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September 27, 2005

Tobias Schneebaum, gay adventurer who lived with Amazon cannibals, dies

Tobias Schneebaum, an openly gay explorer and writer, has died at this home in Great Neck, N.Y. He was in his mid 80s, and the cause of death was related to Parkinson's disease, Schneebaum's nephew told The New York Times.
Schneebaum gained fame after he lived among cannibals in the Amazon during the 1950s and claimed to have eaten part of a human heart. He was featured in the 2000 documentary Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, in which he returned to the Amazon and Indonesian New Guinea.

Keep the River on Your Right, originally published as a book in 1969, "became a cult classic [and] described how a mild-mannered gay New York artist wound up living, and ardently loving, for several months among the Arakmbut, an indigenous cannibalistic people in the rainforest of Peru," the Times wrote. Publishers Weekly called the memoir ''authentic, deeply moving, sensuously written, and incredibly haunting.'' Other critics dismissed it as exaggerated.

Theodore Schneebaum was born on the lower east side of Manhattan, most likely on March 25, 1922 (some sources say 1921), and raised in Brooklyn. But as a gay man and a Jew in 1950s America, Schneebaum was restless and began to travel, living for several years in an artists' colony in Mexico. In 1955 Schneebaum accepted a fellowship that took him to Peru, hitchhiking there from New York. At a Roman Catholic mission on the edge of the rain forest, he heard about the Arakmbut. (The tribe, whose name is also spelled "Harakumbut," was previously known as the Amarakaire. In his memoir, Schneebaum calls it by a pseudonym, the Akaramas), the Times reported.

The Arakmbut, whose home was several days' journey into the jungle, hunted with bows, arrows, and stone axes. No outsider, it was said, had ever returned from a trip there. To his relief, the Arakmbut welcomed him congenially. To his delight, homosexuality was not stigmatized there: Arakmbut men routinely had lovers of both sexes. Schneebaum spent the next several months living with the tribe in a state of unalloyed happiness, according to the newspaper.

One day he accompanied a group of Arakmbut men on what he thought was an ordinary hunting trip. They walked until they reached another village. As Schneebaum watched, his friends massacred all the men there. In the ensuing victory celebration, parts of the victims were roasted and eaten. Offered a bit of flesh, Schneebaum partook; later that evening, he wrote, he ate part of a heart. It was an experience, he later said, that would haunt him for years. He left the Arakmbut shortly afterward, the newspaper reported.

Keep the River on Your Right caused a sensation when it was published. Anthropologists were aghast: Ethnographers were not supposed to sleep with their subjects, much less eat them. Interviewers were titillated (''How did it taste?'' a fellow guest asked Schneebaum on The Mike Douglas Show. ''A little bit like pork,'' he replied). (The New York Times, Advocate.com)

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