Queer coders II

In the first instalment, I related how Carlton Gajdusek, genius medical researcher, cultivated a boy harem from the most remote places in the world—places like Papua New Guinea, where he worked among the cannibals. Gajdusek scooped up the boys and adopted them—took them back to America. Since these boys originated from societies that were pre-literate and were taken to live a middle-class life in the United States, Gajdusek was more or less ensured a quiet life with his catamites—until, in the 1990s, one boy became disgruntled and blew the whole operation open. Otherwise, Gajdusek pretty much got away with it—though when the operation blew apart it meant he died in disgrace (not that he minded, he was not socially orientated).

As with many such operations, Gajdusek experimented to find the right formula—he began fresh from Harvard Medical School, where, at 22, he was the youngest graduate ever at the time. He went to Germany—a Germany still in ruins, since this was 1948. Here, Gajdusek scooped up a young boy and took him home to the States—he had his mother, then worried about his homosexuality, adopt the boy. This was the first experiment in adoption. The boy, Wolfgang Klaiber, went on to be a senior executive in the defence industry and in the military think-tank world. It seems nothing happened between the boy and Gajdusek, but really this was a dummy run—for a man with a brilliant scientific mind like Gajdusek this adoption was a means to test the waters, work out what was possible and what he could get away with. Obviously, as Germany recovered and became an ordered society again, such opportunities would soon vanish.

If this were a conspiracy theory site, I would say that the fact the boy shot up the US defence industry hierarchy indicates a wider conspiracy; almost certainly not, Gajdusek in all likelihood identified a smart boy and the smart boy thrived in his adopted homeland—especially as he had an educated upbringing. Yet the operation does indicate how these things can work: Gajdusek brings this boy up—or is associated with his salvation from the post-war ruins, anyway—and the boy rises in US society. What Gajdusek has done, even if not consciously, is establish an anchor—a powerful person who could come in useful, could use his contacts to get people to look the other way if Gajdusek ever encountered problems; and it is in this way, in part, that influence networks are created.

In addition, Gajdusek also did a stint where he was a live-in doctor, for about nine years, in a Boston children’s hospital—he specialised in terminal diseases, hopeless cases. You realise why, right? The victims, as he knew, would not recover from terminal childhood cancer—they would never talk and so…But, of course, a single man cannot stay as a live-in doctor in a children’s hospital indefinitely without suspicions being raised, no matter how selflessly he devotes himself to incurable illnesses in children. Again, Gajdusek was testing out the right positions to work unmolested…

Gajdusek eventually abandoned all his research funding to stay in Papua New Guinea after an initial field trip. Yes, partly this was because he was fascinated by the novel kuru illness that he encountered there, but he was also captivated by the less restrained sexual mores he found in PNG—worth more than any research grant. In his defence, Gajdusek always claimed that inter-generational sex was normal in PNG; people there just happened to masturbate or frottage each other, almost as a casual greeting. Obviously, with these remote tribes we mostly have his word for it; perhaps their sexual mores were different, but were they really as different as Gajdusek’s proclivities were? Further, this was no real defence because context matters—once you take the children out of their native environment and plonk them in an American suburb, you cannot carry on with the same sexual behaviours as in a tiny village in PNG.

This was all Gajdusek’s means to justify his actions to himself; he even insisted that intergenerational sex was the only way to stop children from abandoning their elders to nursing homes—although “his” only child who seemed to care for him in later life was the token girl he adopted, since really it is a woman’s lot to care for the elderly along with the children (intergenerational sex be damned). Gajdusek also insisted that “his” children enjoyed sexual contact; well, this is more cope—you can bring someone to orgasm involuntarily and then say they enjoyed it; and, well, they did and they didn’t; actually, the enjoyment is not the point—anymore than if I tied you up and forced you to eat chocolate ice cream all day (“But it’s tasty, what’s the problem?”).

One addendum, slightly in Gajdusek’s defence. Nobody knows what causes homosexuality, nor are we likely to know given the current political environment—although one proposed explanation is an in utero viral infection that leads to a hormonal imbalance. However, there is such a thing as “gay face”; there are characteristic facial features that appear in homosexuals; ergo, a man like Gajdusek, especially with his autistic-analytical traits, may well have noticed such faces on particular children in PNG and picked them out for special attention—which they would have naturally reciprocated, since they were in fact already so inclined.

In this way, you can see that the child molester who thinks his victims are “into it” (all children like it really, they say to themselves) may be right in the sense that he has picked out a homosexual child by facial features recognisable to himself—and this can lead to the self-delusion that “all children like it really”, since he in fact selects those that will be “into it” and, insofar as they have begun their sexual maturation, know they are different from the other children and are actually delighted to have found an “uncle” who understands them.