Wild man

Blending personal diary entries with elements of a social history told like a novel, this book follows Tobias Schneebaum from his first private reckoning with homoerotic longing through years spent in Peru, Borneo and elsewhere. Schneebaum was a young New Yorker who, in 1955, vanished from view on the eastern flank of the Andes. In truth he had been living for over a year with the Harakhambut, a remote people whose way of life struck him as unfamiliar, primitive and deeply compelling.

His search for a "wild man" in other societies, and within himself, carried him across South America, India, Tibet, Africa, Borneo, New Guinea and Southeast Asia. Along the way he spent time with isolated forest communities, among them headhunters and cannibals, in places where few if any Western men had previously set foot.