ABSTRACT
In 1914, John Layard, aged twenty-three, accompanied his mentor, Rivers, on an anthropological trip to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). He stayed for a year on a small island off Malekula studying the inhabitants, their culture, and lifestyle. Layard was the type of person who really enthused about his own sexuality and the sexuality of others. He could empathise with anything, sexual or violent, or criminal or perverse. Layard believed in loving the sin, that everyone had to do something evil as part of their spiritual development. To Layard, sex was healing in itself; he claimed to have started the cure of a schizophrenic lad by masturbating him. However, in 1914, Layard was lucky enough to fall among tribesmen that he liked and admired. Layard's Melanesians might have been murdering homosexual cannibals, but for him they remained the only real gentlemen on this planet.
