Suburban Sex, Purple People

 

Cindy and Vic Baranco

 Part 1 of 2 parts

 

 Sometime last year my son Isaiah came home and told me there was a “Purple People” sex cult in neighboring Lafayette, CA. Yep, he said, a racy private community with a guard who chased away prying outsiders. That was the buzz at high school anyway.

 I figured the story was just typical adolescent boy blather blown out of proportion. Lafayette may not be the straightest suburb in America, but it probably gets votes for the Top 10. Sure it’s a bedroom suburb, but could it be that kind of bedroom suburb? We’re talking about million dollar homes, top public schools, a hardware store and a beautiful new public library. You’d expect to find Marcia Brady—not Lady Chatterley—in Lafayette.

 

 Turns out, Isaiah was right; I was wrong. Probing the Internet, I learned that since 1968, Lafayette has been home to Lafayette Morehouse, a commune—they bristle at the term “cult”—of purple homes whose residents drive around in old purple limos on about 20 acres off Purson (shouldn’t it be Purple?) Lane. Their stated philosophy is “Responsible Hedonism”—“the pursuit of pleasure as the highest goal,” but with a concern for the pleasure of others, not just oneself (hence “responsible”).

 
To earn greenbacks to support a purple lifestyle, Lafayette Morehouse offers courses to the public on topics its members purport to know well after boning up on them for many years: Communication, intimacy, sensuality, sexuality and group living. After all, this is the commune that lays claim to the first known public demonstration (1976) of a woman in a state of orgasm. For 3 hours! (“Honey, this is wonderful, but I’ve got to run some errands, go to the gym and play golf with the boys. Don’t stop. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”).

 
While all of this sounds like a stimulating ride toward nirvana, scattered news reports over the years paint Lafayette Morehouse—originally founded as More University—a  very different color purple.

 
More’s founder was the late Vic Baranco, an Oakland native whose black jazz pianist father and white Jewish mother “had the world’s most miserable marriage,” according to Baranco himself in a bylined article posted on the Lafayette Morehouse website, which portrays him as a benevolent leader and wise educator in the ways of sensual pleasure.

 Baranco is described rather less flatteringly in author David Felton’s 1972 book, Mindfuckers, which also profiles two other notorious cult leaders: Mel Lyman and Charles Manson (don’t you wish you shared a book cover with Chuck?). Felton called all three men “mindfuckers simply because they have made it their business to fuck men’s minds and to control them. They’ve succeeded by assuming godlike authority and using such mindfucking techniques as physical and verbal bullying and group humiliation.”

 Various other accounts and lawsuits reference More University’s tent-living homeless people, drug use, trash, vagrancy, filth and, of course, sex, including a 1978 county health officials’ report that a 3-year-old girl contracted gonorrhea while on the property. In an example of dubious marketing, reporters in 1992 found that More received generous donations of underwear from Jockey.

 Baranco eventually divorced his first wife, Suzanne, with whom he had two children and whose favorite color was purple.  He later married a considerably younger blonde, Cindy, with whom he spent 27 years before his death in Hawaii, home to yet another Morehouse location, in 2002. He was 68. Cindy is now the communal leader.

 I couldn’t find any recent reports about Lafayette Morehouse, which perhaps is tamer and a better neighbor since Baranco’s death. And I sure wasn’t going to try to penetrate the closely guarded community—I’d leave that to fearless, troublemaking local teens.

 However, I figured I could go undercover and attend one of Morehouse’s public classes. Choices include Basic Sensuality, Advanced Sensuality, Saying Yes to Pleasure and Mutual Pleasurable Stimulation of the Human Nervous System. But those cost between $225 and $475 each, well beyond this blog’s budget.

 Expansion of Sexual Potential sounded like a hands-on learning experience, but it runs a cool $12,500 and the course description says it has homework (sorry, I’m busy). If I’d had $35,000 burning a hole in my pants and had completed the prerequisites, I could have tried Qualification, which “will train you to experience and explore an intensity and duration of orgasm far beyond commonly held viewpoints in our society.”

 Instead, I enrolled in Intimacy Revealed: An Introduction. Why? It cost only $40, involved a group Q&A session and there was no touching or clothing removal (I know, boring!). The class was held at yet another Morehouse site—a purple Victorian house in Oakland adorned on the front with an inverted, modified peace sign, the community’s symbol.

 I got there a little late on a Friday night. Things started off kind of creepy.

 To be continued…