Elder of the tribe - artist Tobias Schneebaum and making of documentary Keep the River on Your Right - Interview

Tobias Schneebaum twice left his New York home to live and love with primitive peoples, including a tribe still practicing cannibalism. Now 80, he recalls the journeys that he retraces in a new documentary

"My older brother would go in one direction; I would go in another." Tobias Schneebaum, 80, is talking about walking through Brooklyn's Owls Head Park in the 1930s with his brother. Moe Schneebaum refused to discuss Tobias's homosexuality with him but understood enough to leave his brother to cruise on his own. But Tobias might well be talking about his and his brother's life paths as well: Moe became a physicist and designed America's first two satellites; Tobias, working from the opposite, nonscientific brain lobe, was an up-and-coming abstract expressionist painter in the '50s, wrote several books, and, most sensationally, took off on unguided adventures, living and taking male lovers among remote tribes in Peru in the '50s and New Guinea in the '70s. Those journeys are now the subject of the excellent documentary Keep the River on Your Right, which IFC Films is opening in New York on March 30 and in limited release nationwide April 20.

For the moment, however, Schneebaum is remembering Owls Head Park. "Sometimes I would get picked up," he recalls. "But that was a time when cops planted evidence. They would go into the bathroom, get [aroused], and wait for somebody to come in. As soon as something happened between them, they would get arrested, and their names would be in the newspaper the next day."

Schneebaum's cruising took him well beyond Brooklyn. Recently on a cold winter morning, this calm gentleman with a dry sensibility talked about his exploits in his high-ceilinged studio apartment in Westbeth, a subsidized artists' residence in Greenwich Village. Its walls and tables are covered with fighting shields ("Don't they look like penises?"), lime pots, and other artifacts from his extensive travels as well as at least one nude photograph next to his bed of a dancer and ex-lover. Sitting nearby is his old friend and most recent lover, collage artist Joel Singer, 45.

Schneebaum's remarkable adventures began after he received a Fulbright grant to study art in Peru in 1955. He hitchhiked down through Central and South America. "Everywhere there were nice young men," he says matter-of-factly. "I had no trouble finding someone, at least for the night." Once in Peru, he decided to go across the Andes and into the then-uncharted jungle of the western Amazon basin. He headed off alone, in search of a mission he'd heard of, with only vague directions--essentially, walk downstream and "keep the river on your right." But the native tribe he'd hoped to find wasn't there, and "there seemed to be no way to find out where to go. Then this man with feathers implanted in his cheeks appeared and told us that everyone had been killed in his village. I thought, That is where I want to go. I don't know if I had an erotic feeling about him, but he affected me deeply."

Schneebaum ended up being adopted weeks later by an isolated tribe known as the Harakhambut. Harakhambut males and females joined to produce children, but they slept communally with others of their own gender. In his 1969 book from which the documentary gets its title, Schneebaum describes entangled male legs and arms and nocturnal encounters--with only veiled references to his sexual contact with many of the men.

"That was intentional," he explains. "Just the fact that I'm gay was enough to destroy the whole book. Sometimes we had sex, sometimes we didn't. It was so simple and natural to do anything that I wanted to do."

The book tenderly describes in detail one young man, Darinimbiak, for whom Schneebaum cared while the youth endured terminal dysentery. Was he his favorite? "He was," Schneebaum recalls. "He was extremely beautiful, with long black hair and a wonderful body."

Some anthropologists have taken him to task for sleeping with his subjects, as did talk-show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Charlie Rose, clips of whom appear in the film.

"To me, that was the most interesting aspect of the relationship I had with the Harakhambut," Schneebaum says in his defense. "Otherwise I wouldn't have had access to information."

A sudden raid on a neighboring village--and the subsequent feasting on the flesh of the murdered males--precipitated Schneebaum's return to "civilization," and he reappeared seven months after his disappearance. He had been presumed dead by the State Department.

As persistent as their subject, sibling filmmakers David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro take Schneebaum back to Peru and to the western, Indonesian half of New Guinea, where he had lived among the Asmat people and had taken several lovers--one of whom, Aipit, he meets again in the course of the documentary after close to 30 years. He says that at first he had declined to go, and not just because he has had three hip replacements and suffers from Parkinson's.

"I had memories that I didn't want to have disturbed," he says. "But then I felt I had to go back and see whether there really is homosexuality going on or whether I just made it up because I wanted it to be there." He laughs heartily and winks. "Maybe I just seduced them all."