This Bay Area Sex-Loving Commune Is Still Going Strong

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.

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.