Solitary Warrior of Love

[interview]
Writer Tom Spanbauer Talks with A&U’s Chael Needle About His Latest Novel

Like the narrator of his latest novel, Now Is the Hour, Tom Spanbauer grew up in pre-Stonewall Idaho: “I just wasn’t like anybody else. I was very odd. I wasn’t like my father; I wasn’t like any kids at school. Probably because I was queer. What I did, in order to find some sort of companion, I just started writing, writing little poems, diaries....It just became a way to accompany myself because I couldn’t relate to the medieval Catholicism, and when the sixties came along, there was some bit of hope there, things started loosening up some, but there were some dark days there. I got through it by writing in my little notebook.”

Now Is the Hour, published by Houghton Mifflin, tells the story of Rigby John Klusener, a teenager who feels “differnt” as his senses awaken to erotic possibilities and the clearly drawn boundaries of race, religion, class, and gender that work to keep everyone suspended in the status quo. “The fifties, with Eisenhower, was all pretty buttoned-down. Everybody was coming back from the war and there was a big push to put women back in the home, and anything that was intellectual was Communist or homosexual, and so on....[Growing up] I went smack into the sixties; even in Idaho the social upheaval of the cultural wars landed big time in my college, Idaho State University.”

For Rigby John, San Francisco calls, and though he doesn’t know it, says Spanbauer, the Summer of Love awaits. “AIDS was around the corner. One of the side effects of that cultural war and that incredible freedom that we all felt was AIDS.” If Now Is the Hour could be thought of as a foreshadowing of this new chapter in the cultural wars that its characters would soon collide with, Spanbauer’s last novel, In the City of Shy Hunters, crashes the reader straight into the breaking heart of the eighties, when AIDS was making ghost towns out of America’s urban centers.

In his family of novels—his second, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, was nominated for the Pulitzer—Spanbauer calls Shy Hunters his “dark, brooding child.” Says Spanbauer: “A friend came over once when I was in the middle of the writing and she said, How come you’ve got all these pictures of all these dead people on your walls? I said, They’re all the men who have died who were my friends. It’s about the time I came up with [the notion that] it’s the responsibility of the survivor to tell the story. I really felt that with the book....I think there’s only two people in New York who are still alive that I know. It’s a devastating thing.”
Portland, Oregon-based Spanbauer is also known for his Dangerous Writing workshops, which started in 1991 at Portland’s literary festival, LitEruption, and evolved at Haystack, Portland State University’s summer session program. “Dangerous writing,” a philosophy that Spanbauer nurtured along with fellow writer and teacher Peter Christopher while in New York City, in part involves going to that place that’s secret, silent, censored by fear. “I didn’t necessarily face any fear about writing about AIDS,” says Spanbauer about Shy Hunters. His anger about Reagan, Republicans, and everyone else who “could’ve really helped us at the most important time and didn’t” propelled him to write. “Now in retrospect I can see what a daring thing it was to do—that story. To talk about those lives, those ruined lives, and all of the darkness. That was so much of the problem....there’s a part where they have to pull a dead body out of a basement of an old building on the Lower East Side and that was about the time I got AIDS,” he says, referring to a bout of pneumocystis in 1996, his T-cell count dwindling to seven, and a period of depression.

“So when I was recuperating, I remember one day I got up out of bed, made it to my little writing house, which was just ten steps away from my house, opened up the computer and wrote the sentence: It was one year after Rock Hudson died that I dialed 911 for Rose. And that was all I could write that day; I had to close it down. I was battling with the disease itself at that time. It was hard to stay focused—lots of delirium, I went pretty far out there. I was surprised I made it back really.”

The surprise, perhaps, has been blunted of late; Spanbauer is happy to report that he is enjoying much better health, the comfort of a relationship, and the recognition his latest novel has garnered. Spanbauer wants others to know—corny as he fears it sounds—that low points can be countered by high points, though he offers that his health was boosted by the advent of combination therapy. “As fate would have it, all of those wonderful cocktails were just coming out. It was just at the time—I had a friend who died the April before. I was just one of the lucky ones. Of course, at the time, I was in such misery I didn’t even realize how lucky I was. In retrospect I was pretty fucking lucky.”

The younger generation of gay men, however, need not depend on something so random, Spanbauer seems to intimate. “It’s so tragic now these young men who are getting HIV. And they have all the information, or the information [at least] is there. But I can really understand in a moment of passion saying, Fuck it. I can understand that. But at the same time, it’s not right. First of all, it’s so much in the culture; it’s such a youth-oriented culture....These young beautiful men see us old guys, and think Oh, those old queens with AIDS. We can’t learn anything from them. Let’s go have a party,” says Spanbauer. “We’re here. We’ve gone through it and we’re willing, so willing, to talk to people about it.”

While he understands the feelings of indestructibility, and the arrogance that sometimes accompanies it, Spanbauer wishes the younger generation would use the safer-sex information that his generation did not have. He is clearly frustrated. “Everyday I have to worry about what I’m going to eat, worry if I’m going to sleep, and I have to worry where I’m going to shit....As a twenty-five-year-old man, is that what you want to start doing with your life? They just don’t realize what a huge thing [that living with AIDS] is. There’s the cocktail all right, but they have no idea what it all entails.”

But Spanbauer brings the conversation back to the wider social climate that helps shape these gaps in knowledge and disconnects between knowledge and action. "I have a friend, a girlfriend, who works at one of the major drug companies and she’s somebody who’s right up next to research and what’s being done and her company hasn’t done any new research on AIDS at all. The AIDS cocktail is enough to keep everybody healthy, or at least it’s not a death sentence anymore. But then there’s Africa—they should be havng the same drugs I have. There’s just so much [to address]. Our whole country is turning away from science, because it’s not the word of the Lord. It’s kind of like a turn to the Dark Ages. I think with some responsible funding we could get some research going and we could nail this thing. I’m not saying there aren’t people on the frontlines really working hard, it just seems that [the local clinic that I go to] is the little train they could. They’re just so sweet over there, and full of help. But they’re strapped for cash, and there’s people on the street coming in for help, they’re understaffed. Our President and his cowboys. What a ridiculous thing. We’re spending all this money over there to bathe ourselves in oil. It’s ridiculous. It’s shameful."

Chael Needle is Managing Editor of A&U.

June 2006