Sexual Surveillance and Lived Contradiction: The Crossroads of a Cultic California

Upon entering Davis Cemetery in Davis, California, one might expect to find a variety of what popular American discourse has termed ‘small-town folk’: working people, gardeners, mailmen, teachers – fixtures of the Northern California locale. If you walk a little further on the stone-path that is just barely visible among the encroaching and tufted grasses, however, you’ll come across a rust-stained plaque engraved with two names vaguely familiar to most who lived through 1978: Carolyn Louise Moore, born in 1945, and her son Jim Jon, born in 1975. The year of their shared demise is 1978, which is listed on the stone. The place of their deaths, Jonestown, Guyana, is not.

It may seem ludicrous to believe that cult leader Jim Jones’ son, and his son’s mother, are memorialized in the small town of Davis, California, but Carolyn had been raised in the area, attended UC Davis, and joined Peoples Temple shortly after her marriage to Larry Layton. Indeed, within the Temple in life and in news stories and histories of Jonestown after her death, Carolyn Moore is better known by her married name of Layton.

“The girls’ [Carolyn and her sister, Annie] father-in-law was a fairly known minister in San Francisco, and very progressive; he helped to solidify the gay movement [there], Jim Jones used him to some extent,” said Fielding McGehee, co-founder of the Jonestown Institute and brother-in-law of Annie and Carolyn, two women in Jonestown’s upper echelon. “Their parents were living in Davis, expanding the social gospel… Carolyn was looking for a similar church.”

By 1968, she had found such a place in Peoples Temple, after having moved to Mendocino County with Larry. Her transgressive collision with Jim Jones, a Pentecostal, socialist preacher from Indiana, was anything but brief. “Carolyn was Jim’s main partner for the last 10 years,” explained McGehee. Throughout this period of time, the socialist idealism of the church had found its own place in their relationship. According to personal letters, Jones and Carolyn thought themselves the reincarnations of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and his mistress Inessa Armand. This mutual aspiration to socialism would spur and fortify the tumultuous relationship in years to come.

In the backdrop of this prologue to Jonestown, the political-workings of 1960s California had long fertilized the grounds for Peoples Temple, along with several other New Age Religious Movements. The recently elected governor Ronald Reagan posed threats to anti-war movements, grassroots activists such as the Black Panthers, and those with liberal or socialist views. Meanwhile, San Francisco and Los Angeles had seen rises in youth movements against anti-gay policies and vagrancy laws.

Dr. John Hall is a sociologist at UC Davis, and published his rigorous study of Jonestown, Gone from the Promised Land, in 1987. The Californian sociopolitical climate, he says, was the ideal environment for leaders such as Jones to gain widespread influence. “He had reached out to political movements, he was appointed to the housing committee in SF, networked with political figures, and came out strongly against the Vietnam War,” noted Hall. “He was very much a political animal.”

‘Bo’ and ‘Peep’

Sawyer is an ex-member of Heaven’s Gate, another New Age Religious group with roots in California. His turbulent beginnings in the state were largely motivated in a similar political vein. “I was against the Vietnam war, having had some exposure to the anti-war message and the political-economic real reasons for the war. There was no way I was going to fight in this war[…] I recall hitching through the apple orchards where a mass-murderer had stashed bodies, near Chico, California and Redding or so[…] The police would occasionally tell us to move on and we’d have to walk out of the town limits. […] [We had] no luck finding anything we were inclined to become a part of in California.”

It was in this state of displacement and despair that Sawyer chanced upon Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles (known as ‘Bo and Peep,’ and ‘Do and Ti’ in later years). Applewhite had previously taught music at the University of Alabama, but resigned shortly after having sexual relations with a male student. Nettles was a nurse at a hospital when she met Applewhite in 1972, and was married with four children. In their own writings, their relationship, while non-sexual, was portrayed with an equal amount of exuberance and prophetism as had Jones and Carolyn. Within a year, Nettles left her children to pursue a nomadic lifestyle with Applewhite, whom she claimed had come to her by way of extraterrestrial, divine intervention. Conceptualizing the ideology through the Book of Revelation and UFO theories, Applewhite and Nettles undertook a mission along the Pacific coast, in search of devotees to, what they had initially entitled, the ‘Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church’.

Sawyer was intrigued by the poorly-printed, black-and-white handout he had found on the pole nearby a small general store, which read, in a vertical fashion: “UFO’s” and underneath: “Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human, and are about to leave the human level and literally (physically) return to that next evolutionary level in a spacecraft (UFO) within months! ‘The Two’ will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done.” It was that month that he set out to attend a nearby event, whereupon ‘Bo’ and ‘Peep’ separated and assigned their newfound disciples to a ‘partnership’.

“This ‘process’ was an accelerated period of growth – a cocoon kind of stage,” Sawyer describes. “A partner becomes a mirror of what you need to overcome. They are your equal, but all decisions should be made together.” Bo and Peep later clarified that such a partnership was not to be confused with a sexual relationship– an instinct they claimed was instigated by ‘discarnates,’ human spirits that would prevent the attendees’ transcendence.

“If we had a thought of a sensual/sexual nature, we could allow it to linger and grow[…] We were given the expression ‘nip it in the bud’ – sense that thought even before it registers in your head and cut it off[…].” It was the expression that Sawyer, who struggled with abstinence, would grapple with for the next nineteen years.

UFOs at Sea

Elsewhere, not far from Bo and Peep’s precipitous Pacific coastline, L. Ron Hubbard was penning away at doctrines not dissimilar to their own. He had now been at sea, aboard his flagship the Apollo, for four years since he had embarked on his journey to establish the Sea-Organization in 1967.

“He had this conceptualization of the self: You used to have an alien body and now you have an earthling body. Not a super new concept. It was his time with Jack Parsons in Pasadena – the eastern philosophy – all of it in a melting pot filtered through Hubbard’s paranoia and creativity,” said John [not his real name], who was born and raised within the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles. Several of the texts John studied during his early schooling at the intersection of L. Ron Hubbard Way and Sunset Boulevard were studied by Charles Manson himself, just a year before his disciples murdered actress Sharon Tate in 1969, 9.3 miles away from the church.

‘Dangerous perversions’, which Hubbard had specified as homosexuality, among other ‘sexually-depraved acts,’ were deemed explicitly felonious and unethical, as per his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which makes use of heteronormative language to assert binary, conservative social views.

“There was a lot of black-and-white thinking, which is very easy to cultivate in that intellectual framework. There’s such an emphasis on strict definitions of words[…] Scientology is inherently right wing […] It was an us vs them organization,” recalls John of his childhood. Heterosexual marriages, and nuclear families, conversely, were viewed as essential and even profusely encouraged within the organization.

However rigid the doctrines may have appeared in writing, John describes his educational experience as one that firmly contradicted them. “Parents have to emancipate or sign over custody [of their child] to someone in the organization. My mom refused to sign off, and my parents got divorced because of it.”

The Church of Scientology did not respond to inquiries to express their current views.

Theatre at Peoples Temple

Jones too, had participated in a similar paradoxical warfare – one that Fielding McGehee defines as theatre. Among various discrepancies weaponized by Jones was his claim that he was the only heterosexual person in the world, evidenced in the 215-page manuscript of Jones’ own writings recovered by former Temple member Jeannie Mills shortly after his death in 1978. In 1973, however, Jones had been arrested by the LAPD for soliciting sex from undercover policeman Arthur Kagele in the men’s bathroom of Westlake Theatre.
“I’m motivated heterosexually, and I don’t have any homosexual need that I am aware of […] but I don’t think that sexual persuasion or orientation has a damn thing to do with what a person is,” Jones claimed in an interview with Nouvelle Observateur in 1977.

Despite his public views on sexuality, in 1965 he had gone so far as to ban sex among members of the congregation completely, and while the general policy persisted over the years, his creation of the ‘Relationships Committee’ sought to bureaucratically govern the congregation’s sexual relations and family lives.

“If you were together, you needed to spend three months apart but you couldn’t have sex, or be with each other in that way. They said, at the end of the three months, we will revisit it and see if we can give you a pass. It was a way to demonstrate your commitment to the cause,” explained McGehee.

Abstinence for the Cause

The enforcement of abstinence among Temple members was not unlike the philosophy instilled upon the members of Heaven’s Gate by ‘Bo’ and ‘Peep’, by then known as ‘Ti’ and ‘Do’. “Ti and Do did not give us direct guidelines toward remaining celibate until we’d been in the classroom for nearly a year,” Sawyer notes, “except by saying any sexuality was not permitted and that infractions were not tolerated.” Members were asked to leave the group if they could not commit to abstinence.

There is no written, stated, nor recorded evidence that ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’ were hypocritical about their teachings with regards to sexuality, as abstinence was viewed as a prerequisite to their idealized ‘ascension’. Nonetheless, it was the primary means by which they asserted authority over their zealous entourage.

Dr. Robert Balch, a sociologist and professor emeritus at University of Montana, has spent nearly 50 years studying Heaven’s Gate – a journey that began with his own infiltration of the group in 1975. “Oftentimes charismatic leaders take sexual advantage of their followers. But after Ti had died, Do had two members of the group become his personal helpers[…] One of them was this guy, Dick Joslyn. A very tall blonde haired blue eyed male model, very handsome. And he was gay. […] Do eventually told him ‘my vehicle is becoming attracted to your vehicle so we have to end our relationship, I have to replace you with someone else.’”

 ‘Vehicle’ is the term members used to describe their bodies.

Members were additionally mandated to wear looser clothes and buzz cuts, to affect an androgynous, asexual appearance. More radical attempts to adhere to the doctrine, however, were not unheard of amongst certain fervent students, even ‘Do’ himself. In an exit interview recorded shortly before the group committed suicide, Srrody [Steven Terry McCarter], speaks of the voluntary castration he underwent in order to sustain his abstinence. “I’m familiar with irreversible steps […] I don’t know if you remember […] Do talking about that some students had chosen, had proven to him, that they desired to have their vehicles neutered. I can’t tell you how free that [it] made me feel[…] having seen the benefit the neutering has had for my consciousness.”

An initial castration was purportedly performed by group member Julie LaMontagne, but it was largely unsuccessful. Srrody, for example, had wound up hospitalized, according to Sawyer. Srrody and some few others were surgically castrated in a hospital in the coming years. Autopsy reports, detailed by medical examiner Dr. Byran Blackbourne, noted that the castrations had not occurred directly proceeding the suicides.

“I had been dealing with giving into sensuality with myself for nearly a year, keeping it mostly hidden though I did expose it early on,” recalled Sawyer. He faced little reproach from ‘Do’. “Do also said he didn’t feel [he needed] to dismiss me from the classroom as was the policy via the documents Major Offense List and Lessor Offense List[…] because I had not threatened any other student’s compromise of their discipline.”

Sawyer left Heaven’s Gate in 1994, three years before the group would commit mass suicide in a 9,000 square foot mansion they had rented in a suburb of San Diego, Rancho Santa Fe. Supposedly, the Hale-Bopp Comet, which had shone its brightest in 1997, necessitated that the members ingest a mixture of barbiturates, apple sauce, puddings and vodka to transcend their human forms into that of aliens. The 39 limp bodies, donning Nike sneakers, shaved heads, and black sweatpants, were discovered on March 26th, five days before the comet would reach its closest approach to the sun.

The Children

At Peoples Temple, the newly-bureaucratized government of intimacy took its most ruinous toll on the children, whose existence was leveraged and yielded by Jones as legal, social and physical capital. Jones cultivated sexual relationships with several members of the congregation, and fathered a child, Jim Jon (nicknamed Kimo), with Carolyn Layton in 1975. Although he initially denied parentage, he later told his Temple congregation that he had impregnated Carolyn by chance, when instructing her to “use her body for the Cause,” according to Stephan Jones, Jones’ eldest son. Aside from his own children, Jones had some form of custody over a large majority of the lot.

“Parents or guardians of children under eighteen were forced to sign a notarized release, prepared by Temple lawyers,” wrote Kenneth Wooden, an investigative journalist who anonymously interviewed surviving children for his book, Children of Jonestown. Several children alleged being subject to Jones’ abuse, often involving drugs and non-consensual sexual acts. One youth testified to being placed “in solitary confinement and drugged for about a week. When he was let out, his face was completely distorted from massive doses of Thorazine and Quaalude.” Thus, a large majority of the children had been unaccounted for, sometimes unrecognizable by the time the 918 residents of Jonestown had ingested fatal doses of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in November of 1978.

Kimo’s own paternity was formally attributed to Mike Prokes, another Temple member, in an attempt to legitimize his parentage. In subsequent letters, Prokes renounced that paternity.

“In theory, Carolyn’s son Kimo should have been among the first thirteen counted [among the dead in Jonestown],” wrote Rebecca Moore, Carolyn’s sister, in her reflection of her first-hand experience of the deaths, Last Rites. “We knew Kimo was Jones’ son before he was born[…] [Assistant Police Commissioner] Roberts told us there were three children in Jones’ cabin, two boys on bunk beds and an infant lying between a couple on Jones’ bed.”

Kimo’s body was unidentified, and is believed to have been buried in Oakland, in a quiet, hilled mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery, among 408 others, 234 of whom are children. For 47 years now, he has remained 58 miles away from his mother.

En Masse

Whether it be through orchestrated partnerships, Orwellian-style relationship surveillance or forced emancipations, cult leaders have led their communities down a dangerous, albeit, socio-politically paved path throughout California—violating sexual autonomy and parentage in the name of morality and ethicism for decades, and in doing so, robbing individuals of essential connections. While these separations remain ascertained in life and, for many, in death, there is a resolve that lies alongside the memory and recognition of this great theft– buried six feet deep, but perhaps, marked with a stone bearing the name of mother and child, claiming a reunion for itself.

Interviews:

Interview with John, January 22, 2026.

Interview with Sawyer, February 19, 2026.

Interview with McGehee, Fielding, January 25, 2026.

Hall, John, February 5, 2026.

Balch, Robert, February 6, 2026.

Other Sources:

(Ritama Vallishayee is an undergraduate student at UC Davis studying Economics, Russian, and French. A former copy editor for The California Aggie and an aspiring fiction writer currently working on a novella, her research background spans the Levada Center, the UC Davis Global Migration Center, and the Departments of Political Science and Economics. She may be reached at ritamavallishayee@gmail.com.)