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' which involved the consumption of semen. Males were required to pass through three specific sexual phases in their lives: 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).

Selected Relevant Publications

• Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights (Editor and contributor, 2009). He dedicated this book to "five very special people - my oldest and closest friends from the 1970s to the 90s, whose love has enriched me and changed my life" - including to Theo Sandfort and Theo van der Meer.
• The Sambia: Ritual, Sexuality and Change in Papua New Guinea. Second Edition. New York: Wadsworth.
• 2001 Children of Horizons: how gay and lesbian teens are leading a new way out of the closet, editor with author Andrew Boxer. Beacon Press.
• 2001 Secrecy and Cultural Reality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
• 2000 Something to Tell You: The Road Families Travel When a Child Is Gay. New York: Columbia University Press.
• 1999 Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1998 Rituals of Manhood, edited by Gilbert Herdt. New edition. New York:Transaction Publishers.
• 1997 Same Sex, Different Cultures. New York: Westview Press.
• 1994 Third Sex, Third Gender. New York: Zone Books.
• 1993 Gay Culture In America: Essays From the Field. Boston: Beacon Press
• 1992 Children of Horizons: How Gay Youth are Forging a New Way Out of the Closet. (With Andrew Boxer.) Boston: Beacon Press.
• Gilbert Herdt PhD. (1991). Commentary on Status of Sex Research, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 4:1, 5-12.
• 1987 The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• 1984 Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology), editor Gilbert Herdt. Berkeley: University of California Press
• 1982 Rituals of Manhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• 1981 Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill.