The Man Who Fell In Love with the Moon
by Tom Spanbauer

This novel is narrated by a half Native American/half European American, living in Idaho during the last of the 19th century. So, the book has a distinctly pre automobile, small town America, western flavor. On the other hand, most of the tale occurs in and around a bordello, so that gives it a more urban flavor.

The major characters, other than Shed, the half breed, are Ida, the proprietress of the bordello, Alma, the principle prostitute, and Dellwood Barker, Shed's father, though that relationship remains hazy for most of the book. The role of Alma is not easily defined. She introduces Shed to heterosexual sex, has sexual and love relationships with all of the principle characters and is identified as a member of the family. I guess she functions as a sort of sister to the other main players. Shed is bisexual, as is his father, and this fact and Shed's adaptation to it is the major surface theme. The author views bisexuals, some of them at least, as special humans frequently with special powers closely related to their bisexuality. He also conceives of the unusual personalities of these people as being very spiritual and shamanish.

The novel is explicitly sexual, going into great detail describing both the physical nature of sexual contacts and their spiritual impact on Shed, as he grows more mature. He begins very early in life when the madam begins to sell his services to the local males, who the author portrays as only too eager to avail themselves of the service. He does this to demonstrate the contradictory nature of masculinism, or human creativity, and the damage it can potentially do to those that must involve themselves in this way and then do penance for it.

The story is organized around the adventures of Shed as he seeks to discover who he is. This leads early on to the discovery of his father, who is of the opinion that his wife and children died in a snowstorm shortly after the children's birth, and so seems to be ignorant of the relationship for most of the book. Shed isn't sure, either, since they share no physical similarities, though the author gives them very similar personalities.

In fact, Shed has two fathers and two mothers, and the challenge for him resolves into understanding who they are and what their roles in his life actually are. This he eventually succeeds in doing, but not before confusing them repeatedly and misidentifying them throughout the book. I think it would be proper to say that he is struggling to separate the physical from the spiritual and to separate what is real (physical) from what is mental. To what extent we are telling ourselves the story of our lives (creating it), and to what extent our lives are happening to us. To what extent are we the creators? What is God's role? Does God use us to create life? Shed refers to this intentional and inadvertent creativity as "killdeer", because of that birds mastery of trickery.

Shed uses sexuality to penetrate this mystery, in fact produces his children, in the end, by impregnating his own mother, though unaware of the fact. (His mother, on the other hand, has used the sexual relationship between her and her son to further obscure her motherhood, in an effort to protect him from his father.) He also develops a sexual relationship with his presumed father, though in the end this also turns out to be a misunderstanding. In the end he discovers his greatest hatred was directed towards his real father and grew out of his father's forcible rape of his child. Billy Blizzard does this because of his perceptions that Shed is a competitive threat for the attentions of Ida and because of his anal fixation, one supposes, developing as a result of his own heritage, which was feminist by blood, but masculinist by adoption at an early age. His adoptive father is a judge, probably murdered along with his wife by Billy.

So, as with all children, the question of Shed's parentage is crucial, though he uses sexual relationships with them to get at the truth. This works because of the truthful nature of sexuality, the inability to maintain our fantasies regarding who we are while involved in sexual relating over time. The prospect of a sexual relationship with his own father troubles Shed, but, in the end, the fact that his penis assumes the erect state when that prospect is in mind, convinces him of the rightness of the event. He recognizes that our bodies, being millions of years old, are far more likely to be right than our minds, only in existence for a few years.

This obscure parentage that continues throughout the book has an analog in Shed's racial heritage. In the beginning he is represented as completely American Indian and gradually becomes more white throughout the story until at the end, it isn't clear he has any Indian blood at all.

What Shed is attempting is the penetration of mysteries constructed by other humans in an attempt to creatively resolve problems produced by the creativity of yet other humans. It is a deconstruction. He uses creativity in an act of uncreating. The job of the detective, is to creatively uncreate what has been created by another. A very difficult task, sometimes, as we saw in the O.J. trial.

As soon as Shed begins his travels, he is confronted by anti Indian bigotry which continues as a secondary theme of the work, and in every described instance the perpetrators are portrayed in the most negative way. This particularly extends to the Mormons who are harsh, though the bordello seems to be the focus of their intemperate hatred. In fact, the bordello and its occupants, both employees and customers are grouped with Indians, in the form of Shed and his mother, as a persecuted minority suffering at the hands of the moral majority like Mormons. This interesting grouping, which eventually includes African Americans, is done to make us aware that all persecuted, in the U.S., are persecuted because of their feminism. As feminists, one and all, they are sexually attracted to each other and find their natural home in the bordello, the feminist outpost in a masculinist world. Masculinism is a rule based ideology, because of the order provided by rules. Feminism hates rules because they have the effect of restraining the serendipitous development of relationships.

In fact, God's people are portrayed in such a negative light, they become caricatured. The author underlines the point in this way, that strong beliefs of any sort produce enmity and hatred, and to the extent that their adherents are driven to proselytize for them, they are exposed as idolaters of the worst sort. This is in the way of demonstrating the negatives, too often ignored in the West, of creativity. Restraint is the most common way of asserting the creative will on a human population, it is therefore, a creative effort. But, it has the negative attribute or side effect of rendering the operated upon individual and especially the ideological operator intolerant of non believers to the extent of persecuting them and identifying them with their most negative concept, the devil.

The author places the first importance on anal sex, which will no doubt put off many readers. First, we become suspicious that he is a homosexual proselytizing in his own way for his minority, which would certainly be expected, given the political times. Certainly they have made the book publishable. However, this suspicion is minimized by the treatment the author gives the subject. He closely relates it to Indian mythology and the struggle for males to realize their own femininity, without losing their masculinity in the process. In fact the author suggests that the male anus is a special feature of the male anatomy, and especially the prostate gland, which requires the owner to establish a special relationship with it if he hopes to succeed in the quest to understand who he is and why he exists.

This is certainly a novel suggestion in my experience, but it is presented in such a convincing way, I am not ready to dismiss the notion. All methods of rising above common awareness that I am aware of require the seeker to adopt unusual practices. Some Hindus find it necessary to drink their urine. Many require a monastic existence. Priests are required to renounce sex. Of course not many of us have such a dramatic search for identity, as does Shed, nor his unusual and conflict intensive parentage. As can be read elsewhere, I am of the view that Western Europeans are the most intense masculinists in existence, while I would identify the American Indian as the most unalloyed feminist culture in existence. They, the Indians, are devoted to feminist values and use feminist symbols throughout, at least the non Christian ones. They minimize the Western God, Jehovah or Allah to the point of identifying him as the elusive "Spirit in the Sky", as Norman Greenbaum called Him, while devoting their entire waking life, from all reports, to worship of Gaia or Mother Earth.

They are devoted to the use of hallucinogens as a method of bridging the gap between the conscious and unconscious minds, which fact is in abundant evidence in this book. So, our masculinist culture will not like this book. It deals with drug use, including opium and pot as normal everyday occurrences experienced in conjunction with alcohol. It also dismisses sexual segregation in bed as part of the Western culture that produces bigotry, violence, and psychological complexes. This is a valid characterization I would say, though these negative manifestations of masculinism aren't quite so widespread as portrayed by the author. It would be remiss of me not to point out that, without masculinism, the author wouldn't be in a position to write such a critical analysis of Western civilization.

In the end though, the heterosexual reader is left to ponder the total dismissal of restraint represented by a sexual relationship relying on anal intercourse between father and son. It is very difficult to imagine that this violation of every sexual taboo in Western civilization, even for one who grants in some degree all of the criticisms of American culture, has any realistic validity. Maybe in some special cases. The main effect is to shock the reader to the point of dropping the book like a hot potato, or continuing to read while temporarily dismissing judgment.

The Mormons and their fellow travelers will scream with outrage at the violation of decency they see here, but, I don't know. I think this is just what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they envisioned a free press. This is ideological criticism of a very intense kind and in all of the areas I am qualified to judge, is valid. It does telescope events and choose particularly extreme examples, but these are the common devices of fiction.

The book foretells the future for us, I would say. It has been clear to me for some time that the success or failure of the drive for acceptance of homosexuals lies mainly on anal sex. Can the heterosexual majority be brought to acceptance of this practice as normal instead of branding it a "crime against nature"? It is a tough sell, given the fear of feces that permeates our culture. But, who knows. I never would have guessed twenty years ago that the establishment would grudgingly pipe the most extreme forms of pornography into a wide cross section of American homes and mild pornography into all of them.

This book deals with a lot of American mythology and redefines it to some extent by viewing it through the prism of feminism. It describes the mythic qualities of the buffalo and how that animal continues to affect us all. It develops the character of the shaman beyond what we are ordinarily exposed to, even to the extent of describing the source of his powers and his methods. It treats the subject of sexually anomalous persons and their potential for contributing to the health of the culture. It presents, in Billy Blizzard, the archetypal masculinist, forcibly repressing his own feminism to the extent, eventually of violent self destruction. It deals with the sheriff in the old west by providing a sheriff that could be described as the shadow of Matt Dillon.

In fact, this book is so jam packed full of themes and sub themes, that most of us will not get it all in one reading. It describes every idealized American institution from its negative side, as is appropriate for a feminist describing a masculinist culture. He is doing what we have done, when describing the native or black cultures in America, or primitives, or prostitutes. A profound and timely book.