Utopia, Desire and Denver
This is a shirt I wore while painting houses in Denver in the late 1970s. I framed it and hung it on a wall so I never forget
HOBOKEN, OCTOBER 4, 2026. Last week a colleague at Stevens Institute, Smaran Dayal, gave a talk that stirred up memories from a previous life. From 1975 to 1980, I lived in Denver, painted houses, wrote sci-fi stories and flirted with a cult.
Smaran is a professor of literature who specializes in science fiction. In his lecture, “Against the Sexless Utopia: Delany contra Le Guin,” Smaran examined the divergent utopian visions of sci-fi titans Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany.
Le Guin imagines an anarchist utopia in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Delany in Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976). Smaran presented evidence that Delany, a gay black man, admired Le Guin but found her utopia insufficiently sexy.
Smaran plans to publish his lecture as a paper, so I won’t reveal more about it now. I’ll just recount memories that his talk—and especially his phrase “sexless utopia”—aroused in me. These memories are old and tattered, I welcome corrections from those who know better.
A half century ago, I lived in a tiny house in southwest Denver with a woman I met in Jamaica, Darlene. I eked out a living painting houses with a guy named Chris. He was a lanky, long-haired hippy who rode a chopped-out Norton that was always breaking down.
Chris belonged to Divine Light Mission, whose guru was a supposedly enlightened Indian dude, Maharaji. Chris lived in a big house, or “ashram,” with other Divine Lighters. They called themselves “premies,” pronounced “PREE-mees.” They tithed 30 percent of their income to their guru.
The premies periodically formed a caravan and drove to a city to worship their guru in person. Maharaji sat on a stage dispensing wisdom while thousands of premies lined up to kiss his naked feet. Waves of bliss washed over Chris when he kissed his guru’s feet. So Chris told me.
Chris persuaded Darlene and me to attend a Divine Light recruitment session. A senior premie gave the hard sell to few dozen benighted souls. We watched a cartoon video in which everyone in the world except for a few grumpy holdouts joins Divine Light and becomes enlightened. A Divine Light utopia.
I was a grumpy holdout. I told Chris: Divine Light is a cult, and you’re a brainwashed idiot. But I couldn’t help but envy Chris, his happiness seemed irritatingly genuine. Maharaji taught devotees secret yogic techniques that, Chris assured me, blow your mind. You see the divine light, hear the divine music, taste the divine nectar. And so on.
Maharaji permitted sex between premies, but he urged them to avoid attachments, which lead to jealousy and other un-enlightened feelings. That rule alone was a deal-breaker for me. I was attached to Darlene. Although I tried to hide it, I got jealous when other guys ogled or flirted with her. Chris made me feel my attachment to Darlene was un-enlightened.
But Chris had trouble practicing non-attachment, too. After he had sex with a premie whom I’ll call Cheryl, he fell in love with her. He thought she felt the same. Then one night Chris was driving Cheryl and another premie back to Denver from a Divine Light shindig in Boulder, and Cheryl and this guy fucked in the back of Chris’s van.
Chris tried to be cool about it, but he was heart-broken, humiliated, enraged. He confessed all this to me one day while we were slathering paint on some schmuck’s house. I felt sorry for Chris, but I also thought: Where’s your non-attachment now, you smug prick?
Darlene and I drifted apart, and in 1980 I detached from her and moved to New York. I lost touch with Chris. But I heard through a mutual friend that his parents hired a deprogrammer to yank Chris away from Divine Light.
All this came back to me during Smaran’s talk about sex and utopia. Plus one more thing: In Denver I took a few creative-writing classes, and for one I wrote a short story, titled “Free-7,” about a futuristic utopian commune. I just found a yellowed, 50-year-old copy of the story in my files.
In the commune, called “The Community,” genetic screening ensures everyone is healthy and beautiful. Robots do all the work, leaving inhabitants free to dance, sing, wander in woods surrounding the Community and just, you know, groove on the miracle of existence.
The leader of the Community is “Godman,” a wise, benevolent, enlightened old guru. He encourages everyone to have sex freely without being possessive. No attachments.
A genetic-screening error results in the birth of Free-7, who has a hunchback and cleft palate. Free-7 grows up to be a horny young man. He desires a young beauty named Dawn-12, but she prefers a cute guy named Sunlight-3.
When Free-7 encounters Dawn and Sunlight coupling, he flies into a rage and strangles Sunlight as Dawn runs away. Free-7 hides in the woods, but later he sneaks into the commune and strangles Dawn.
Members of the Community capture Free-7 and bring him before their guru, Godman. The members want to kill Free-7 for killing Sunlight and Dawn. But Godman decides the universe has created this monster because life in the Community has become “too easy, too peaceful.”
Godman says the Community needs to be reminded “how terrible the mystery is.” Godman lets Free-12 return to the woods, where he sleeps in a burrow and forages for mushrooms, roots and nuts. Occasionally he sneaks back into the Community to murder someone.
That’s it, that’s the story. I’ve been told the ending is too abrupt.
Why am I dredging up this ancient history? Perhaps to remind myself that my obsession with endpoints—and what are enlightenment and utopia but individual and collective endpoints?--goes way back.
Cults like Divine Light Mission have always attracted and repulsed me. All religions, which are just successful cults, promise us salvation. You just have to suspend your free will and skepticism and kiss a guru’s ass. Or feet.
You need to curb your desire, too. Smaran Dayal, my colleague, implied in his talk that “sexless utopia” is an oxymoron. I agree. A utopia without sex is not a utopia.
Is a sexy utopia possible? Well, it’s certainly imaginable. Remember the scene in The Matrix Reloaded in which humans rebelling against the evil machines dance ecstatically in a vast underground cavern? That’s the Wachowski sisters’ vision of a sexy utopia.
The dancers are black and white and gay and straight and everything in between, and everyone looks buff and smoking hot in their guerilla-hipster threads. But you have to wonder: Where are the ugly people, the fat and skinny people, the nerds too shy to dance? Is this utopia theirs?
And what about those who are jealous? Who don’t want to share their beloved? Or those who, like Free-7, desire someone who doesn’t desire them?
If “sexless utopia” is an oxymoron, so is “sexy utopia.” Utopia is stable, safe, serene. Sexual desire is none of those things. That’s why so many cults prohibit or severely restrict sex--although of course cult leaders make exceptions for themselves.
Christianity says desire is our original sin, which keeps us from paradise. Buddhism says more or less the same thing. Well, then, the hell with paradise.
Thanks, Smaran, my friend, for provoking me.
Further Reading:
For a more upbeat take on utopia, see “A Pretty Good Utopia,” a chapter in my book Mind-Body Problems.