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)