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Kerista

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Kerista was an utopian community that was started in New York City in 1956 by John Peltz "Bro Jud" Presmont. Throughout much of its history, Kerista was centered on the ideals of polyfidelity[1] and creation of intentional communities. Kerista underwent several incarnations that later became known as the "Old Tribe," which was associated with a fairly large, but fluid membership. What was called the "New Tribe," a period of more stable membership and ideology, began in 1971 based in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.[2]

Founding

Kerista was founded by John Presmont after an auditory-hallucination telling him that he was the founder of the next great religion of the world. After time spent in New York in the 50's, and several island experiments in Dominica, Honduras and Belize in the 60's, Jud settled in San Francisco at the end of the 60's.

Old Tribe

Kerista-inspired storefronts and communal houses existed in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Bay Area throughout the 60's, and was moderately popular. The ideology shared by the Old Tribe was remarkably simple: 'Wash your own dish', 'No one belongs to anyone else', 'Kerista is freedom and love'. The main tenets of the Old Tribe embody the hippie ideals of 'good vibes' and the 'righteous high', racial and sexual liberation, and a strong tendency towards dropping out of the straight-world and living a non-conformist life of idealism, spontaneity, and fun. In addition, Old Tribers started the use of a Ouija-board for wisdom and guidance, and use of the 'alphabet-board' continued in the New Tribe.

New Tribe

From 1971 until 1991, the community was centered at the Kerista Commune (not a single physical building), founded in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Keristans maintained a very high profile which included publication of a popular free newspaper and several national media appearances.[3]

When it was active, Kerista was a focal point for people interested in alternative and non-monogamous lifestyles. The terms polyfidelity and compersion were coined at the Kerista Commune. The commune developed an entire vocabulary around alternative lifestyles—for example their term polyintimacy in their literature was similar to the term popularized as polyamory years later. Entrance to the commune was extremely selective and included a 6-month waiting period and a screening for STDs.[citation needed]

Social contract standards

Kerista accumulated a codified social contract over its history that all members were expected to agree and comply with, at all times. Starting with a few unwritten rules in 1971 to 26 standards[4] in 1979, the social contract evolved to 84 standards [5] by 1983. There were over 100 standards in 1991.

Examples from the 84 Standards include:

  • Total Rationality at All Times
  • Search for Truth through the Elimination of Contradictions
  • No Jealousy, No Anger, No Rivalry, No Sexism, No Ageism, No Racism, No Classism, No Duplicity, No Alienation, No Profanity, No Flippancy
  • Social Tolerance, Equality, Verbality, Participatory Democracy, Accountability, Conviviality, Graceful Distancing
  • Positive Attitude towards the ‘Toggle-Switch’ Mode of Decision-Making
  • There is One and only One Objective Reality

Gestalt-O-Rama / Utopian Psychology

Kerista used a group process called Gestalt-O-Rama, loosely taken from Fritz Perls' concept of gestalt ("enhanced awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotion, and behavior, in the present moment.") For Keristans, gestalt consisted of a lot of conversation. Maintaining personal 'resolve-on-the-lifestyle', a euphemism for being aligned with the social contract, was a regular worry for many Keristans. Being 'unresolved-on-the-lifestyle', even momentarily or temporarily, was worthy of immediate gestalt and possible expulsion from the family or commune. Practically, a member could be "called out" on any standards violation or non-utopian thought or action by anyone at any time, and then the whole commune would join in. If a gestalt was started, and someone was in the 'hot-seat', most everyone in the commune would either come and participate - or run and hide. Typically this resulted in a roomful of people discussing one member's transgressions late into the night, and always had the potential for the hot-seat shifting focus to another Keristan. Gestalt was rarely a pleasant experience.

Publications

Kerista produced zines that included drawings and comics. Some concerned day-to-day life. Others presented a lighthearted polytheistic mythology which revolved around a pantheon of benevolent and technologically adept goddesses and gods. Features presented in the zine included articles and essays concerning life within the community and their proposed World Plan to establish a functional Utopian society on a larger scale. The volume of publications and art work produced by Kerista Commune was quite a bit greater than other groups that were active in the Haight Ashbury during this period.[citation needed] Kerista claimed singer Joan Jett as the "Matron Saint" of their community.

Work Life / Abacus

The Keristans shared income and could choose whether to have outside paying jobs or work within the community (which operated several businesses, a legally incorporated church, and an educational non-profit organization).

The most successful of the businesses was Abacus, Inc., an early Macintosh computer vendor in San Francisco, which eventually offered a variety of computer hardware, training and services. At its height, Abacus employed over 250 people and had offices in five major California cities. Voted the 33rd and 42nd fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. Magazine in 1990 and 1991 respectively, Abacus achieved revenues in excess of $25 million per year. Prior to Apple Computer Corporation abandoning the Value-Added Reseller in 1992, Abacus was the top reseller of Macintosh computers in the Bay Area in 1991.

Membership

The official[according to whom?] website lists 44 people as having joined Kerista at various times during the community's history, though more than this number passed through briefly. The commune population numbered 5 at founding in 1971, and numbered 25 at dissolution in 1991. Before dissolution, there were closer to 30 Keristans in residence.

The commune maintained a very active program of social events and Gestalt-o-rama rap groups, which were open to the public 3-4 nights a week, and were mandatory for Keristans to regularly attend. The commune functioned a lot like a religious order and was an important focal point for a larger community of people in San Francisco interested in alternative lifestyles. The events sponsored by Kerista were almost always free and non-commercial.

In 1979 and 1980, two children were born in the community. Beginning in 1983, the adult male Keristans had vasectomies to deal with birth control and address global population issues. All male members subsequently had the requirement of having a vasectomy within a set period of time after joining the community.

Family Life / Polyfidelity / Sleeping Schedule

The family structure of Kerista was composed of fidelitous groups called B-FICs (Best-Friend Identity Clusters). Keristans practiced non-preferential polyfidelity. Polyfidelity requires consensus to accept a new person into the group, either a man or woman.

Non-preferentiality was an important concept of Keristan polyfidelity, and had lofty goals but was more intended to keep people from coupling-up. Non-preferentiality proved very difficult to achieve. Keristans had a transitional celibacy period after joining a group of three months, sometimes waived.

A single B-FIC was composed of men and women who rotated sleeping with all of the opposite-sex members on a balanced rotational sleeping schedule. The sleeping-schedule assigned each family member to sleep with a different opposite-sex partner each night. Since the BFICs were rarely balanced between men and women (typically more women than men), on any given night several family-members would have no partner to sleep with and were assigned a 'Zero-Night' - when they slept alone. In addition to the programmed sleeping schedule, it was permitted to sleep with any opposite-sex family-member at any time, which was termed a 'freebie'.

Criticism

After an arranged visit to Kerista by three professors, the New Tribe was criticized for not being egalitarian, notably in Bro Jud's dominance[6] of many commune matters. The same professors questioned whether Kerista was feminist,[7] and whether Kerista made only token contributions to philanthropy.[8] A separate dissertation, written by an ex-Keristan, argued that Jud was not the primary problem, and instead criticized Kerista for institutionalizing '...a fetish for purity', describing 'the core psychological process in Kerista was anxiety-producing and ultimately destructive because it centered around the toxic value of purity, which made the commune a bad place to live.'[9]

Dissolution

In 1991, the community was dissolved by vote. Bro Jud went on to create The World Academy of Keristan Education[10]. Several former members of the commune still live in the San Francisco Bay Area, while a number moved to Hawaii and purchased a block of adjoining parcels of land.

John (Bro Jud) Presmont died on December 13, 2009 in San Francisco.[11] In his last years, Jud had been seen regularly on 'The Bro Jud Show' on San Francisco public-access television cable TV.

Kerista, Robert A. Heinlein, and Stranger in a Strange Land

Science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, in a 1966 letter to his agent Lurton Blassingame, mentioned Kerista in connection with his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land:

I recently learned that it was considered the "New Testament" — and compulsory reading — of a far-out cult called "Kerista." (Kee-rist!). I don't know exactly what "Kerista" is, but its L.A. chapter offered me $100 to speak. (I turned them down.)[12]

The person who invited Heinlein to speak may have been Kerry Thornley, co-founder of Discordianism, who at the time lived in Watts. Thornley had joined Kerista in 1966 and was known[by whom?] to be a lifelong science-fiction fan.[13]

Kerista's polyamorous sexual practice was influenced, as was that of the Church of All Worlds, by Robert A. Heinlein's (1907-88) science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which the Martian-raised human Michael Valentine Smith founded The Church of All Worlds, preached sexual freedom and the truth of all religions, and is martyred by narrow-minded people who are not ready for freedom.[13]


References

  1. ^ Furchgott, Eve. "Polyfidelity - description of a new type of family structure:". Retrieved 2011-03-12.
  2. ^ Miller, Timothy (1999). The 60s communes: hippies and beyond. Syracuse University Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-8156-0601-7. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
  3. ^ Bullet, Rio K. "My Brief Encounter with Kerista". Retrieved 2011-03-12. One day I was walking past Washington Square Park. Like all big cities, there are loads of alternate and underground publications in the form of newspapers, most of them free of charge. I bent to look in the windows of the metal boxes on the sidewalk to see if there was anything I might like. One had an intriguing title: RockHead. I took it back to my hotel room and read it. The paper was published independently by an organization known as the Kerista Commune
  4. ^ "Utopian Social Contract of Kerista Village". 1979. Retrieved 2018-01-12.
  5. ^ Eve, Even (1984). "Social Contract of the Gestalt-O-Rama Do-It-With-Friends Mental Health System". Retrieved 2018-01-12.
  6. ^ Cummings, Michael (1996). "Tale of Two Communes: A Scholar and His Errors". Retrieved 2018-01-12. Though all Keristans were said to be equal, weren't some, especially Jud, "more equal " than others? Jud's authoritarian personality stood out like a sore thumb at Kerista. We had observed him try to dominate and, we thought, seriously abuse the Gestalt-o-Rama process of mutual criticism. We had heard him simply announce a policy change, and we got the impression that he expected his position to be rubber-stamped during the required voting process. Also, we had not seen Jud sharing in domestic chores...
  7. ^ Cummings, Michael (1996). "Tale of Two Communes: A Scholar and His Errors". Retrieved 2018-01-12. How truly feminist was Kerista? While proclaiming feminism, Keristans seemed to know little about the feminist movement itself. Also, they had resisted the argument advanced by Lyman and me (whom they knew) that we wanted to add Lise (whom they didn't know) to our research team in order to get a woman's point of view. "We think a man can understand the situation of women at Kerista just as well as a woman can, " said Way, at the time a hard-core Jud supporter and one of Kerista's most zealous ideologues. At least half a dozen members, especially four or five women, seemed to us clearly superior to Jud as thinkers and leaders. Yet we sensed that Jud exercised far more influence than these more talented followers. We failed to uncover any special qualities that might justify Jud's revered status. Lyman and Lise became convinced outright that Kerista's feminism and egalitarianism were either a delusion or a sham.
  8. ^ Cummings, Michael (1996). "Tale of Two Communes: A Scholar and His Errors". Retrieved 2018-01-12. While Kerista financed a number of free publications, we could never get beyond the officially crafted expression — "x " percent of net income is "made available for philanthropy " — to a concrete figure for actual dollars given. The only actual charity we learned of was a few hundred dollars given to a poor Jamaican household.
  9. ^ Hamelin, Larry (August 2013). "And To No More Settle For Less Than Purity: Reflections on the Kerista Commune" (PDF). Praxis: A Journal of Politics, University of Colorado at Denver. Retrieved 2018-01-12. Kerista had become a bad place to live precisely because they had come to consider purity a core cultural value. What makes purity a toxic value is that it is impossible. Human beings are far too complex to be purely anything. The value of purity provides only an opportunity to intimidate and bully people. Jud was able to exert so much negative influence only because the Keristans had themselves privileged Jud as the standard of communal purity. By adopting the value of purity as a core value, the members of Kerista had doomed the community.
  10. ^ "World Academy of Keristan Education, Inc". 1993. Retrieved 2018-01-12.
  11. ^ "Kerista.commune - Historical Home of the Kerista Commune:". Retrieved 2011-03-12. John Peltz Presmont passed from this life on Sunday Dec 13, 2009, in San Francisco, CA.
  12. ^ Heinlein, Robert A. (Virginia Heinlein, ed.), Grumbles From the Grave, Del Rey Books, 1989, ISBN 0-345-36941-6.
  13. ^ a b Cusack, Carole M. Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Farnham (UK), 2010, ISBN 978-0754667803

Further reading

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