GAJDUSEK IN NEW GUINEA, 1969

Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008) was an American physician, medical researcher, Nobel laureate and boysexual, who wrote journals from his childhood onwards. Presented here are excerpts from his journal describing his visit to New Guinea in 1969. Though his profession was medical, he always took a keen anthropological interest in the tribes he met. 

The journal was published as Journal of expeditions to the Soviet Union, Africa, the islands of Madagascar, la Réunion and Mauritius, Indonesia and to East and West New Guinea, Australia and Guam, to study kuru and other neurological diseases, epidemic influenza, endemic goitrous cretinism, and child growth and development, with explorations on the Great Papuan Plateau and on the Lakes Plain and inland southern lowlands of West New Guinea, June 1, 1969 to March 3, 1970 by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Strokes in Bethesda, Maryland in 1971. 

However, the following extracts from it are only those republished in “NIH Scientist’s Journals Describe Child Sexuality”, an article published in The Washington Post of 5 April 1996, with additions in brown text from “Sex Abuse Case Casts Pall on Nobel Scientist”, an article in the Los Angeles Times of 23 February 1997,  and another passage in green text taken from The Independent of 4 August 1996. 

The basis of the selection of the excerpts was that they show Gajdusek’s interest in Greek love and hint at his partaking of it. 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 other newspapers of the time, 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.^[2] 

The Biami tribe described in the first three passages were horticulturalists in the Nomad River tropical rainforest area of the Western Province of the then-Australian-ruled Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Other peoples of the same province were earlier visited and described by Gajdusek in the article Gajdusek in New Guinea, 1962.

[Gajdusek] describes a New Guinea tribe known as the Biami:

Nov. 3, Wabiri Haus Kiaphe. “The boys are interested in semen and on being friendly, holding hands with them or sitting intimately beside them they reach for one’s genitals, as do the Anga boys at low stages of contact. They are trained to masturbate and fellate the adult males and probably, like the Etoro and Waragu, as I know is in the case in the Anga, they believe that eating of semen or rubbing it into their skin is important to the growth and maturation of the boys.... Here, too, when asked for words pertaining to sex or sexual anatomy everyone [in a group of boys] laughs and younger boys run off. On the other hand their overtures and actions make it clear that they know of and practice a great deal of sexual activity with the men.”

Nov. 5, Sedado Village: “Tiuda is the term used as the boys present the young boys to the police, [blank] and myself as sexual partners ... they are not at all ashamed and quite openly solicit among the boys and men. The use of tongue protruded from mouth somewhat curled to indicate fellatio is a gesture they make rather publicly, and it is new to me.”

Nov. 9, at the Nomad River Patrol Post, he says of the Biami: “Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, my hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me, and the suggestion is made only slightly more seriously and with but a bit more levity than would accompany a suggestion that one accept a gift of food.”

25 December, describing a night shared with a group of young assistants.: “I slept well again, like a bitch with her half dozen pups lying and crawling over her, and I awoke to the dramatic skies of a Papuan morning.”

Dec. 26, Be’a: “Slept well with Mbira, Awomu, Sengo, and Mbondo, and arouse to a round of horseplay with them. Then all the boys and men were off to wash in the adjacent stream.”

Dec. 27, Be’a: “Ekoro, Yewei, Mbondo, Awamu and Sengo and [blank space] slept with me last night and I find the children as gentle and kind and playful as at the start of my sojourn. I love them.”

^[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] 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.