the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

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ners, or who was branded a “leaker” for going over the falls, might be
placed in the same sexual purgatory as the community’s young boys, with
sexual access restricted only to the community’s older women, or denied
altogether. If you wanted to play at Oneida, you played by Noyes’s rules.
“Love at Oneida was not ‘free,’ ” wrote Kern, “and those who confused
complex marriage with free love erred gravely in their conception.”
As a result, the Oneida Community was a roiling stew of weirdness.
Noyes and his followers willfully violated every conceivable sexual
taboo, from the routine deflowering of preteen girls by the community’s
older men, to institutionalized incest, to eugenics. To manage so complicated
a social structure, the Oneida Community had a rule book that,
were it not evolving constantly in Noyes’s head, might have been as dense
as the modern U.S. tax code, and just as bizarre. And in Noyes, the Perfectionists
had an autocratic leader who oversaw the most intimate details
of his followers’ lives with the same attention to detail that Hugh Hefner
once brought to Playmate photo shoots.
“This was rational sex, one might say, with a vengeance,” wrote
editor Kaz Dziamka in the journal American Rationalist. “No other utopian
experiment before or since has so drastically overhauled the existing
system of sexual, moral and social conventions. . . . One would expect
that the system would never work, that human nature being what it is, no
sensible woman or man would ever be glad to share sexually his lover [and
that] any utopia based on Male Continence, Complex Marriage and Christian
Perfectionism would be doomed to fail from the start. But the rather
uncomfortable fact is that the Oneida Community did succeed.”
For a while.
As with any organization built around a charismatic leader, the
Oneida Community began to unravel during the 1860s as Noyes’s powers
began to fade. He stayed at Oneida less and less, and started delegating
responsibilities to others in his inner circle, including the initiation of the
community’s virgins. (For much of his life at Oneida, Noyes had reserved