GAJDUSEK ON TONGARIKI ISLAND, 1965

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 in August 1965 to Tongariki, a tiny island with five villages and one of the Shepherd Islands in the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides. 

The journal was published as Melanesian and Micronesian Journal. Return Expedition to the New Hebrides, Caroline Islands and New Guinea, July 29, 1965 to December 20, 1965 by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness in Bethesda, Maryland in 1993. 

The first section of the journal devoted to his return to Tongariki is full of descriptions of  his time with the local boys, who accompanied and helped him in his work by day and slept with him at night. In the light of Gajdusek’s sexuality, all of this is vaguely suggestive of Greek love, but presented here are only the passages most strongly suggestive of its being at play, or which touch on its practice in the Shepherd Islands independently of Gajdusek’s own participation. Given that the journal was intended for publication in the USA and there was then no public knowledge of his sexuality, it is hardly surprising that he refrained from describing his own participation at all overtly. It was only after he was charged in April 1996 with having fellated a boy that his love of boys 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]

Melanesian and Micronesian Journal, 1965

August 6, 1965 Herata Village, Tongariki, Shepherd Islands, New Hebrides.

Soon after arriving in Herata, I slipped off down the trail to the school at Lehunata ground, at the junction of trails for Lagilia, Tavia and Leiwaima. As I approached the school, the boys were starting up the trail to return home as school just had been dismissed. They saw me and instead of being apprehensive they recognized me immediately and with a shout of joy rushed up the trail at me, springing upon me from all sides with shrieks of rejoicing. I have probably never been so enthusiastically welcomed before in my life, and it was very, very pleasing. After a full half-hour of shouting, laughing and hugging me, we all ran down the trail together to the school, where I was equally enthusiastically greeted by the Tavia, Leiwaima and Legilia boys and girls of the school. A half-hour later the boys accompanied me back down the trail toward Herata, where we arrived in a still jubilant spirit, with the crowd of children forming a loud and joyous entourage. We had tea and played about with the children, renewing my acquaintance with their names and, finally, in early afternoon, started back toward the school and the three other villages. We went first to Lagilia and then to Leiwaima but not to Tavia. The trip took most of the afternoon, and the two dozen boys with us came with us the whole way. We visited most of the houses of Lagilia and Tongariki looks as though a great many people are off the island. [p. 14]

August 11, 1965 Leiwaima, Tongariki Island, New Hebrides

I have slept here at Leiwaima, and in George’s house which I was given for the night, I have had with me Toara Kali, Toara Newman, John ”Bush,” Carlo Fau, Sepa and Nisu, and they have tumbled and tossed and played most of the night. However, all their rough house is gentle and they get along along very well with each other. I estimate their ages as follows: Toara Kali 12 years, Toara Newman 12 years, John “Bush” 14 years, Carlo Fau 9 years, Sepa 7 years and Nisu 8 years. [p. 20]

[The same place, the next day]

I awoke early, with eight boys sleeping in the room with me, to unrestrained horseplay, unrestrained in the genital grabbing and holding. Loud references about this, in spite of their family’s presence, do not phase them, whereas, they were highly restrained in that all was gentle and without a trace of the roughness characteristic of most American boys at play. Finally, boys of five play with those of ten and 15 in one solid group without much age-group division or segregation. […]

Early in the morning at Leiwaima, soon after the boys had awakened, gone through their usual rough-house of genital pulling and jest, then washed for school and had breakfast of taro with coconut milk, the Leiwaima launch crew arrived from Buninga to ask that I go directly to Buninga with them to attend to several seriously sick people. [pp. 23-4]

August 14, Erata Village, Tongariki Island

[27] We had six mild earthquakes (”narira”) during the night. I slept out with George and with Tom at Likaro, thus having slept indoors at Erata only once thus far and indoors at Leiwaima twice. Tonight is dark, the moon very late in rising, and the afternoon has been dull, cold and windy. Views near sunset across to Tongoa showed Lopevi dimly silhouetted beyond Tongoa’s silhouette, and foreboding cloud formations built up high over Epi and Tongoa. I stood in darkness looking out at the dramatic view, such as few are privileged in their lifetime to behold, and thought gratefully of the wonderful years I have had and the wonderful fortune that has been mine to permit me such a large share of privileges for forty years. It is granted to few to see as much of the world and to work as intimately with different cultures and races. With these Tongarikians on their remote inaccessible island as with the dozens of other indigenous peoples to whom my studies and endeavors of these over-forty years have brought me, I have had immense fun and joy in the splendor and beauty, and mirth and inspiration that life with them has given me. To have been so surrounded by children for all my life as I have been has been perhaps the greatest reward, and although I have always been threatened with a lonely old age I still hope for a foolish, passionate one, as Yeats prayed for, and will have had so much of childhood, infancy, and youth surrounding my mature years that memories will sustain me if I am doomed to a lingering senescence. […]

[The same place, the next day]

I had shortly after awakening, engaged in horseplay with Kaltipun and Tom to such an extent that I twisted my back, and by the time that we finally had to leave for Buninga I could neither carry a thing nor bend over. It was the first such serious back injury I had ever had, and as a sign of old age and foolishness I was rather proud of it---for it was something like a skiing injury---one feels self-satisfied and proud, to some extent, in spite of it, if after 40 one returns to skis and suffers such an outcome. Here to be still wrestling in horseplay at nearly 45 with small children is foolish and strange, to say the least, but great fun, and I am proud of my foolishness. [pp. 27-8]

August 16, 1965 On board the M.Y. Navaka of Port Vila—The Condominium Government launch, anchored off Emae Island. Shepherd Islands, New Hebrides   

A crowded day, starting with an early rising in the central clearing of Erata village where Dick and I slept out with a group of the boys. Edmond, Ton and Toara Newman slept with me and George and Malen with Dick. Edmond and George decided they were not getting enough of our sleeping bag coverage from the cool winds to warrant staying and left early, while the others stayed with us for the night. Tom, George, Toara Newman, Toara ……… of Leiwaima and Toara Kali have been my keenest companions during this stay, with Kalitipun, Nisua and Carlo Fao, and Amos and Kalomar Tambil close seconds, and Mason, Abel, Robeia, Jimmy and many others all close friends and helpers. Malen was with me most of this last evening at Erata, helping me pack up the blood specimens we had collected during the day and getting supplies sorted out, and would have spent the night with me but for the fact that Toara Newman and Tom pushed him out. Dick had the more subtle sensuality of George and Malen for his company than was my fortune with the others. George’s leaving left him with only Malen as a companion, but that was enough for him to be pleased and joyous with the morning and to reward Malen with the special carving knife and other things he gave away. Certainly the younger boys: Amos, Malen, George and Nisua are more promising interesting and challenging than the somewhat more crass, mercenary and worldly older sophisticated boys such as Toara Newman of Erata. [p. 29]

^[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.