the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 6
Noyes had given his follower permission to publish the letter, and
its subsequent appearance in a Perfectionist publication set Noyes on an
irreversible course. Having publicly declared his belief in the free exchange
of marriage partners, he became openly dedicated to the proposition.
While that made it tough for his less radical disciples to publicly
support him, a different kind of flock began to gather, including a reasonably
wealthy and generous woman named Harriet A. Holton who credited
a previous Noyes article with saving her from sin. She began sending
money to support his ministry, and in 1838, Noyes proposed marriage in
a letter that read like a tomcat’s prenup. It emphasized, in no uncertain
terms, the sexually open nature of the relationship he envisioned.
Holton accepted, and for nearly a decade she and Noyes worked
together to build a following among the native Vermonters. Things went
pretty well until 1846—the year after they moved Noyes’s ideas about
“complex marriage” from theory to practice.
Heaven on Earth, but with a Catch
Call him what you will, but John Humphrey Noyes was without
question a great communicator. After he and his followers were run out of
Vermont and relocated to Oneida, he continued to articulate his Perfectionist
principles and share his ideas in nightly “home talks” and in published
newsletters and theological tracts.
And while the brand of Perfectionism he preached offered a broad
and holistic approach to living, emphasizing both the pursuit of individual
perfection and communal good, even a casual reading of Noyes’s public
writings and comments suggests that he spent a lot of time thinking about
sex, often with the same obsessive focus on “precious bodily fl uids” that
the fictional General Buck Turgidson displayed in the fi lm Dr. Strangelove
more than a century later.
According to Louis J. Kern, author of the book An Ordered Love:
Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—the Shakers, the Mormons,
and the Oneida Community, Noyes considered the term “spirit” analogous