Schneebaum's gentle demeanor and soft, sensitive eyes do not seem like the attributes of a hard-edged thrill seeker. He says that he doesn't know if he seeks danger or if the risk is merely the price he pays for pursuing his obsession. "I knew they would be receptive, though I don't know how I knew it," he told me. When I asked him about the sex he's had here in New York, his anecdotes had a very different flavor. He told me, for instance, about a longstanding sexual relationship that began when he was in high school, in the 1950s.
"I used to do it on the subway. Boy, if you think the subways are crowded now, you should have seen them fifty or sixty years ago. There was this man, he would be waiting for me at the station. We would enter together and squeeze in so that there was no way of anyone noticing. The cars were so packed you could masturbate someone, or be masturbated, and no one would know. We never talked, we never looked into one another's eyes."
Every time he took a piss in a public restroom, he recalled, he was terrified of the cops entrapping him on a trumped-up morals charge. Then there was Sergio, a black man who would stand outside his apartment building and charged ten dollars a fuck. When Schneebaum returned from a trip to South Asia, he heard that Sergio was in prison for manslaughter. "One of his tricks was a coke addict who wanted to be chained. They got so high that they passed out, and when Sergio woke up the guy was handcuffed to the bed, and dead."
Schneebaum recounted these stories with barely a hitch of emotion. From his perspective, his real life had transpired elsewhere, in the Peruvian jungle. For months, he had lived, hunted and slept with the men of the Akaramas tribe. But his sojourn came to a terrifying climax. In the midst of a hunting trek, the leader had the men form a tight circle.  "Michii broke from the circle and stepped inside, the gap closing in the smack of flesh. He held up his penis and began to rub it hard. He walked to the man beside me who was himself half erect, and touched the end of their penises together, then moved from one to another, pressing slightly on each penis with his own, ending up with mine." Schneebaum didn't know what to make of this, and before he realized what was happening, he found himself on a raid for human flesh. His friends were crushing people's heads, impaling them on arrows. He vomited at the sight of blood mixed with feces and hair, but did not run; his friends were laughing, they were victorious. Schneebaum admits that he laughed with them. The male victims were beheaded, gutted, strung up on poles and toted back to the village. Later that night, Michii bit into a piece of roasted heart, chewed and spit it back into his hand, and divvied it up among the warriors, placing a morsel into Schneebaum's mouth.
Schneebaum panicked and left the tribe soon afterward. He had learned how far he could go to consummate his "need." Without a word of goodbye, Schneebaum walked away from the mission and wandered days later into a town along the river, dazed and naked, as if emerging from a dream.
For the next twenty-five years, Schneebaum bounced back between New York and the peripheries of globalization, courting sexual fulfillment in India, Burma and Somalia. He took part in a drunken orgiastic festival in a Murut village in Borneo; fucked two Buddhist monks in Mandalay who then filched his wallet; was threatened with homophobic taunts by a knife-wielding truck driver in Ethiopia who later came on to him; and found himself turned on by the repulsive beauty of skin disfigured by ringworm. He sees himself as both "indestructible" and "some half-creature, thin and weak, not frail but vaguely feminine," whose introspective nature blocked him from complete immersion in the unself-conscious homoeroticism of tribal life.
In 1973, Schneebaum traveled to Asmat, New Guinea. At the time, Asmat was considered one of the remotest places on earth, its people, hunters and gatherers, intensely hostile to outsiders. Rumor had it that Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared there in 1961, was murdered by an Asmat tribe in revenge for the colonial Dutch government's violent attempts to stamp out traditions of ritualistic headhunting. The anthropologist Gilbert Herdt had come to New Guinea as well to study what he calls "ritualized homosexuality" and the practice of semen ingestion in male initiation rites. But Schneebaum traveled there neither to collect nor study. Instead, over the ten years he lived there, Schneebaum writes in his book Where the Spirits Dwell, he found something akin to sexual bliss.
The Asmat men possess compact muscular bodies and wear elaborate facial adornments of curved fox bones, bamboo nose plugs, shell, seeds and fur. Their nakedness is accentuated by long, conical, rolled-leaf penis sheaths. Upon arriving at a remote, upriver Asmat village, Schneebaum — wearing nothing more than sneakers — was led by a young boy to an elevated thatched house filled with men. His nakedness set him apart from the few whites they had ever seen. When the headman entered, Schneebaum writes, "I stood up and he motioned me to sit down. He stood in front of me, took his penis in both hands and flapped it up and down. The penis was half-erect. He moved even closer and flapped it in front of my nose, almost touching it. I did not know the meaning of this gesture." Schneebaum knew an Asmat from downriver might suck the penis as part of certain peacemaking ceremonies, or a Dani from the mountains might hold the pair of testicles in greeting. But he was too startled to react, except to smile weakly. The man pulled him up and threw his arms around Schneebaum, apparently satisfied by his reaction. "What would have happened, I wonder, had I shown anger, or opened my mouth and received his penis? I had visions of being forced to fellate the men, one after another."
As Schneebaum describes it, in Asmat communal life, sex between men functions as a system of personal alliance. The penis is both a mechanism of testing authority and a vital clause in the village's social contract. Gradually, he was allowed full access to the bisexual activity hidden from outsiders:  "They knew I was sympathetic, possibly a participator, and I begin to see that homosexual relations existed everywhere," he writes. He learned about the mbai, a ritualized sexual relationship between boys that often lasts into adulthood, even after marriage; imu-mu, sex between an adult man and a boy connected to the belief that the continual absorption of semen is necessary for masculine development; and ndoram ata yima, which translates roughly as "I want balance" and signifies how sex between men is never expressed in active and passive roles, but must always be reciprocal.
He began a relationship with a man named Akatpitsjin. It was "the longest continuous sexual relation I've ever had with anyone," Schneebaum told me. "He called me mbai, and everyone in the village knew it, there was no secrecy." Only the itinerant Catholic teacher was kept in the dark. Schneebaum delighted in the frankness of his new friends. "When one mbai sucks the penis of his friend," they instructed him, "the two may not part until the friend turns around and sucks his penis. If one enters the ass of another, the other must turn around and enter his ass." The only thing that surprised Schneebaum was when, after many nights of sex under his mosquito net, Akatpitsjin took him to his wife, to complete the initiation into the mbai relationship. "I failed," said Schneebaum, "and he consummated the act in my place. His understanding of my dilemma gave me a sense of security I had never felt before." For the men of this village, Schneebaum claims, the bond of the mbai was stronger than any other interpersonal tie, including marriage.
In his writings, Schneebaum doesn't exactly idealize these Asmat men (the world of women, he said, remained closed to him): he portrays the men as jealous, vengeful and close-minded as the suffocating world of his Western upbringing. They considered most non-Asmat people subhuman, referred to rival Asmat villages as "shit-eaters" and viewed sexual practices of neighboring groups, such as the Fore people's initiation rite of piercing the hole of the penis with a thorn and twisting it until semen and blood come out disgusting and bestial. Schneebaum knew that they would never really know him, just as he had little inkling of their lives beyond his external, pleasurable interactions. And, after ten years of immersion, he returned to New York for good.
Although Schneebaum has been attacked by anthropologists and other academics for his ethnographic naïveté, it's only a short-sighted egghead (my tribe) who can't see that Schneebaum really has no pretensions of seeking anything but a particular form of homosexual activity, and for little reason beyond his own personal oddities. "I could have done it with anybody without anyone getting angry or upset or nervous," he told me about his time in Peru. "The men always came together at night, no matter what they did during the day, and slept in the body pile. And in Asmat, I felt like was part of a people, a family."
What Schneebaum sought in these remote and hauntingly alien places was not some erotic Eden, like Margaret Mead's Samoa, but merely a positive version of his youthful subway sex. The negative anonymity of the homosexual act, in the midst of a crowd hostile to men fucking men, became, in Peru and Asmat, the welcoming anonymity of fucking men who he would never really know — except in the one way it mattered, the disinterested but connecting closeness of bodies. Or at least that's my theory. Schneebaum himself gently rebuffs all attempts to rationalize his obsession. "There is some element of all that," he said when I offered my interpretation, " but I do not want to understand it. I just want to do it. And now it's getting late in my life and I'll never do anything like it again. It was the best sex I've ever had. What can I say after that?"
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