Editor’s Note: Some words have been censored by Gay Globe solely to facilitate distribution on social media, as certain platforms and tools have, in the past, restricted or censored our content when it contained specific terms.
Roger-Luc Chayer (Image : Cultination)
Once again, the misinformation website Cultination has published another misleading story, claiming that a Papua tribe practiced sexual relations between men before marrying women, which is highly misleading and largely false.
Here is the truth: a post shared in recent days on social media, particularly by the page “Cultination,” features a striking image of Papuan warriors accompanied by a sensationalist claim: “In some tribes in Papua, men engage in sexual relations with each other before marrying a woman.” While the image is eye-catching, the content seriously distorts the anthropological reality.
The facts concern the Sambia (Simbari), a people from the highlands of Papua New Guinea studied during the 1970s and 1980s by American anthropologist Gilbert Herdt. He documented a particularly strict system of male initiation rituals, which has now been largely abandoned.
A Ritual for Transmitting “Masculine Strength”
In traditional Sambia cosmology, boys were believed not to be born with enough “male substance” (associated with spm). To grow into strong and fertile warriors, they were expected to receive this substance from older males.
From approximately the ages of 7 to 10, boys were separated from women and placed in the “men’s house.” For several years, they performed ritual fellio on older adolescents or young initiates, ingesting spm. The roles later reversed, and as they matured, they became the “donors” themselves. At the end of the initiation process, around the ages of 18 to 20, they married women and permanently ceased these practices, adopting an exclusively heterosexual lifestyle.
These were neither romantic relationships nor expressions of chosen homosexuality, nor even recreational sexual activities. They were mandatory, hierarchical, ritualized, and non-reciprocal acts forming part of a rigorous system of masculine training. The Sambia did not regard these practices as homosexuality in the Western sense of the term, but rather as a form of spiritual nourishment necessary for growth.
Viral posts such as those published by Cultination remove this ritual entirely from its cultural context. They transform it into a supposed form of “ancient gay life” before marriage, which is both inaccurate and anachronistic. There were no couples, no search for mutual pleasure, and no sexual freedom in the modern sense. Instead, this was a rigid cultural system rooted in magico-religious beliefs and strict gender segregation.
This type of practice, sometimes described by anthropologists as ritualized homosexuality, has been observed in several Melanesian societies. However, it has largely declined—or disappeared entirely among the Simbari—under the influence of Christianity, formal education, urbanization, and major social changes since the 1990s.
Cultination is not a traditional news organization in the sense of a structured newsroom comparable to a recognized newspaper or news agency. Rather, it operates more like a viral content page producing sensational stories designed for social media engagement.
In practice, this type of platform often relies on sensationalism, clickbait, and a lack of proper source verification, sometimes recycling distorted or outdated stories to maximize engagement. To verify such claims, readers are encouraged to consult reputable fact-checking sources before sharing viral content.
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