close like that. The elk tossed his end and his rack of antlers then walked into the underbrush of a nearby stand of trees. I went crazy, telling everyone there was an elk on campus. But no one else had seen the elk. When I spoke to Clyde about what I had seen, Clyde told me that elk was a very important animal for me and to pay attention to what elk means. And as far as I can tell from over the years, what elk seems to embody is someone with great physical beauty and strength but doesn’t really know it.

So much of what is termed as “magical realism” in my books has come from what I’ve learned from Clyde. He opened his arms and let me into his world. I was present at a feast from his grandfather, Alasandro, and his adopted father George Wesaw. I took part in sweat lodges, I danced with a very holy pipe in Montana. All these things brought me to a deep spiritual understanding. And did I mention, Clyde had a great deal to do with me coming out. So in that sense, Clyde and my green corduroy pants just proves everything I’ve learned from Clyde to be true. Even those green corduroys are alive.  

At the restaurant I was working in, in Boise in 1978, it seemed like there was something in the water. All my fellow friends and employees started turning up gay. The last straw really was my friend Will. Will and I had had become avid “junkers,” driving all over Idaho looking for old junk, clothes, artifacts. Every object in Will’s house was really something else. His ashtray was a wagon wheel. His salt and pepper shakers were chickens, his chair was alligator.

I remember the day, as I was driving down the ramp in Meridian onto I-5, I said to Will, “Yes, I’ve often thought about having sex with men.” 

Looking back on that day with Will now, I can see how untruthful I was. Because, after all, I had fallen deeply in love with a man in Kenya only eight years earlier. But the love I’d felt for James I’d somehow made disappear because it was just too painful. So on this day with my friend Will, what I said was all that was possible for me to say.

All this ends up with me leaving my wife Evie and driving my pickup across the United States to live with a friend in New England. Two years later I move to Key West. Key West is another place I haven’t written about. Like Africa, there is so much that I know, but I don’t know really yet, because I’ve never written about it.  

Will moved to Key West as well, along with our friend Leo. Really, I guess all I can say about Key West at this point is that it was a training ground for Manhattan. I moved to Key West to find my gay brothers and sisters, to talk and drink and love one another. I moved to Key West to learn to be gay. What I found was quite different. The end of the road in the early 80s, AIDS already apparent in several mysterious deaths. I don’t want to be too harsh, but what I found in Key West was mostly rage. What my gay brothers and sisters were doing was getting fucked up, “black-holed” they called it, and getting laid.

Cocaine and bath houses. PCP, Tuinols, black beauties, MDMA, ethyl chloride, hashish. Maybe it was that we all moved to Key West to deal with our sexuality, but all we could do was black-hole and get high enough so we could have anonymous sex in a dark room at a bath house.

When someone asked me why I was moving to Manhattan, I told them, “There’s only so long you can talk about suntans and blow jobs.”

It wasn’t until twelve years later, when I was invited to a “gay spirit” meeting in Tennessee, that I found what I’d gone to Key West for twelve years earlier. Gay men holding one another, looking one another in the eyes. Talking. Revealing what was in their souls. I cried the entire five days.

Manhattan and Columbia University helped me put myself back together. I began to meet gay men who had real lives, real jobs, made art. Of course, all this came with the deepening scourge of AIDS.

The other night after our weekly Dangerous Writing class, my partner Sage and I were lying on the couch together, talking about the class we co-teach and the writing that had been shared that evening. Dangerous Writing has become my new family. There’s this group of people whom I know so intimately, because really, what we’re all doing is going to our ghosts, and revealing our ghosts, outing our ghosts by writing about them. I’m the luckiest guy in the world really. My basement is a famous place where people come to tell the truth.

There is so much to tell you about my partner Sage. He’s a searcher, a Jupiter out there in the world so eager to understand all its mysteries. He’s a big guy with a big personality and a lot of love. And a real Italian beauty. He’s a singer, a performer, a publicist, a tattoo artist, and will soon be going back to school to study Chinese medicine. He’s younger than me by twenty-four years. I get scared for us sometimes as time passes. What’s going to come along. And of course then there’s AIDS and I had a stroke seven years ago. I’ve recovered but I’ll soon be sixty-eight and who knows what’s going to come along. But I do know in my heart, I’ve found my true partner. I would trust him with anything.

As I lay there in the big strong arms of my boyfriend that night after class, the fire going, Pat Metheny on the turntable, my nose snuggled into Sage’s armpit, I realized that my father had lost this long battle between us. I was in the loving arms of the man I loved.  And I felt safe.