David Weisberg on Schneebaum

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?"