{"id":138876,"date":"2026-10-12T13:59:42","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T20:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=138876"},"modified":"2026-10-12T14:13:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T21:13:23","slug":"sexual-surveillance-and-lived-contradiction-the-crossroads-of-a-cultic-california","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=138876","title":{"rendered":"Sexual Surveillance and Lived Contradiction: The Crossroads of a Cultic California"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Upon entering Davis Cemetery in Davis, California, one might expect to find a variety of what popular American discourse has termed \u2018small-town folk\u2019: working people, gardeners, mailmen, teachers \u2013 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

It may seem ludicrous to believe that cult leader Jim Jones\u2019 son, and his son\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe girls\u2019 [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,\u201d said Fielding McGehee, co-founder of the Jonestown Institute and brother-in-law of Annie and Carolyn, two women in Jonestown\u2019s upper echelon. \u201cTheir parents were living in Davis, expanding the social gospel\u2026 Carolyn was looking for a similar church.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cCarolyn was Jim\u2019s main partner for the last 10 years,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Dr. John Hall is a sociologist at UC Davis, and published his rigorous study of Jonestown, Gone from the Promised Land<\/em>, in 1987. The Californian sociopolitical climate, he says, was the ideal environment for leaders such as Jones to gain widespread influence. \u201cHe 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,\u201d noted Hall. \u201cHe was very much a political animal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Bo\u2019 and \u2018Peep\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sawyer is an ex-member of Heaven\u2019s Gate, another New Age Religious group with roots in California. His turbulent beginnings in the state were largely motivated in a similar political vein. \u201cI 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\u2019d have to walk out of the town limits. […] [We had] no luck finding anything we were inclined to become a part of in California.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was in this state of displacement and despair that Sawyer chanced upon Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles (known as \u2018Bo and Peep,\u2019 and \u2018Do and Ti\u2019 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 \u2018Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church\u2019.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cUFO\u2019s\u201d and underneath: \u201cTwo 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! \u2018The Two\u2019 will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done.\u201d It was that month that he set out to attend a nearby event, whereupon \u2018Bo\u2019 and \u2018Peep\u2019 separated and assigned their newfound disciples to a \u2018partnership\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis \u2018process\u2019 was an accelerated period of growth \u2013 a cocoon kind of stage,\u201d Sawyer describes. \u201cA partner becomes a mirror of what you need to overcome. They are your equal, but all decisions should be made together.\u201d Bo and Peep later clarified that such a partnership was not to be confused with a sexual relationship\u2013 an instinct they claimed was instigated by \u2018discarnates,\u2019 human spirits that would prevent the attendees\u2019 transcendence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we had a thought of a sensual\/sexual nature, we could allow it to linger and grow[…] We were given the expression \u2018nip it in the bud\u2019 \u2013 sense that thought even before it registers in your head and cut it off[…].\u201d It was the expression that Sawyer, who struggled with abstinence, would grapple with for the next nineteen years.<\/p>\n

UFOs at Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elsewhere, not far from Bo and Peep\u2019s 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, <\/em>for four years since he had embarked on his journey to establish the Sea-Organization in 1967.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe 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 \u2013 the eastern philosophy \u2013 all of it in a melting pot filtered through Hubbard’s paranoia and creativity,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Dangerous perversions\u2019, which Hubbard had specified as homosexuality, among other \u2018sexually-depraved acts,\u2019 were deemed explicitly felonious and unethical, as per his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health<\/em>, which makes use of heteronormative language to assert binary, conservative social views.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a lot of black-and-white thinking, which is very easy to cultivate in that intellectual framework. There\u2019s such an emphasis on strict definitions of words[…] Scientology is inherently right wing […] It was an us vs them organization,\u201d recalls John of his childhood. Heterosexual marriages, and nuclear families, conversely, were viewed as essential and even profusely encouraged within the organization.<\/p>\n

However rigid the doctrines may have appeared in writing, John describes his educational experience as one that firmly contradicted them. \u201cParents 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Church of Scientology did not respond to inquiries to express their current views.<\/p>\n

Theatre at Peoples Temple<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jones too, had participated in a similar paradoxical warfare \u2013 one that Fielding McGehee defines as theatre<\/em>. 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\u2019 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\u2019s bathroom of Westlake Theatre.
\n\u201cI\u2019m motivated heterosexually, and I don\u2019t have any homosexual need that I am aware of […] but I don\u2019t think that sexual persuasion or orientation has a damn thing to do with what a person is,\u201d Jones claimed in an interview with Nouvelle Observateur<\/em> in 1977.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Relationships Committee\u2019 sought to bureaucratically govern the congregation\u2019s sexual relations and family lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were together, you needed to spend three months apart but you couldn\u2019t 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,\u201d explained McGehee.<\/p>\n

Abstinence for the Cause<\/strong><\/p>\n

The enforcement of abstinence among Temple members was not unlike the philosophy instilled upon the members of Heaven\u2019s Gate by \u2018Bo\u2019 and \u2018Peep\u2019, by then known as \u2018Ti\u2019 and \u2018Do\u2019. \u201cTi and Do did not give us direct guidelines toward remaining celibate until we\u2019d been in the classroom for nearly a year,\u201d Sawyer notes, \u201cexcept by saying any sexuality was not permitted and that infractions were not tolerated.\u201d Members were asked to leave the group if they could not commit to abstinence.<\/p>\n

There is no written, stated, nor recorded evidence that \u2018Do\u2019 and \u2018Ti\u2019 were hypocritical about their teachings with regards to sexuality, as abstinence was viewed as a prerequisite to their idealized \u2018ascension\u2019. Nonetheless, it was the primary means by which they asserted authority over their zealous entourage.<\/p>\n

Dr. Robert Balch, a sociologist and professor emeritus at University of Montana, has spent nearly 50 years studying Heaven\u2019s Gate \u2013 a journey that began with his own infiltration of the group in 1975. \u201cOftentimes 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 \u2018my vehicle is becoming attracted to your vehicle so we have to end our relationship, I have to replace you with someone else.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018Vehicle\u2019 is the term members used to describe their bodies.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Do\u2019 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. \u201cI\u2019m familiar with irreversible steps […] I don\u2019t 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\u2019t tell you how free that [it] made me feel[…] having seen the benefit the neutering has had for my consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, noted that the castrations had not occurred directly proceeding the suicides.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been dealing with giving into sensuality with myself for nearly a year, keeping it mostly hidden though I did expose it early on,\u201d recalled Sawyer. He faced little reproach from \u2018Do\u2019. \u201cDo also said he didn\u2019t 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\u2019s compromise of their discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sawyer left Heaven\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Children<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019 eldest son. Aside from his own children, Jones had some form of custody over a large majority of the lot.<\/p>\n

\u201cParents or guardians of children under eighteen were forced to sign a notarized release, prepared by Temple lawyers,\u201d wrote Kenneth Wooden, an investigative journalist who anonymously interviewed surviving children for his book, Children of Jonestown<\/em><\/a>. Several children alleged being subject to Jones\u2019 abuse, often involving drugs and non-consensual sexual acts. One youth testified to being placed \u201cin 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Kimo\u2019s own paternity was formally attributed to Mike Prokes, another Temple member, in an attempt to legitimize his parentage. In subsequent letters,<\/a> Prokes renounced that paternity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn theory, Carolyn\u2019s son Kimo should have been among the first thirteen counted [among the dead in Jonestown],\u201d wrote Rebecca Moore, Carolyn\u2019s sister, in her reflection of her first-hand experience of the deaths, Last <\/a>Rites<\/a>. \u201cWe knew Kimo was Jones\u2019 son before he was born[…] [Assistant Police Commissioner] Roberts told us there were three children in Jones\u2019 cabin, two boys on bunk beds and an infant lying between a couple on Jones\u2019 bed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kimo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

En Masse<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014violating 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\u2013 buried six feet deep, but perhaps, marked with a stone bearing the name of mother and child, claiming a reunion for itself.<\/p>\n

Interviews:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interview with John, January 22, 2026.<\/p>\n

Interview with Sawyer, February 19, 2026.<\/p>\n

Interview with McGehee, Fielding, January 25, 2026.<\/p>\n

Hall, John, February 5, 2026.<\/p>\n

Balch, Robert, February 6, 2026.<\/p>\n

Other Sources:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Balch, Robert, and David Taylor (2002). “Making Sense of the Heaven’s Gate Suicides”. In David G. Bromley and J. Gordon Melton (ed.). Cults, Religion, and Violence<\/em>. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66898-9.<\/p>\n

Lalich, Janja (2004). “Using the Bounded Choice Model as an Analytical Tool: A Case Study of Heaven’s Gate”. Cultic Studies Review<\/em>. 3 (3). International Cultic Studies Association: 226\u2013247<\/p>\n

Chryssides, George D. (2004). “\u2019Come On Up, and I Will Show Thee\u2019: Heaven’s Gate as a Postmodern Group.\u201d In: James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (eds.). Controversial New Religions<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 356\u20137.<\/p>\n

Fact-checked Poster: https:\/\/wearethemutants.com\/2017\/02\/09\/heavens-gate-event-poster-1975\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Hubbard, Ron (1958) [1951]. Science of Survival (PDF) (8th ed.). London: Hubbard Association of Scientologists International.<\/p>\n

Sermons and texts from Jim Jones:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=14111<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www-rohan.sdsu.edu\/nas\/streaming\/dept\/scuastaf\/collections\/peoplestemple\/MP3\/Q1055-1-sideA.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n

Jones, Stephan. “My Brother’s Mother”<\/p>\n

On Ssrody: https:\/\/www.findagrave.com\/memorial\/42491283\/steven_terry-mccarter<\/a> (this page was used purely for the purposes of linking Ssrody to Sawyer, who was then able to confirm the details with his own eye-witness testimony)<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.sdsheriff.gov\/bureaus\/media-relations\/common-questions\/heaven-s-gate-case<\/a><\/p>\n

Heaven\u2019s Gate Exit Videos: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=jQvLNR_UTvU<\/a><\/p>\n

Voluntary Castration, autopsies:<\/p>\n

\n

https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9704\/05\/cult.toxicology\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9703\/28\/mass.suicide.pm\/<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.pbssocal.org\/history-society\/sign-of-the-times-iv-sensation-scandal-and-salvation-at-westlake-theater<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jim Jones\u2019 arrest records:<\/p>\n

\n

https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=131678#:~:text=In%20this%20case%2C%20the%20records,arising%20from%20the%20same%20incident<\/a>.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.pbssocal.org\/history-society\/sign-of-the-times-iv-sensation-scandal-and-salvation-at-westlake-theater#:~:text=Jim%20Jones,March%2027%2C%201979%20(9)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

(<\/em>Ritama Vallishayee<\/em><\/strong> is an undergraduate student at UC Davis studying Economics, Russian, and French. A former copy editor for <\/em>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\u00a0<\/em>ritamavallishayee@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upon entering Davis Cemetery in Davis, California, one might expect to find a variety of what popular American discourse has termed \u2018small-town folk\u2019: working people, gardeners, mailmen, teachers \u2013 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":138814,"menu_order":15,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-138876","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138876"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138885,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138876\/revisions\/138885"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}