Any group that feels obligated to include “Are you a sex cult?”

on its frequently asked questions page probably has something of a public relations problem, even when the answer is, “No.”

“Seriously, we are in many ways fairly traditional, suburban families and individuals but we’re also a group exploring pleasurable living, which qualifies us as an alternative lifestyle,” writes the intentional community Lafayette Morehouse on its website.

According to a 2020 webcast from Morehouse, “dozens and dozens” of people are still living communally in a group that has been active since the late 1960s.

It’s one of a small fraction of surviving communes from that heyday of experimentation in group living.

Contra Costa County locals like Sabrina McQueen used to see group members — who live on a secluded parcel of some 20-plus acres, including a swimming pool, tennis court and, at one time, a boxing ring — driving around town in purple limos.

“They’d drop people off at the grocery store,” McQueen said.

“So it’s like, ‘Well, what’s that?’

And that’s when my mom told me, ‘Oh, those are the Purple People.'”

Purple is a big theme with Morehouse, whose members also live in purple-painted houses.

In high school, McQueen and her friends were so curious about the group they’d make a night of spying on the property from the one lookout point where you could see it.

The “Purple People” themselves do not answer to that name.

“Do I look purple to you?”

one Morehouse member told an SF Weekly reporter in 1995.

And their penchant for privacy is well-known in the area; McQueen’s father was a mail carrier, but Morehouse wouldn’t let him get past the gate of their property to make his deliveries.

McQueen herself had never heard the name Lafayette Morehouse.

She has, however, heard the sex cult rumor, and media organizations also have referred to the group that way.

So she wants to know the truth about Morehouse.

“I’m just wondering, are the Purple People still there and what are they about?”

she asked.

Marco Beneteau took courses at Lafayette Morehouse in the 2000s and has lived in several communes.

He said the idea that the group is a cult is “complete nonsense,” and that the group has displayed none of the characteristics associated with cults.

“For instance, excommunication for leaving, financial coercion, demanding that people cut off relationships with their relatives.

None of this has ever been practiced at Morehouse,” he said.

Academics who study intentional communities like Morehouse eschew the very word “cult,” said Tim Miller, a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas who has written extensively about 1960s-era communes.

“The way people in common parlance use the word is to say [this is] something I don’t like, and that may have a good basis and it may not,” he said.

So why has Lafayette Morehouse acquired this reputation?

I very much wanted to talk to the group, but despite numerous emails and phone calls, they mostly ignored me.

However, some of their history is available in newspaper stories, magazine articles and books, on websites and via former members.

What has come through is that Lafayette Morehouse is one of the few surviving links to an increasingly forgotten part of Bay Area history.

This promotional video produced by Lafayette Morehouse is the only one on their YouTube channel.

Communes, gurus and human potential

To really understand Lafayette Morehouse, you have to grasp a few things about the 1960s and early 1970s other than Bob Dylan, Vietnam and hippies.

During the era, the younger generation — believe it or not, the baby boomers now so readily derided as out of touch — formed the bulk of a counterculture looking to overthrow norms and conventions in just about everything: religion, politics, music, art — you name it.

Hundreds of thousands — even up to a million — young people took to living together in groups organized around political, religious or environmental ideals, said Miller, who authored a survey of the era’s communes.

Starting in 1965, he said, “there was just an explosion” of new communities.

These groups sought to build a better society based on values other than those enshrined in what Miller calls “this sort of me-first” American culture.

While communitarian ideas were inspiring people to live together in collectivist ways, a parallel, more individualistic philosophy also was gaining ground.

The human potential movement was based on the notion that people could tap into their unused abilities to attain “self-actualization.”

The Bay Area became a hub for both these ideas.

This also was the age when high-profile evangelists pushed for expanding human consciousness.

The former Harvard professor Timothy Leary urged young people to take psychedelic drugs and “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Meanwhile, self-educated former car salesman Werner Erhard promoted a program of intense seminars called EST, designed to bring about personal transformation.

In 1967, at the intersection of communes, the human potential movement and the rise of these charismatic gurus, appeared the founder of Morehouse: Victor Baranco.

“Victor Baranco was one of the teachers who had come up with a philosophy that helped people to self-actualize or reach their human potential,” said Laurie Rivlin-Heller, who knew Baranco in the 1970s when she lived in Morehouse residences in Oakland and Rohnert Park.

She later wrote her master’s thesis on the group, which was initially called the Institute of Human Abilities.

Baranco was a former appliance salesman now selling a new philosophy, in which the goal, broadly speaking, was to remove the self-created obstacles between you and what you want.

And he was good at reeling people into his orbit.

“You would participate in a course in which he was the teacher,” Rivlin-Heller said.

“And he would be able to see you in a way that most people are not capable of doing.

Not only did he listen, but he looked and he could assess on the basis of your question and maybe a couple of follow-up questions where you were coming from.

It was a unique gift.”

Baranco’s group made money by selling courses and renovating dilapidated houses he’d purchased.

The Morehouse concept was so successful that at one point it had dozens of affiliates around the country, and Rolling Stone reported that people in Berkeley were calling the founder “the Colonel Sanders of the commune scene.”

That 1971 article was less than complimentary, portraying Baranco driving around in a chauffeur-driven limo surrounded by obsequious devotees who paid money to hear him deliver homespun homilies.

Baranco was also quoted as acknowledging he’d been a “hustler” who’d made “big money in shady ways.

Not necessarily illegal, but shady,” including selling phony diamond rings and watches.

The article later appeared in a book called “Mindfuckers” alongside a chapter on Charles Manson — not a good look for any leader of a commune.

Rivlin-Heller said the article missed the point of Baranco’s philosophy.

“He put everything up front,” she said.

“The introductory course to Morehouse is called the ‘Mark Group,’ where you are the mark.

So there was no denying that he had put together a hustle, but you were volunteering, entering into the hustle and participating in it.

Those that I know, [they] had a good experience there … and if they didn’t feel they were getting value, they would leave.”

Another former Morehouse adherent, Rebekah Beneteau, said she took a lot of courses at the Lafayette property in the 1990s and also lived with her then-husband, Marco, in a Yonkers, New York, Morehouse.

She described her time there as “a really life-changing experience.”

“I call them the silver-lining people,” Beneteau said, “because their philosophy and approach to life was to always view everything as if it was a gift and their own creation.

And how could they use it?

How could they view it as already perfect, including the potential for change?”

One of the primary components of the Morehouse philosophy, both Beneateaus said, is that a community runs better when its women are happy.

Rebekah Beneteau said that while the Morehouses clearly had a money-making component, she never felt they took advantage of her.

“I’ve actually been affiliated with way more organizations that are way more pushy and suck your money out,” she said.

So what’s with the sex?

Lafayette Morehouse bills its philosophy as “responsible hedonism.”

“Hedonism is an ethical point of view that has the pursuit of pleasure as the highest goal,” the group writes on its website.

“People often think that living pleasurably means that you don’t care about anybody else.

Our experience has proven that if you are going to have a pleasurable life, then you have to see to it that others around you live pleasurably too.”

A big part of Morehouse’s hedonistic doctrine appears to involve having better sex.

The group currently has nine sensuality-related courses advertised on its website.

Current sensuality-related courses offered by Lafayette Morehouse.

The focus on sex is a reflection of the culture at the time of Morehouse’s founding, said Rivlin-Heller.

Baranco, who was in his 30s at the time, saw a way for people his age and older to participate in the sexual revolution happening around them.

“All of these different gurus had different hooks,” Rivlin-Heller said.

“Ram Dass did meditation and chanting and Buddhism.

Esalen had humanistic psychology.

So the sexual revolution, I guess you would say, was the hook for Victor Baranco.”

One notorious Morehouse event was a public demonstration in 1976 of what the group claimed was a woman having a three-hour orgasm.

(No, I couldn’t find any video.)

And Baranco took advantage of California’s loose postsecondary education standards to turn the Lafayette commune into “More University,” which offered Ph.D.s in the humanities and sensuality, and conducted what the organization said was sexual research.

In 1992, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that courses cost as much as $16,800.

A 1994 profile of the university in the conservative magazine Heterodoxy described a less than rigorous academic program, to put it mildly, as well as some alleged troubling sexual incidents, though no arrests or charges were ever made.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Baranco unsuccessfully sued The Chronicle and The Contra Costa Times for libel.

One court decision is not-safe-for-work reading: According to the court, More University’s Advanced Sensuality class included research in “engorgement, lubrication, seminal secretion.”

It said one of the goals of the course was to “make friends with another crotch.”

The university was forced to shut down in 1997.

Rebekah Beneteau, at least, believes Morehouse did legitimate sexual research.

“There are many people now who are teaching [the one-hour orgasm] who either attribute it to them or not,” she said.

“They have a technique that allowed me to sink into my body much more instead of always being up in my head.”

For a whole hour?

“Not yet, but I’ve gotten up to 27 minutes,” she said.

A Facebook Live video from Lafayette Morehouse discussing their approach to communal living and COVID-19.

Fear of what’s different

From the 1970s into the early 1990s, Lafayette Morehouse engaged in an ongoing battle with the county and neighbors over zoning issues and code violations, including allowing unhoused people to live on the property in tents.

Tim Miller, the historian of intentional communities, said it’s not uncommon for communes to be unpopular among local residents.

“That’s a very typical thing that’s happened throughout history,” he said.

“There seems to be an instinctive fear among a lot of people of anything that’s new or different.”

Miller said the remaining ’60s-era communes are “often quite quiet.

They don’t want to call attention to themselves, even though … they get along with their neighbors and all of that.

[But] the big problem they have over and over are zoning laws [that] often forbid communal living.”

Surviving the decades

Baranco died in Hawaii in 2002, and since then Lafayette Morehouse has been mostly free of controversy.

The great swell of ’60s-era communes eventually dissipated, leaving only a small fraction of surviving groups.

“A friend of mine, who still lives on one of the ’60s-era communes, said when their community had a great out-migration in the ’80s, he thought some of them just decided they were Republicans, after all,” said Miller.

It’s hard to say why Morehouse has outlasted its peers, but Rebekah Beneteau said Morehouse has figured out how to make group living work.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the group held a webcast where they described the difficulty of living in a close community with so many people during a pandemic.

But true to their “silver lining” philosophy, they were looking for ways the experience could actually enhance their lives.

Not a bad goal, really.

Episode Transcript

I’m Olivia Allen-Price.

You’re listening to Bay Curious.

Today we’re going to venture back to the 1960s and 70s, when the Bay Area was a center for many social movements.

People took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War …

Sound pop of protest

The Black Panther Party formed in response to police brutality against Black people …

Speech: We are talking about the survival of Black people, nothing else…

Women were frustrated by the gender inequality they faced daily …

Chanting: Free our sisters, free ourselves

And a lot of people started to think differently about how they wanted to live.

As many as a million Americans decided to join communes, group living situations, often with shared chores and finances.

Now the vast majority of those intentional communities that formed in the 60s and 70s have disappeared.

But not all of them.

Reporter Jon Brooks went looking for one that survived in the suburbs of Contra Costa County, a group that has been steeped in mystery and sometimes controversy.

One note for listeners: we do talk about sex in this episode.

It first aired in 2022.

Here’s Jon…

If you were a high school kid growing up in the Walnut Creek area back in the 1990s, there wasn’t a lot to do.

That’s one reason why Sabrina McQueen has never forgotten the big purple car she saw driving around town.

They’d drop people off at the grocery store.

So it’s like, well, what’s that?

And that’s when my mom told me, ‘Oh, those are the purple people.’

Purple people.

That is fun to say.

Say it once, you’re probably gonna want to say it again.

Purple people.

Who could they possibly be?

That’s what Sabrina wants to know.

She remembers in the seventh grade she went with a friend to pick someone up who lived on the purple people’s property…a compound on some 20-plus acres.

I was so excited that I thought I was going to go inside and be able to see it.

And then we got just to the gate, and that was it.

You can’t get past the gate.

What exactly was going on in there?

It’s one of those lingering mysteries to people who live in the area.

Now, here we should tell you, the Purple People aren’t really called the Purple People.

(I know, rats.)

That is just what locals call them.

Why?

Because they’re known to drive around in purple vehicles and live in purple-painted houses.

Do you know the official name of the group?

No, I don’t.

That’s why I asked this question.

Their real name is Lafayette Morehouse.

And they are one of a very small fraction of 1960s-era communes that survive to this day.

Lafayette Morehouse was so mysterious to locals like Sabrina, she and her friends on weekends would drive to this one lookout point to see if they could catch a glimpse of the property.

It would be kind of like, Hey, what do you guys want to go do tonight?

It’s like, Oh, you guys want to go like, check out the purple people?

Sabrina’s driving me to that spot now.

But she’s having a hard time finding it.

So, here’s where we’re going to turn.

But it has been 30 years.

Excuse me, we’re looking for the Purple People campus …

Purple people campus?

Yeah.

Sorry, no idea.

You never heard that?

Do you think they don’t know for real?

Lafayette Morehouse has a colorful history, which we’re going to get into in a moment, but in recent decades it’s been quiet.

Three years ago, the group was briefly in the news after someone left racist graffiti on their buildings.

Morehouse’s reaction to the media at the time: No comment.

Naturally, I wanted very much to talk to the group, but they declined multiple interview requests.

But I did find three former Morehouse members who did want to talk.

Like Rebekah Beneteau.

She took courses at Lafayette Morehouse in the 1990s.

The group was so successful at attracting members, Morehouse branches sprang up around the country.

Beneteau says she lived for six years in one of the sister Morehouse communes in New York.

Really the core of Morehouse’s philosophy is that life is better lived together and that we disrupted that in the 50s by shuttling every woman, every couple, off into their own houses.

And then we invented Valium because there were all these women alone at home going nuts.

In the 1960s and 70s a lot of people were looking for new ways to live more fulfilling lives, at least more fulfilling than their parents.

One way to escape the prescribed path laid out by society – school, job, marriage, kids, death – was to live together in groups organized around political, religious, or environmental ideals.

Hundreds of thousands, up to a million, people tried their hand at communal living, says professor Tim Miller, an expert on intentional communities.

Starting in 1965, I think you can date it that precisely. there was a whole new wave of communities came along… (4:00) I would say by and large these new young people’s communities were not very popular with mainstream society, and I would say that’s a very typical thing.

I think it’s just that fear of what’s different.

In the 1970s ..and all the way through the 90s, Morehouse and Contra Costa County also battled over zoning issues and code violations … skirmishes that were frequently reported in the news.

Psychedelic music starts

The 1960s and 70s were also the age of … the guru.

Like Timothy Leary – who urged people to take psychedelic drugs.

Turn on, tune in, and drop out.

And Werner Erhard, creator of something called E-S-T, or EST.

This was a program of intense seminars supposedly leading to personal transformation.

What Erhard was prescribing was… um, I don’t know…

People are…that love is attention.

All of these different gurus had different hooks.

This is Laurie Rivlin Heller.

In the early ‘70s she dropped out of college and moved to the Bay Area.

Here, she got interested in the human potential movement – the idea that people could tap into their unused abilities to reach their full potential.

That’s when she discovered someone named Victor Baranco.

We’ve got to pause for a quick break.

When we return … we get to know Victor Baranco.

Sponsor message

Laurie Rivlin Heller met Victor Baranco in the early 70s, and found herself drawn to him.

The Berkeley-born Baranco was the founder of Morehouse, which had branches in a few Bay Area cities.

Baranco had a successful career as an appliance salesman.

But with Morehouse, he was offering something more than consumer goods.

He was selling a new philosophy.

The goal…remove the self-created obstacles between you and what you want.

And he was good at it.

He would be able to see you in a way that most people are not capable of doing.

The fact that he could so clearly understand who I was and where I was coming from.

And he did that to everybody.

It was a unique gift.

Baranco called his program for living “responsible hedonism.”

That means creating a pleasurable life for not only yourself, but for others.

The responsible part was that you take responsibility for your life and your action.

Things could change, but it was up to you to do that.

The hedonism part?

That’s where the “more” in Morehouse comes in.

And a lot of it has to do with … you guessed it … or you didn’t, because this is public media: sex.

The sexual revolution, I guess you would say, was the hook for Victor Baranco.

There were young people in this time period who were experiencing sexuality in a way that hadn’t been done previously.

And there were older people who wanted a piece of it.

According to former members, one of the tenets of Baranco’s teaching was that a community functioned better when the women were happy, sexually and otherwise.

The group is famous for a 1976 demonstration of a woman reportedly having a 3-hour orgasm.

Yes I said what I said.

I spent a lot of time looking for that tape.

Didn’t find it.

But I did find some current Morehouse YouTube videos.

In the fundamentals of sensuality course, we discuss the nature of orgasm.

And in the afternoon, there’s a live demonstration of a woman in orgasm for an hour that will really blow your mind.

Rebekah Beneteau…the woman who lived in a Morehouse commune in New York… was at first put off by the emphasis on sex.

They had a class where a woman was demonstrating being in orgasm for an hour.

I thought that was extremely freaky.

I didn’t want anything to do with them.

But she did like the group’s positive outlook and focus on people’s ability to change.

Now, she offers sex and intimacy coaching.

And, she changed her mind about the one-hour orgasm.

They have a technique that also allowed me to sink into my body much more instead of always being up in my head.

30:05 Can you really have a one-hour orgasm?

Not yet, but I’ve gotten up to 27 minutes

Mm, 27 minutes.

Pretty, pretty good.

All of this focus on sex has led to a certain reputation for Morehouse among its neighbors.

There’s a couple of rumors, one that it was a sex cult.

Yes, the group has definitely at times been labeled a sex cult.

So much so they even have a question on their FAQ page … “Are you a sex cult?”

I mean, that’s complete nonsense.

This is Marco Beneteau.

He and Rebekah used to be married.

He also took a lot of Morehouse courses.

Then the two of them started their own commune in Philadelphia.

Now he lives on a commune in Wyoming.

So the man knows his communes.

He says Morehouse didn’t have any of the characteristics people associate with cults.

For instance, excommunication for leaving, financial coercion.

You know, demanding that people cut off relationships with their relatives, that, you know, none of this has ever been practiced at Morehouse.

If Morehouse isn’t a cult, it has been controversial.

In 1971, Rolling Stone published a pretty unflattering portrait of the group – complete with Baranco driving around in a chauffeur-driven limo.

The article implied Baranco was making a lot of money off group members.

But Laurie Rivlin Heller says there was nothing devious going on.

Self-interest was an open part of Baranco’s philosophy.

I would say that he put everything up front.

The introductory course to Morehouse is called the Mark Group, where you are the mark.

So there was no denying that he had put together a hustle, but you were voluntarily entering into the hustle and participating in it.

Still, that Rolling Stone article later appeared in a book alongside a chapter on Charles Manson.

Not a good look for any leader of a commune.

Using classical educational modes, More university is dedicated to the full realization of human potential.

Baranco later turned Lafayette Morehouse into More University.

More University, more controversy.

The university offered PhDs in the humanities and of course, sensuality, including sexual research.

In 1992, the San Francisco Chronicle reported at least one course cost almost 17-thousand dollars.

In the 80s and 90s Baranco sued the Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times for libel.

(Hashtag please don’t sue us.)

The court threw those lawsuits out.

One of the decisions is not-safe-for-work reading.

According to the court, a goal of More University’s Advanced Sensuality class was to “make friends with another crotch.”

Which, if you’re listening Morehouse, would be an awesome bumper sticker.

The university shut down in the mid-90s.

Victor Baranco died in 2002 at the age of 68.

And, eventually, the great majority of ‘60s communes faded away.

Professor Timothy Miller:

Friend of mine, who still lives on one of the 60s era communes, said when their community had a great outmigration in the 80s, he thought some of them just decided they were Republicans, after all.

But Morehouse has survived.

The decades come, the decades go, and they’re still doing their thing – whatever it is.

Back in the car with Sabrina, we wandered around trying to find that one view of the campus she remembers.

We kept taking wrong turns, going back over the same streets.

And then… …

It’s a purple house.

Sabrina’s excited.

She’s a Purple People fan.

I wonder if that belongs to… Oh, yeah, I mean, that is, does that look like it’s purple?

It’s a nice property, with tennis courts and everything.

But really, there’s not much to see and the group does have a right to its privacy.

Sabrina, I think, is viewing it through the eyes of her high school years, when there was this mysterious aura around this counterculture group right in her own suburban home town.

I wanted to know what she thinks of the Purple People now.

It is kind of interesting that this has survived so long, which I think is so amazing.

I mean, hey, if that’s what they want to do and they’re peaceful and they are able to be part of our community, it sounds like they’re having fun.

So good for them.

I’m a reporter.

It’s my job to be skeptical.

But I will say one thing.

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Lafayette Morehouse went live over Facebook.

They were definitely taking safety seriously.

But, their aim wasn’t just to survive COVID, they said that wasn’t a high enough goal.

They wanted to use the experience as a way to make their lives even better.

If life hands you really sour lemons, make even sweeter lemonade.

I got to admit, I’m still thinking about that one.

That was reporter Jon Brooks.

If you like Bay Curious, I’ve got a request.

Please tell your podcast listening friends about the show.

We all like a good recommendation…help us grow!

And as always, consider donating to help sustain the work we do on Bay Curious.

More info at KQED.org/donate.

Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.

Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.

Brendan Willard and Sebastian Miño-Bucheli also helped on this episode.

We get extra support from: Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.

I’m Olivia Allen-Price.

Have a wonderful week.

This Bay Area Sex-Loving Commune Is Still Going Strong ^⁠58%

Speakers

Tim Miller

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

This Bay Area Sex-Loving Commune Is Still Going Strong ⁠58%