A PLAYFUL GAME:
 DR. GAJDUSEK IN THE CAROLINE ISLANDS, 1961

Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008) was an American physician, medical researcher and Nobel laureate, who wrote journals from his childhood onwards. Presented here are excerpts from his journal describing his visit to the Western Caroline Islands, September 4 to October 1, 1961, published by The National Institutes of Health in January, 1968. The excerpts were edited by Mike van Houten, who gave them the title A Playful Game, and published in the Nambla Bulletin volume 19 no. 2, pp. 16-18, published in New York in October 1998. Minor additions from The Washington Post of 5 April 1996 are given in brown text. 

All the Caroline Islands were inhabited by Micronesians and were then part of the American-ruled Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. 

The basis of the selection of the excerpts is that they hint at Gajdusek’s love of boys. Given that the journal was to be published in the USA and there was then no public knowledge of his sexuality, it is much to be expected that he would have avoided them doing so at all overtly. It was only after he was charged in April 1996 with having fellated a boy that this became widely known, though after his release from imprisonment in 1998, he became fiercely outspoken about it and the good its expression had done.^[1] 

Shorter extracts from this same journal were widely published in newspapers of the time,^[2] as it had in fact played a role in his downfall, an embittered junior colleague determined somehow to harm him having perused all his journals in the hope, soon realised, of finding material that could be used to induce the FBI to investigate Gajdusek.^[3]

 

During the 10th Pacific Science Congress meetings I early became aware of a youth attending the meetings, a Japanese boy who appeared to be no more than 14 years old, but who attended with all the rapt attention and serious appearance of understanding, and who followed the proceedings of many of the senior delegates. Day after day I noted his youthful appearance, astonished that a Japanese professional man could appear so young. However, I could not accept the fact that he was really any older than 13 or 14, and yesterday, at the closing ceremony in the amphitheater of the University of Hawaii, I asked him about himself. He is William Lau, a tenth grade student in Honolulu, who has only attended the Congress as an Auditor in the Medical Science meetings, the subject in which he is most interested. To find that such enthusiasm and striving in a youth thrilled me with pleasure and joy; I asked for his address and have already sent him a stack of our reprints. I shall surely keep in touch with the promising youngster.

[Sept. 10, 1961, Koror Island:] How much there is to gain if the fun and joy of childish play can be left uninhibited in adult life, without semantic twists into categories of bawdiness, perversion, lewdness, sensuality, eroticism, unnaturalness, masochism and sadism.

I had a wonderful time jesting with the 51 boys and girls I examined. The girls are not shy about removing their dresses or taking off their blouses, even before adult male teachers or their boy classmates. Thus, the Catholic admonition to cover the breasts is not taken very seriously. Boys too are not nudity shy.

Of the children, I have taken greatest interest in Esteban Austin, one of the only 2 boys in the highest school class, the sixth. He is 13 years old, looks but 11 or 12, and is the brightest of his age mates. [Editor’s note: The following entry comes after a long description of the “Texas Club” on Koror Island.] I look on the loud jukebox, the ready girls (all teenagers but one, who later tells me she is the mother of the 15-17 year old I have spotted as the most exciting and provocative) and sit drinking in deep thought. How regrettable is our culture that lets boys such as myself develop without the ease and social skills required in such a totally not-intellectual, yet real and corporeal and aesthetically fundamental setting as that of this club. As youngsters we should be truly at home in this; as teenaged youths we should be masters of the erotic and the stylization of the erotic which is the root of and heart of this pageantry. Instead, it is either the hearth of which we burn out our teen-aged energy, or the altar we cannot approach with ease, our whole life through. The girls respond only to the rhythm and the eyes, the motion and the erotically provoking.

Above all, there is joy, fun and light-hearted pleasantry here... such as one would never find in a similar establishment in Baltimore, New York or Europe. My companion dances and later even I dance, overcoming my hesitancy and clumsy inabilities... Yet, it is one thing to admire, to envy, to appreciate all the fun, levity, erotic candor, and display, and another to reap it - to take part in the harvest... and I, in my bookish, over-intellectualized way am not a match for the offering. I would, at this moment, have every youth sleep with his sister, get seduced by his older brother and male teacher, practice with his male and female cousins, aunts, uncles and teacher and maid - anything! - only to know sex as fun and frivolity, as rhythm and passionate play - from an early age - from the very onset of puberty. Yes, all this I have long approved of, yet I am fully aware that in such a permissive, unfrustrated, unfettered setting, not academic proficiency, scientific curiosity, aesthetic activity, creative drive, nor sustained intellectual endeavor are provoked. The ascetic, prohibitory, monastic and inhibiting atmosphere alone seems to be required to creative intellectual application and endeavor. Oh, if this may not be true! Yet, I fear it is, in spite of the whimsical, wishful thinking of “progressive” educators. [...]

The relaxed, unguilty and immensely humorous and light-hearted way still prepubertal children can take part in overt sexuality with those of their own age or with older people is a quality of behavior, part and parcel with the realm of play. This spirit of sex in youth is play and it is enjoyed as such. It required a very direct and prolonged attack by the culture to inhibit this playfulness, to produce of sexual participation a shame, a guilt, and a stealth or frustrated inhibition. Even in those cultures which most seek to produce such controls, success in childhood is often lacking and a good number of individuals succeed in escaping - i.e. in always find fun, humor, excitement and playfulness in sex. Yet many only escape through rebellion: always thereafter taking all sexual activity far more seriously than its place as play. Thus devotees and champions of sex arise: absurd for a playful game of fun and humor! Without humor, laughter and gaiety sex becomes something much different from its early unschooled form.

Among the older children, one boy of about 12 fainted after venepuncture [drawing a blood sample], and we simply let him recover lying on a table, as we continued with the others. He recovered sheepishly and was far more upset by his fainting and performance than by direct effects of his physiological reaction to venepuncture. Finally, when we finished and collected the specimens from the children who had each been holding his own, I found him - one of the oldest and the only one of all the near 100 Palauan children bled - crying. It was obvious that he was crying more from the shame of his “weakness” than from any objection to the procedure or reaction to it. I tried to elicit his aid in packaging the specimens, and to give him a chance to recover his self esteem, but it proved difficult and I did not fully succeed.

We collected blood specimens on Mogmog through the morning and, thereafter, I went exploring the island with Isack Langal, a boy of about 12 years, who took me around the entire island, and then went swimming with me off one of the points. We swam for a full hour off a fine sandy beach facing the reef. Later in the day, when we returned to our very same swimming spot, there was a large shark swimming about in our pool. The boys ran into the water and chased him out with sticks and stones.

The nightly motion pictures have started, the Coast Guard truck has picked up most of the children who will attend, and I still type here, with the two brothers Raphael and Nicholas looking on. They are not going to the motion pictures and, as I suspect, the health of their mother is the cause. I will stay with them this evening as long as I can, for I like them, among the best of this fascinating and wonderful group of Ulithi children. They have hung about with me, paid me a great deal of attention, given me confidence and trust and responded to my attentions with least misgivings.

During my days on the Ulithi Atoll I was rewarded by a love from the children which produced in me a self confidence and a tranquillity of spirit which only satiation of passion and confidence in ability to love and be loved can produce. [... Sept. 20, 1961, Falalap Island, Ulithi Atoll:] The children trusted me without much hesitation, gave themselves to me, and many individuals gave me a personal share in their lives, their passions, their sensuality, their aspirations, which I but little deserved and for which I tried to give all of myself in gratitude. Ulithi was an overwhelmingly pleasant experience - as was also Palau - but I was more intimate and got to know youngsters on Ulithi better than those on Palau, and I learned more about them and they more about me.

Nothing that the more sophisticated civilized and cosmopolitan world can offer can ever surpass what I have been given by the Ulithians.

On the ship from Falalap to Mogmog, Hathe’s 12 year old son, a late adolescent who looks 16 rather than his true age, was my most interesting companion Since his mother is from Mogmog, and his father from Falalap, he often lives on Mogmog (in fact, most of the time). Ramon Peiel, as the lad is named, reciprocated my interest in him, and I became a close friend in short order. The following day on Mogmog he was often with me and remained closely bound to me. On the island a like-aged lad, somewhat less advanced in development than Ramon - Caesario (or Sesario) Harongachem, first showed me about, helped me with my limited Ulithi vocabulary and showed me the seaward shore with its immense pounding, frightening surf.

Quickly, with trust and confidence, these lads identified with me, gave of themselves to me and became my lasting friends. I parted from Mogmog the following day, hoping that they would not forget me anymore than I should forget them, and grateful!

On Asor, Isak, a boy of 12, and one of his comrades went swimming with me on the reef tip of the island. We swam together, played about in the water, and got to know each other well. Isak was from Fassarai, I found that he, too, had returned to his Fassarai home in the outboard driven boat of Mr. Johnson, the Trust Territory agricultural advisor. Again Isak ran off alone with me and together we toured the length of the long, narrow and quiet island. Again he clung closely to me, showed me about extensively through the uninhabited part of the island, taught me much about Ulithian youth, and gave himself completely to me.

And yet, all my thoughts and most intense memories of these islands will leave Guam untouched... except for that hour with the small 13 year old brother of two pregnant feeble-minded sisters of 16 and 17 years, in the family of Chamorros whom we four visited together - Dr. Mathai, Dr. Dunn, Dr. Lessell and myself. A family with a 20 year old brother, and his two sisters - all with the same syndrome of progressive dementia, cataracts and ataxia, with insidious onset at about 11 years of age in each case - was the subject of our examination. .

We found all three siblings at the home with an aged grandfather. The mother arrived later and the 15 year old and 13 year old brothers were off to school. These two younger, and still normal, siblings had passed 11 years without showing any signs of this familial syndrome.

Simmons Lessell has been studying this fascinating family. I watched Mathai perform his neurological examination of the oldest brother carefully and cautiously, and when the 13 year old boy arrived, I checked him while Mathai and Lessell examined the two now-pregnant sisters. The small, mid-pubertal Chamorro schoolboy provided my only chance on Guam to get to talk intimately and at length with a Chamorro youngster. I was too much within myself, at work on papers, books and manuscripts, and too much a captive of the doctors of the Naval Hospital here at Guam Memorial, and of my own group, to see and really meet the Chamorro children. This one fleeting hour, thus, stands as the most important of my many on Guam.

The boy trusted me, told me much about himself, his school, and I won him by my interest and sincere devotion to his problems and to him. Quite obviously, the home he and his missing - 15 year old high school student did not get back before we left - brother are sharing with three defective and neurologically degenerating and socially stigmatized older siblings, provides a great problem for the boy, now in the seventh grade and doing well. It is quite a probable guess that he or his older brother may have had a hand in the sisters’ pregnancies, but we did not investigate the family drama. That he would welcome any contact outside the narrow horizons of this family, this inbred and depressing community, this military-dominated small island was very evident. That at this age, even earlier, such contacts are needed and wanted and exploitable, and perhaps never again available to him, was the knowledge that left me with a sense of tragedy and frustration as we left the household, saying goodbye to the giggling triumvirate of defectives, and the voluminous mother, who had arrived after we did.

But the lad who had been my patient followed us out, waved goodbye, followed us further, caught my eye and returned my smile and waved, and, as we left, I felt I was committing a crime, a crime often committed in the past and often to be committed again, yet one which I cannot commit without recognizing the violence and the betrayal which lies in the parting... as one cuts the lifeline from a drifting lifeboat, once full; so I turned and went my way.

 

^[1] For example, amongst other things Gajdusek said passionately to Bosse Lindquist in his documentary The Genius and The Boys, aired by BBC Four in 2009, after being provoked by Lindquist’s sudden exposition of the dominant narrow view of Greek love as something necessarily “forced” on a boy, were:

Boy, what a brain-washed person you are! With three or four hundred boys who had sex with me from eight and ten and twelve, one hundred percent have run into my bed, jumped in without my mentioning it, and asked for sex. I have never asked for it. […] All boys want a lover.

^[2] See, for good examples, “NIH Scientist’s Journals Describe Child Sexuality” in The Washington Post, 6 April 1996 and “The Fall of a Family Man” in The Independent (London), 4 August 1996.

^[3] The story was most fully recounted by Gajdusek’s long-term colleague Dr,. Michael Alpers in an obituary of him in the Papua New Guinea Medical Journal, volume 53, no. 1-2, March-June 2010, pp. 54-64.