Gilbert Herdt

Gilbert Herdt (born February 24, 1949) is Emeritus Professor of Human Sexuality Studies and Anthropology and a Founder of the Department of Sexuality Studies and National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University. Herdt is the recipient of various awards and research grants, and founded the Summer Institute on Sexuality and Society at the University of Amsterdam (1996), and the PhD Program in Human Sexuality at the California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco (2013).

Herdt is best known for conducting long term field work among the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, where male intergenerational sexual practice was normal in the form of 'ritual insemination rites'. Males were required to pass through three specific sexual phases in their lives involving the consumption of sperm: boys provide sexual service to young men, adolescents then receive oral sex from boys, and finally, males enter adulthood by becoming heterosexual. His publications on the Sambia began in 1981, providing early and highly influential evidence of accepted homosexuality in non-western society. By the late 1990's/early 2000's, Herdt found to his surprise that the Sambia community he had studied, came to abandon the intergenerational ritual insemination rites he had observed 20 years prior. Herdt has written widely on variation in human sexual expression, sex and gender, in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, and across culture. Easily accessible papers include Why the Sambia Initiate Boys before Age 10 (2000), The Magical Age of 10 (2000 - on puberty and adrenarche), and his interview in Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia (1994).