the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 2
way to godliness was by doing the nasty—early, often, and with a smor-
gasbord of willing and like-minded partners. Their approach to spiritual-
ity was built around a marginal theological concept that, in more ways
than one, promised heaven on earth. By the end of 1846 at least four couples
among Noyes’s approximately forty followers were actually practicing
the “complex marriage” system that they preached (including Noyes,
his wife, two of his sisters, and their husbands), and in doing so they embarked
on one of the most remarkable—and controversial—social experiments
in American history.
But to the pious citizens of Putney in those fledgling days of Noyes’s
grand plan, the defrocked preacher appeared to be hosting a kinky
Victorian-era swingers’ club under the convenient guise of religion. Even
today, a skeptic might draw the same conclusion, especially after a recent
revelation that Noyes once suggested that the Perfectionists could “conquer
shame” by having sex onstage in front of an audience. The scandalous
tales of spouse swapping and Noyes’s unapologetic defense of complex
marriage were enough to work the locals into a lather, and on October 25,
1847, a county court in Putney issued a writ for Noyes’s arrest on two
counts of adultery and “adulterous fornication.” His arrest was preceded
by dark threats and loose talk about lynch mobs in this life and eternal
damnation in the next, and the controversy eventually prompted Noyes
and his followers to flee Vermont for New York State, where they joined
with another group of Perfectionists on land along Oneida Creek in Madison
County to build what outsiders imagined was a 19th-century version of
Plato’s Retreat.
In fact, what came to be known as the Oneida Community was a
much more complicated endeavor—one that lasted for a remarkable
thirty-two years but which ultimately proved unsustainable. That’s not to
say it was a complete failure; in fact, Noyes’s experiment succeeded on
many levels. The group gradually built a magnificent mansion complex in
which to house a population that at one point swelled to more than 250
people. The members fused into a community in the purest sense of the