Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (13 page)

“Hey, did you ever have a Greek pastry?” he asked.

“No, what is it?”

“Wait, let me get some money.” Elam stopped a few people and sold a few more letters. I followed him to another store, where he bought something called a baklava.

“This is marvelous,” I said, my mouth full of exotic tastes of sesame and honey.

He also bought a drink called Orangina, which was a bubbly orange juice. It became my favorite French soft drink.

Thor was about a year old then, and he had started to eat adult food cut up in small pieces. I gave him some of the pastry, which he seemed to enjoy, and he picked the sticky crust from his fingers.

By now it was night, but the streets of the Latin Quarter seemed busier than before. I was worried that we should start litnessing so we could get home with some money before inspiration. Elam smiled knowingly, and I felt so dependent on him at that moment.

“Don’t worry,” he said,“we don’t have quotas here like they do in other colonies. This is the freest place you will ever find in the Family. Enjoy it while you can. Besides, if you don’t make anything, I will give you half of mine.”

Elam was right about the Paris home. Unfortunately, it did not stay like that forever, but while we had freedom, I enjoyed it immensely.

One night Joab read us a new Mo letter titled “One Wife.” Joab was a big, hairy man, at least ten years older than his wife, Hopie, but although I never talked with him very much, I knew he was a gentle man despite his rough appearance. He had kept us excited by this new letter for days, dropping hints that “this was a bomb,” and “the revolution will never be the same.” Joab had been one of the first to join the Family, when it was still called the Revolution, and his favorite antic was to stop in mid-sentence and scream,“It’s a Revolution,” to which all fifty-odd of us would scream back,“For Jesus!” That night he stopped to scream about every two minutes.

“Are you ready, brothers?” he asked, his dark eyes grinning with excitement. “This letter will divide the sheep from the goats.”

“One Wife” talked about everyone being married to everyone else, and not having selfish little marriage units.

God’s in the business of breaking up little selfish private worldly families to make of their yielded broken pieces a larger unit—one Family.

He’s in the business of destroying the relationships of many wives in order to make them One Wife—God’s Wife—the Bride of Christ!…In other words, partiality toward your own wife or husband or children strikes at the very foundation of communal living. [249, 9, 12]

Since I always thought we were all spiritually married to everyone else in the Family, I did not find the message of this letter particularly shocking. However, it turned out to be one of the significant letters of our history, starting us down the road to threesome marriages and group sex.

Other letters came out around the same time with new revelations about the freedom we were given in the Family,“Revolutionary Women,” “Revolutionary Sex,” “Lovelight,” “Jealousy,” “Women in Love. ” Most of this freedom centered around sex, in fact, sexual liberation seemed to be the pathway to spiritual growth, as laid out in the new letters.

Women were told to dress and act sexier, to attract and keep the attention of men. Couples were told that jealousy is pride and “the selfishness of private property.” A wife was reprimanded for not “sharing” her husband with another woman. With the average age of COG members between eighteen and twenty-five at that time, any new liberties in this area were welcomed. We had been under traditional moral guidelines since the Family’s beginning, and these new freedoms in the area of sex were exciting and desirable. They didn’t seem perverted, in fact, every new revelation about sex was supported with Bible verses or Bible stories. There is much in the Song of Solomon about lovemaking, and a few of the Old Testament patriarchs often seemed more immoral than some of our contemporary television evangelists. I would venture to say that the modern Moral Majority would not approve of King David dancing naked in the streets, or of his taking other men’s wives to bed, stories that can be found in the Bible. Any new revelation for which a Bible reference could not be found was covered by Jesus’ words,“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (John 16, 12). The implication was that we were now ready for what Jesus did not tell his disciples, and Mo was revealing these things to us. In addition, the sexual sharing at this time involved only those who had obtained a position of leadership. I had heard of and tried the “free love” philosophy before when I was a hippie, and it didn’t seem to bring any greater community, perhaps this was only for the more spiritually advanced, such as our leaders.

Although I was always curious by nature, I was not very enthusiastic about sharing sexually with just any brother. However, I was interested in the concept laid out in “Flirty Little Fishy,” which explained how Maria, Mo’s mistress, lured men to Jesus by using her flirtatious powers as a woman. Although it was written in January 1974, it would be a year before we tried this method of witnessing, but I was inexplicably intrigued by the metaphor of “catching fish” (men) with the bait (women) on a hook (the love of God), cast by a fisherman (Mo or other male leader). Why did this prick my interest? Why was I fascinated by a woman being used by a man to lure other men? The image was a classic pimp-prostitute model, but I did not recognize it. Even if I had, we had already learned that God can use anything the devil uses for His own glory. Mo taught us that the devil had a monopoly on sex, and we were going to bring it back into God’s realm.

Strangely, although many of us had been sexually liberated before we joined, those who had come from the more religious fundamentalist backgrounds took this new license to the furthest extremes. As sex became more and more prevalent in our lifestyle, I noticed that the most insistent to follow the letters were those men and women who had been good church-raised Christians and had never gone “astray” as I had. For instance, Mo’s own permanent lover, Maria, had been a very strict churchgoer before she joined the Family, and Mo was her first sexual partner. Most of the girls I knew who became lovers of leaders, and even those who went to Mo’s house, were former churchy “saints. ” I don’t know if they actually enjoyed the sexual freedom, or if they were just oriented to obedience! I followed these letters in part because I had always been rebellious to authority, and I was therefore now trying to prove I was a good disciple. And since, for some unknown reason, I seemed to be resigned to a life of sexually “giving” to men, the new concepts on sex and sharing did not bother me. In fact, it was easier to follow than trying to sell Mo letters on the street.

My husband was more intrigued by these new letters than I was. Since we did not have our own individual copies of the letters at that time, Cal tried to obtain copies to read over and over. He informed me, as if he were letting me in on a closely guarded secret, that there was quite a bit of hanky-panky going on among the leaders here in the Paris home. In particular, Hopie, Mo’s own daughter, and Joab, her husband, each had started intimate relationships with single brothers and sisters. Since this was closer to home, my interest was further piqued. I realized that Beth, a young single woman who had joined the Family in Scandinavia, wasn’t sleeping in the dorm. She had her own bedroom in a small area behind the leaders’ office. I knew that there were quite a few married men who were living in Paris without their wives, and I began to wonder how much “one wife” principles were being followed in the area of sexual sharing here in our colony. I wondered if I would be sharing Cal with anyone soon, and I truthfully did not feel jealousy or experience any anxiety over this thought. At twenty-one years of age, I was interested in whom I might be able to share with, mostly out of curiosity. Sadly, this should have been the time of my life when I would seriously be looking for a lifelong partner, but one had already been chosen for me.

Since I rarely had the chance to become friends with a brother, I understood how sexual sharing could allow deeper relationships to develop. Our life was so busy—everyone spent most of their time either working in the home, litnessing, or attending meetings—that we rarely had time to nurture friendships. Sharing sexually certainly seemed like a way to promote deeper friendships as well as the essential feeling of unity with one another. I did not have a sexual desire or an emotional longing to become close to another man, and I don’t remember having a physical attraction to anyone at that time either.

But I would have liked someone to talk to. However, these were nothing more than fantasies, since at this point, the sharing concept was the privilege of leaders only. In fact, I learned later that only in the Paris colony, the London homes, and the big colony in Italy where the leaders congregated was sexual experimentation actually being practiced. Cal expressed conflicting hopes and worries about sharing.

I think he liked the idea for himself, but he wasn’t too keen on letting someone else make love to me. However, with our busy schedules, Cal practicing all day with the band, and myself exploring Paris and raising Thor as a gypsy, we were too absorbed to worry about it for long.

My Paris days were exploding with exciting sensations of life. I was learning French. I was also becoming cultured, which was an adventure for a young, inquisitive American girl. I had little time or money for the relatively expensive museums, but the Paris streets alone are full of culture. Every day I was eager to go out into the colorful city that I was beginning to love. I took Thor to every park in the city, and his first pony ride was in the famed Jardin des Tuileries. I delighted sipping a milk with strawberry syrup, a drink I could share with Thor, while sitting on a crowded cafe patio, imagining that the lone person beside me was a starving artist waiting for his work to be discovered.

I always dashed away these fantasies, since litnessing was my primary concern. On the street, I considered myself a better witnesser than litnesser, which meant I could talk to someone about spirituality more successfully than I could sell Mo letters. Essentially, I thought of myself as some type of angel, rescuing lost souls from the devil’s clutch. For instance, while I was waiting for a metro train one evening, I saw a young man pacing up and down the platform and felt an urge to talk with him. As I got closer, I saw a troubled look on his face, but the desire to speak to him became even stronger. I approached with a smile, and he seemed to back away in apprehension.

After hearing my noticeably American accent, he relaxed, and eventually we sat on the bench, along with my litnessing partner, as I spent hours telling him about Jesus. We learned that because of insurmountable personal problems, he had decided to jump in front of a train and end his life, not an uncommon event in the Parisian underground. He was nervously pacing closer and closer to the edge, waiting to jump in front of the next train, when I had approached. Of course, our conversation put a stop, or at least a hold, on his immediate intentions, and he asked Jesus into his heart and came to our home for visits quite a few times afterward.

Caroline, a young, pretty French woman, was another person whom I witnessed to at a time when she needed help. With a young child and an abusive boyfriend, she had used up all the reserves of hope that she had stored up for emergencies and hard times. I met her on a corner of the Rue Montmartre and talked to her about God. She took my litnessing partner and myself to her tiny apartment, where we talked for hours.

Her little girl’s father was in jail, and her present boyfriend was treating her roughly and not helping her meet her financial needs. She wanted a good home for her daughter, and she wanted to know more about God and His Will for her life. Within a few days, Caroline had left her job, left her boyfriend, and with her daughter moved in with us.

This was our purpose in the world, to tell errant people what God’s Will was for them. This was the type of work that drew me to the Family, and since I was still able to help people in a very tangible way, the apparent idiosyncrasies of the COG seemed superfluous.

Living in the Paris home, with the pampered musicians and our most radical leaders, I was again protected from the mundane chore of bringing in funds from selling literature. Sure, we had quotas, which were a set amount of money to bring back, or a certain number of pieces of literature that had to be sold each day, however, with brothers like Jeremy in our colony, who stood on a street corner for four hours and sold only two Mo letters, we felt comically relieved of quota stress.

I did not realize it, or even think about it then, but wherever there were really big leaders, like Mo’s sons or daughters, or one of his queens, there was always enough money in the home to survive. They obviously had a cash flow that the rest of us did not. Perhaps our best asset was that we had Hopie as the top leader of the Paris home.

Moses David’s youngest daughter was one of the unexplainable phenomena I found in the COG. In my naive state of wonderment at all that seemed true and beautiful, Hopie was the purest embodiment of it all for me, representing selfless love in human form. Her wispy blond hair softened the angular lines of her face, and she looked like the good girl next door no matter what age she was or what problems she had.

Throughout the many years I was in close contact with her, I can only remember kind words accompanied by a smile and loving look whenever I was in her presence.

As one of Mo’s children, Hopie was considered “royal family. ” Recently, Mo had inaugurated his oldest daughter, Esther, as Queen of the Family.

The whole story of the real-life inauguration came out in a letter, and more “queens” were added later. Mo’s three other children, Hopie, Benjamin, and Joshua, were also considered part of the royal family, and therefore top leaders, along with their wives and husbands. Since many of the royal family now had mistresses or lovers, they too were classified as some form of royalty.

Actually, the added titles did not mean much to the rest of the Family, since Mo’s adult children had always been in the leadership circle.