Author Description

About the Author<br/><br/>Gilbert Herdt, PhD June 2007 Gilbert Herdt is a cultural and psychological anthropologist and an international expert on sexuality, sexual development, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Currently he is Professor of Sexuality Studies and Anthropology, and Chair of Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, a unique department in the US that annual teaches 6,000 students in sexuality. He is also the Director of the National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC), a long term project of the Ford Foundation that advances sexual literacy through web-based platforms and face-to-face trainings on sexual health, education, and rights, and Executive Director of the Institute for Sexuality, Social Inequality and Health, both of which institutions he founded. Trained in classical anthropology in the US and Australia, Gil received a 4 year Predoctoral Fulbright fellow to conduct dissertation research on sexuality and social development among the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, for which he received his PhD from the Australian National University in 1978. He was then awarded a 3-year Individual NIMH Postdoctoral fellowship, taken in residence at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, to train in gender identity and sexuality under psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, M.D. His first book, Guardians of the Flutes, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1981, and is now in its third edition. Dr Herdt was appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Stanford University (1979-1985). Herdt continued his research in 13 fieldtrips over a period of 19 years (1974-1993), culminating in a BBC film, “Guardians of the Flutes.” He published two influential edited books on ritual and sexuality in New Guinea, Rituals of Manhood (1982), and Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (1984), both by the University of California Press, and a popular undergraduate case study, The Sambia: Ritual and Sexuality in New Guinea, 1987 and revised 2006, as well as m