Hot Flash: Sound and sexuality

Is sexual orientation determined inside the womb?

By Ros Davidson

One of the questions that has dominated the nature vs. nurture debate is that of sexual orientation — are there physiological differences that determine who is gay and who is lesbian? Though researchers have detected differences in the brains of gay and heterosexual men, evidence of biological variations in women had never been reported until last week, when researchers at the University of Texas released their findings that the auditory systems — specifically the inner ears — of lesbians seem to operate more like those of men than those of heterosexual females. The findings were the result of a study in which microphones were placed in the external ear canal of 240 people who had previously been questioned in detail about their sexuality.

Salon talked with the head of the study, Dr. Dennis McFadden, a professor of experimental
psychology at the University of Texas-Austin, about the implications of his findings.

So you’ve found the first strong evidence of a physical difference
between straight and lesbian women?

To my knowledge, it is the first physiological concomitant to homosexuality in females. There are a few claims, as you may know, of differences in males in various brain sites. But this is, as far as I know, the first time for females.

What exactly did you find?

A normal inner ear, a cochlea, actually makes sounds — as well as receives and processes sounds — and these are known as “otoacoustic” emissions. The particular kind of otoacoustic emission we were studying is very much like an echo. You put in a very brief sound, a click, like the snap of a light switch, and there will be an echo given off by a normal-hearing ear. They are very idiosyncratic. The strengths or magnitude of the sounds differ from one individual’s ear to another’s, although they’re quite constant within the individual’s ear. Females tend to have much stronger otoacoustic echoes or emissions than males.

Why are females’ echoes stronger?

Females tend to have much better hearing sensitivity than males. Their inner ears also tend to make stronger sounds, although the sounds have no real purpose in themselves.

I was interested in the origins of this. Something we did years back was to measure the otoacoustic emissions in opposite-sex twins. And what we found was that those females had otoacoustic emissions that were like those of males, not other females. Since we knew from other research that otoacoustic emissions are reasonably stable through life — infants and children have them in the same pattern and manner that adults do — the implication was that those females with male twins had in fact been born with weaker cochlear amplifiers, that is, with weaker click-evoked emissions. So that leads you to try and imagine what kinds of mechanisms might have been operating prenatally to produce this effect. What we came up with was the suggestion that those females who had male twins were exposed to higher levels of androgens than females ordinarily get in the womb. And where those androgens came from was from their male twins.

But female co-twins are not more likely to be lesbian, I assume. So
what does this say?

Right. There’s not a greater incidence of homosexuality among females with male twins. But it still led us to wonder if there might be a difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. So we did this experiment, and in fact we did find that the strengths of these echoes were smaller in homosexual women than in heterosexual women — that is, the magnitude of their echoes was between that of heterosexual females and heterosexual males.

So why aren’t more female twins lesbian?

Well, we aren’t sure why. But if the suggestion that we’re offering is correct — that there’s been some prenatal “masculinization” in the womb to account for both the changes in the auditory system and later on in some brain centers in homosexual and bisexual women — it suggests that the opposite-sex female twins are not getting quite as strong a dose of the androgens, and whatever brain centers are responsible for sexual preference are not being affected by them.

There’s any number of possible reasons why the latter might occur. It may be a matter of timing — that the high dose of androgen comes along in homosexual and bisexual women at the right time to masculinize the brain centers for sexual preference, but is off some for female twins, so their auditory systems get masculinized but not the other brain centers. There’s also the question of androgen sensitivity — that receptor sites can be hypersensitive in some situations. So it may not be that homosexual and bisexual women are exposed to more androgen, but that they’re more sensitive to it and are absorbing more of it.

How dramatic was the difference between the echoes in homosexual women and those in heterosexual women?

It’s a big difference — a monstrous difference. The difference between heterosexual males and females is five or six decibels, while homosexual and bisexual females are halfway in between — that is, about three decibels weaker than heterosexual females. Remember though, we are talking about group differences, how each group differs on average. It’s a continuum. You can’t predict the sexual preference of an individual with any accuracy from knowing the size of the echo response. In the same way, while men tend to be taller than women, you can’t predict whether an individual is a man or woman from that person’s height.

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Can you give us an example of how conditions might come together in the womb to produce a lesbian fetus? I mean, why might this higher level of androgen or higher sensitivity in the fetus occur?

There are lots of possibilities. Things can happen in the mother’s life that can lead to more androgen produced by the placenta. The developing fetus could be producing more androgen throughout its development — although that’s unlikely since there are no signs of a masculinized body in homosexual or bisexual women. Or androgen could be produced at certain times when it only affects the brain sites for sexual preference and the cochlea.

What could be happening in the mother’s life to produce more androgen?

Stress. There may be other things too, but stress is one that’s been pointed to for decades. People have tried to account for sexuality by looking at that. There are some classic studies looking at children born during the bombing in Dresden. Those mothers were under one heck of a lot of stress and it was reported that there was a greater incidence in homosexuality, particularly among female kids, if I recall correctly. More recently there have been some contradictory findings — in part because it’s not quite that simple, as every woman will respond differently to the stress physiologically.

So is the idea now discredited?

No, not thoroughly discredited. It’s true, to my knowledge, that women do produce more androgen when they’re under stress. That’s a fact. The question is whether those androgens are responsible for producing more homosexual females or not.

What else, other than more androgens, might be a factor in producing this masculinization?

I have absolutely no idea.

Did the finding — this dramatic difference — surprise you?

No, because it was a logical outgrowth of other research that we had done. I’ve been studying the auditory system for 30 years, otoacoustic emissions for 15 and sex differences for half a dozen years, and homosexuality for two years, so we knew the fields pretty thoroughly. It’s kind of an off-the-wall fact when you just hear it for the first time. It just sounds bizarre. Why in the world would the ears of homosexual women be any different from the inner ears of anybody else? But if you approach it from the context of the research that we’ve been doing, it makes more sense.

When I started the experiment, we didn’t have very high expectations of finding physiological differences between homosexual and heterosexual women — they had never actually been found before — but it was worth a gamble to me. I’m glad that we did see a difference because it has a number of different implications.

Such as?

It gives us additional insight to the origins of the sex differences.

But clearly your findings will stir debate and controversy. Even if you’re not that interested in studying homosexuality, those who do might use your findings to further their own agendas.

Yes. I’ve been hoping I won’t get run out of town. I did have some apprehension before I started the research, but since it’s been published I’ve only heard positive reaction from the homosexual community, many of whom have told me that they have felt they were different for years. To hear there might be some physiological concomitant is welcome. But I’m certainly not saying that homosexuality always has a biological or physiological basis. I accept that some women may have made a decision that is solely social or political. It might well be that there is more than one type of homosexuality, and that’s an area for future research.

Is it fair to say that this adds new support to the theory that
sexual orientation may be predisposed before birth?

Predisposed is a strong word. Most neuroscientists believe that just about everything about human traits and behaviors is a complex mix of heredity and environment. But the default condition of humans when they develop is female. If you don’t have certain biochemical events occur at particular points during prenatal development, then you will have a female. Those events are, of course, exposure to androgens — or what we know as sex hormones such as testosterone — produced by developing male fetuses. But if they get those androgens from some other external source, even if it were an XX organism — something that would have otherwise been a female — it will be masculinized.

Masculinized?

I know that some people take exception to the term masculinization. This a technical term. It’s just descriptive of the process that can occur during prenatal development. It’s not meant to be some pejorative term. It’s the fact that during prenatal development some fetuses turn male. How do they do that? They’re exposed to androgens.

So why might the sex hormones vary in the womb?

Individual fetuses could very well produce differential amounts of androgens. The mother herself may produce some androgens. The adrenal glands actually have the capability of producing androgens, as well as the testes. And you have to understand that everything is a mix. Both sexes have some of each, both during development and later in life.

There are also certain maladies that can produce different amounts. One is “congenital adrenal hyperplasia,” when a lot of androgen is produced in a fetus by the adrenal gland and the gland goes bad — it malfunctions and leads to the production of more androgen. When this happens in a female fetus, a fetus with XX chromosomes, you end up with what is known as an inter-sex infant. This is an infant who has what are called “ambiguous” genitalia, and surgeons usually get into the act pretty quickly and try to reverse this. They take the person back to a female appearance because, in this case, they’re genetically female.

We’re not talking about a malady when we’re talking about homosexuality, a condition that comes about reasonably often. The estimates on homosexuality vary hugely, from 1 percent of the population to 10 percent. Most scientists believe the 1 percent figure is a gross underestimate; it’s hard to determine it exactly because historically people have not been open about it. But exactly what would produce this masculinization of the auditory system isn’t known, though we think it’s most likely excess androgens. It’s not the masculinization of the auditory system that’s particularly important, but rather that it is an indication that some other brain sites that are responsible for sexual preference were also masculinized at the same time. That’s the implication of the work.

How likely is it that the masculinization is the result of excess androgens?

Well, scientists are generally a cautious bunch, but it seems to be a real strong working hypothesis. I’d like to think more than 50 percent, likely. It’s what we scientists call a parsimonious idea. It’s a simple explanation that fits with other known facts and it explains the outcome very tidily. But could we be wrong? Absolutely!

Future research should look at androgens then?

Absolutely. I hope other researchers become interested in this and will redouble their efforts to find those brain centers that are responsible for sexual preference and sexual orientation in females.

Which might be where?

The hypothalmus is a center that gets a lot of attention from sex researchers looking for centers that are driving these behaviors. But in a number of cases they’ve searched the hypothalmus for differences between those who are homosexual and heterosexual and only found them in males. Maybe it’s the wrong place to look.

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Like Spider-Man himself -- the first superhero to use a laundromat -- longtime Spidey artists John Romita Sr. and Jr. are regular New Yorkers who dreamed big.

By Ros Davidson

A few months short of his 40th birthday, Spider-Man, the first flawed and fallible comic-book superhero, is finally ready for his close-up. If Columbia Pictures’ “Spider-Man,” starring Tobey Maguire in the title role and directed by cult favorite Sam Raimi, is the smash hit everyone expects, it may outstrip the current box-office record-holder among comics-to-movie superheroes. That was 1989′s “Batman,” currently the 39th-biggest-grossing film in cinema history with receipts of $251 million. Columbia is so confident in Spidey, or so keen to appear that way, that it has already announced specifics of the sequel — again directed by Raimi and again starring Maguire and Kirsten Dunst — before the film’s opening weekend.

No one understands the arachnid hero’s appeal better than John Romita Sr. and John Romita Jr., the father-and-son team of comic-book artists most closely associated with Spidey. John Sr. drew the superhero in monthly books for seven years straight in the comic-book heyday of the late ’60s and ’70s. When Marvel Comics creative genius Stan Lee launched the daily Spider-Man newspaper strip in 1977, Romita Sr. drew it for the first several years.

Romita Jr., or J.R., as he is universally known, currently draws Marvel’s classic Spidey title, the Amazing Spider-Man, as well as the Incredible Hulk. He did last November’s Spider-Man book reflecting the World Trade Center disaster and four of the movie-themed covers that appeared on last week’s issue of TV Guide. (As is standard in comic books, they were inked by other artists, one of them his father.)

Spidey’s appeal is that he has always been more ordinary than other superheroes, contends J.R., who grew up in Queens, N.Y., with the web-casting superhero almost as a family member. By day, Spidey’s alter ego, Peter Parker, is a pimply teenager who also lives in Queens, the semisuburban homeland of New York’s working and middle classes. Introverted, awkward and — at least at first — a dud with the girls, Parker is nothing like Clark Kent, that clean-cut native of the planet Krypton by way of small-town Kansas.

Spidey, perhaps Lee’s most famous creation, was the first superhero to be an ordinary guy. His is the story, J.R. says, of “the little guy making great, the average kid who becomes a superhero. He gets colds, he gets the snot beaten out of him, his uniform gets dirty and it shrinks when he washes it.”

It’s crucial to Spidey’s particular popularity that he works his heroism in the real New York City, not Batman’s Gotham City or the Metropolis of Superman, says Romita Sr., 72, who still makes his home in New York but is visiting J.R. outside San Diego when I talk with them. Spidey, he points out, is a typical wiseass New Yorker driven to heroism by greed and ego — at first he uses his special powers to become a TV star — and then by guilt after his selfishness inadvertently leads to his uncle’s death.

Spidey’s complex personal life has also been central to the character’s longevity, which is only matched by a handful of other fantasy superheroes. “It’s like a constantly changing melodrama based on real people that readers knew,” says Romita Sr.

Father and son are sitting in J.R.’s California studio — with a tiled patio and elephant palms outside — surrounded by dozens of drawings of Spidey, who was launched in August 1962. Lee foresaw that a more complex, skeptical America was ready for a new type of hero and that icons such as Superman, the flagship character of rival DC Comics, were remote from the experience of many readers.

The origin of Spidey’s superhuman capabilities was especially apt. Shortly after his first appearance, in a comic book called Amazing Fantasy drawn by Steve Ditko, the Cuban missile crisis brought America to the brink of nuclear war. As all Marvel fans know, an irradiated spider at a local science exhibit bit the geeky Peter Parker; from then on, he could morph into a creepy-crawly that scaled walls and ceilings and squirted his own webs from his wrists.

“You could say that we were a very animated family,” says 45-year-old J.R., recalling his comics-dominated upbringing. On car trips the Romita family would dissect new plots and characters. On weekdays, at least until his father started working in Marvel’s Manhattan offices, J.R. sometimes stole up to the attic to watch him draw.

He hadn’t been interested in his father’s earlier comics work — romances, westerns and detective stories, mostly for DC — but Spider-Man, which his father began drawing when J.R. was 8, captivated him immediately. Spidey was not only an action hero, he was tinged with counterculture and danger. “Spiders were on tattoos and motorbikes in the ’60s. It was a very cool image,” says the dark-haired and muscular J.R.

Romita Sr. got his start in comics at age 19, inspired by the work of Norman Rockwell. In fact, Romita Sr’s nickname, Jazzy John — “Stan Lee used to give us nicknames instead of a raise,” he says — was ironic; he was conventional, at least by Marvel standards. “They’d always tell me I should smoke a joint and loosen up,” he laughs.

A lifelong penciller of rippling muscles and bosomy babes, the soft-spoken and courteous Romita Sr. refers to Shakespeare, the Gershwins and Irving Berlin in discussing his 50-plus years in what is often seen as a lowbrow form. Much of his ability to draw people, an unusual strength in the superhero genre, came, he says, from drawing romance comics: “I was able to do the girls so well, I could pay the mortgage!”

Romita Jr.’s strength, on the other hand, is storytelling, which he says was first instilled by watching films with his father, including classics like “Inherit the Wind,” “Twelve Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront.” A recent issue of Amazing Spider-Man even had no text whatever, just Romita Jr.’s dark, almost cinematic artwork.

Marvel, which pumps out 20 of the 25 top-selling comic books in America, has four Spider-Man titles, each of which sells about 80,000 copies monthly. The famed “Marvel method,” which led to truly visual comics for the first time, was not exactly planned. Lee would often phone Romita Sr. and his other artists with nothing more than a brief outline; he hadn’t written a script because he was working on so many titles at once.

The artists told the story first, then words were added. “You were forced to think very methodically,” says Romita Sr. “We artists all became great storytellers because we were constantly thrown into the deep end.”

The comics industry, and Spider-Man with it, has been rocky for years. After a peak in the ’60s, when comics were sold in every corner store and supermarket — and MTV, computer games and the Internet were many years away — the form lost much of its luster. Younger, worldlier generations of kids were not hooked on the same adolescent boy-power fantasies that had held the ’50s and ’60s in thrall.

After the success of Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989, a three-year binge of comic collecting reached ridiculous proportions — until the inflated prices led inevitably to market collapse. At the silliest moment, Marvel printed 25 million copies of an X-Men title, its most popular. In 1993, U.S. comic sales were worth $850 million. Six years later that had fallen by more than two-thirds, and Marvel filed for bankruptcy.

There were creative mistakes in the Spider-Man series as well. Over the decades, the web-swinger had become too comfy; he married his sweetheart Mary Jane Watson and moved into a pleasant Manhattan apartment. Romita Sr. believes this was disastrous: “If you marry a superhero off, either the wife dies or it’s the end of the character.”

Marvel tried to make amends, eventually revealing that the married Spidey was a clone and that the real hero — all his life issues intact — had been offstage since 1975. Readers saw this for the cheap trick it was, and sales dropped to a 30-year low. Two years ago the tack was changed again. A new series, Ultimate Spider-Man, was launched at a hipper readership, with Parker reborn as a hip-hop fan with blond, spiked hair who works as an Internet webmaster. (Get it?)

Writer J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the cult TV series “Babylon 5,” was brought in to work with Romita Jr. on Amazing Spider-Man. To refocus the story line, Straczynski had Spidey and his girlfriend separate. Spidey has since discovered that his beloved Aunt May knows his identity. Over the next few issues Mary Jane, who is now living alone in Hollywood, will realize she misses her arachnid superhero, and romance will return.

Spider-Man’s humor is also back. In an upcoming issue, a cop tells Spidey his costume smells of detergent: Is he getting ready for prime time? “Yeah, they’ll make a movie out of me,” says Spidey.

In another scene, a villainess says, “I like you, you’re funny.” Retorts the cocky New Yorker: “Don’t tell me, tell Letterman. I’ve been trying to get on his show for years.”

The big screen will not ruin the Spidey mystique, say the Romitas, especially since Raimi’s film looks to stay true to the original image of the superhero. “The character’s been around so long,” says Romita Jr. “If it hasn’t been diluted — in books, clothing, underwear, you name it — it won’t be diluted now.”

Neither of the Romitas worked on the movie, although Marvel Entertainment co-produced it and their drawings were frequent reference points. (Lee and Ditko receive screen credit.) Romita Jr. says he spent two hours chatting with Raimi before production started, but when he named his price for working on the film — the equivalent, he says, of what he makes at Marvel — negotiations stopped abruptly. “It would have been a novelty to have seen my tiny name scroll down the screen in the closing credits,” he says. “But it was an easier decision to make than most people think.”

His father laughs. Hollywood, he says, still looks down on comic books. “They see us as the Munchkins in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” he says. On three occasions, Lee tried to talk Romita Sr. into relocating to California to do storyboarding for Marvel projects. Every time he refused because, he says, he hates the culture of Hollywood.

It must run in the family. J.R. and his wife, Kathy, a blond Californian, will soon return to New York. Suburban San Diego is beautiful, says J.R., but he feels misplaced among so many fair-haired, pale-skinned people: “Out here, I’m the fly shit in the sugar bowl. I just don’t fit.”

A few days later, the Romitas are star guests at WonderCon, a comics convention in Oakland, Calif. The insider chat and questions are constant and earnest. During a Q&A session, J.R. wonders aloud whether the color of Spidey’s hair has been changed for the movie. His son Vinnie, a kindergartener playing with a plastic Godzilla, sits beside him.

Almost in chorus, the audience tells him that, yes, Internet trailers reveal that the webbed crusader’s do has changed colors on the big screen. Someone asks how he’s going to feel about sitting in a theater and seeing Spidey up there, many times bigger than life.

“I’ll love it!” says J.R., who once drew the X-Men and who recalls the adrenaline rush from seeing that film: “Wow, I helped create those characters!”

Web designer Mike Diaz, a slight, shy 45-year-old, is in line nearby to get a sweatshirt signed by Romita Sr. His dad worked nights when he was a kid, he explains, and comics were his escape. His favorite character is actually Superman, not Spidey, because his mother told him that when he was born the nurses said he looked like the Man of Steel.

Next to Romita Sr., who is busy signing and drawing cartoons, is Mike Burkey, who claims to have the world’s largest collection of Romita Sr. artwork: thousands of action figures and sketches, recently appraised at $7 million. “The man’s crazy, certifiable,” interjects Romita Sr. genially.

Burkey, a 37-year-old from Ohio, wishes he could fly to Los Angeles for the world premiere of Raimi’s film. He can’t, and will simply leave work early on Friday to catch the first screening. A skinny young kid rushes up and interrupts him: Is Stan Lee here? When told no, he says, “Oh, shit,” and melts back into the crowd.

Burkey tells Romita Sr. that he’s just added a new treasure to his collection: a 20-by-30-foot “Spider-Man” film ad that cost him $850 on eBay. He’s hoping to display it at his wedding in June but, in true Peter Parker fashion, hasn’t told his fiancée about it yet.

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Are Internet hate sites "the main culprit" behind the epidemic of hate crimes?

By Ros Davidson

The savage killing of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo., is focusing national attention on the rising incidence of hate crimes, and the groups and institutions who may be encouraging them. Experts say the Internet is playing a central role, allowing hate groups to recruit, network and plan events more easily than in pre-Web America. Consider the following:

Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., is using his Web site, www.godhatesfags.com, to organize a picket of Shepard’s funeral Friday in Casper. “Fags preach tolerance but practice intimidation,” the site proclaims, with a graphic combining a pink triangle with a swastika. Other features include Fag Facts, an encyclopedic list of purported gay sex practices; Fag Churches, a list of which denominations allow gay members, ordain gay clergy and bless gay marriages; and a rundown of the church’s media appearances. The church claims more than 300,000 people have visited its site.
The same day as Shepard’s beating, several newspapers reported an innovative hoax perpetrated by Internet-savvy white supremacists: They purchased 10 Internet domains with addresses that sounded like mainstream newspapers — www.philadelphiainquirer.com, for instance — but that actually led unsuspecting readers to the nation’s oldest white hate site, Stormfront: The White Nationalist Resource Page. Run by Don Black, an ex-Ku Klux Klan official who married David Duke’s ex-wife, Stormfront is probably the most sophisticated hate site, featuring sound, graphics, a White Singles page, a regular column by Duke and multiple links to other hate sites. Black denied responsibility for the hoax.
Stormfront recently launched itself as the server for multiple hate sites, including the White Nationalist News Agency, a 2-month-old site that is running stories on Shepard’s killing and the reaction to it, as well as regular features on crimes by blacks and Latinos and the progress of hate-crimes legislation around the country. The Agency relies heavily on reprinting news stories from the Associated Press and other mainstream news outlets — stories that, at least in the case of AP, it is using without authorization. Editor Vincent Breeding says his news site gets about 1,700 hits a day.

“It’s a complete change of the battlefield as far as the lunatic fringe is concerned,” says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which monitors hate groups. “We spend about 70 percent of our manpower now monitoring online hate.”

To understand the rise in hate crimes, and Internet hate sites, Salon turned to Mark Potok, who edits the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual report tracking the world of hate groups and their Web sites. The SPLC estimates there were 400-plus hate groups operating nationwide last year, up 20 percent from a year earlier, and well over 200 Internet hate sites, up from just one — Don Black’s Stormfront site — in 1995. There were 8,759 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 1996, compared to 7,947 in 1995 and 5,932 in 1994. And the SPLC says there were 21 gay hate murders in 1996 — men and women slain, like Matthew Shepard, because of their sexual orientation.

Potok calls Internet hate sites “the main culprit” in the rise of hate groups and hate crimes in America.

How do hate sites contribute to hate crimes?

The Internet does a couple of things for hate groups. First of all, it raises the impact that a single hate-monger can have. Not too many years ago, a single Klansman would have to go to a great deal of effort and spend quite a bit of money and find a sympathetic printer in order to produce a pamphlet that might reach 100 people.

Now the same Klansman, for almost no money, is able to very quickly put up a Web site that has the potential to reach millions. The other thing the Internet does is let haters network easily. Many of these people are on listserv programs, so if something of interest happens in one part of the country, very soon people all over know about it. Or very often sympathizers just see information posted in announcements on other people’s Web pages.

How much is homophobia a part of hate Web sites?

It’s very much part of them. Anti-homosexuality has spread out from a small number of core hate sites to the point where it’s on most neo-Nazi, Christian Identity and even some militia sites. Like abortion, homophobia has become a mainstream issue for the extremist right. There are now people who think that homosexuality is a capital offense, that practicing homosexuals should be punished with death.

Are these hate Web sites sophisticated in technical terms?

There’s no question that many of them are spiffy, very slickly presented. Don Black, for instance, is very good with computers. He learned his skills courtesy of American taxpayers, when he was in jail for a planned invasion of Dominica by white supremacists. Then he got out of prison and became a computer consultant in addition to running his Stormfront Web page. He’s trying to teach computer skills to the movement.

And some of the sites are very deep: 70 or 80 pages, with all kinds of links. Many of them have very good-looking graphics, and some have video graphics. Many have a lot of memory, which allows you to play white supremacist rock ‘n’ roll music, for instance.

The white power rock ‘n’ roll is helpful in recruiting, isn’t it?

Yes. The rise of white power rock ‘n’ roll has been very important to the racist movement. Currently there are more than 50,000 [white power] CDs being sold every year in America. It’s extremely violent in its rhetoric and lyrics. The songs call for murdering black people or creating a racial holy war or a whites-only revolution, and they’re increasingly being sold to teenagers and people in their early 20s.

You can also sample racist music through the Resistance Records site. There’s a racy little number on it right now called “Aryan Love Song.” Is this exposure changing the sort of people that hate-mongers reach?

Yes. The racist rock music helps to recruit white middle-class and upper-class kids, which is something that the movement is very interested in doing. It’s very attractive to kids, particularly brighter, more affluent kids who are on the Internet. The movement for ages has been interested in getting brighter people into its ranks. It doesn’t just want street thugs who can beat up black people in bars. What it’s really looking for is its future leaders, its tacticians and strategists who can create a second revolution, as opposed to those who can just beat up a few people. And this is something the Net may really be helping with.

How else are they using sites to recruit?

Some of the sites are specifically designed for young children. The most dramatic example of this is the World Church of the Creator, a neo-Nazi group with a great many chapters which cites the Bible to justify racism and anti-Semitism. In the last several months they’ve put up a site called Creativity for Kids. It looks for all the world like a “Sesame Street” for haters. It’s done in a sort of colored crayon look in script. It takes you a while to understand what it’s all about, except that in its introductory page it says: “World Church of the Creator. Kids. Creativity for Children. Purpose. The purpose for making this page is to help the young members of the white race understand our fight.”

What do you make of the Internet hoax that led would-be newspaper readers to Don Black’s site?

This is new. But it’s another example of hate-mongers crashing into the homes of people who would never consciously read their material. It’s like what the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has been doing in at least four areas recently, for example the San Jose, Calif., area. They take free newspapers from boxes, insert Klan literature and then toss the papers onto door stoops or lawns so people open what they think is an advertiser and find something inside advocating violence against blacks. The American Knights have taken responsibility for this. They think it’s a very groovy way of reaching people.

In the second of two interviews with polygamist wives, Vicky Prunty talks about how women become powerless in 'plural marriages.'

By Ros Davidson

It was in a McDonald’s, with the smell of hamburgers and fries, that Vicky Prunty was first introduced to a pretty younger woman named Martha (not her real name), who would become her husband’s second wife in a polygamous marriage. Right there in the fast-food restaurant, Greg (not his real name), a former Mormon missionary, whisked a ring off Vicky’s finger and placed it on the hand of her new “sister-wife.”

It was a highly symbolic moment in Prunty’s plural marriage — an institution that has been so stigmatized that it prompted fighting between Mormon settlers and U.S. Army troops almost 150 years ago and then delayed Utah’s statehood until the practice was relinquished by the Mormon Church. Polygamy is still practiced by a surprisingly large number of people in Utah and nearby states. An estimated 30,000 or more adhere to what they see as a purer form of Mormonism.

Polygamy exploded onto the front pages of Utah newspapers this week. An alleged polygamist, John Daniel Kingston, 43, pleaded not guilty on Monday in a court in Brigham City to charges of beating his 16-year-old daughter unconscious because she refused to be the 15th wife of her uncle, a man twice her own age. Both men are prominent members of the fundamentalist Latter-day Church of Christ, or Kingston group, one of the best-known yet most secretive polygamous sects. Kingston faces a pretrial hearing on Aug. 24. A custody hearing is also scheduled for that day. Members of Kingston’s family will reportedly try to regain custody of the young woman, now in foster care.

A group of ex-wives and daughters of polygamy, Tapestry of Polygamy, also made headlines on Monday in the Salt Lake Tribune when it urged Gov. Mike Leavitt, a devout Mormon, to take a firm stand against polygamy. The practice is, strictly speaking, illegal, although the state has not prosecuted anyone solely for polygamy since the 1950s. The ex-wives’ group says that polygamy encourages abuse of women and children and imprisons them in poverty without an outside support network. Many polygamous wives have no skills for earning wages. And since only the first of a polygamist’s marriages is state-sanctioned, later wives have no legal recourse if they leave; they may never see child support or alimony.

Prunty is the director of Tapestry and one of its founders. Now 35 and divorced, she is struggling to support five children ages 4 to 13. A sixth, her oldest boy, has returned to live with his father and Prunty’s former “sister-wife.” Prunty has found that leaving a fundamentalist polygamist marriage can be difficult. Upon leaving Greg, she briefly married a second polygamist husband, unsure about leaving the institution altogether. At one point after her divorce she was shocked and angry to learn that her children, while visiting their father and her former sister-wife, had been told to pray for Vicky’s death because they claimed she was a sinner.

Prunty, a Californian, was not born into polygamy. A Mormon since age 10, she met her first husband, a Mormon missionary and an Englishman, at Brigham Young University when she was a freshman and he was a senior. Not long afterwards, when they were living as devout suburban “Mormon Yuppies” in Mesa, Ariz. — she was a mother of two and he was a salesman — they decided polygamy would be the best way of serving God faithfully. Salon interviewed Prunty by phone at her Salt Lake City home as she was caring for several children.

As leader of Tapestry of Polygamy, you told the media on Monday that Gov. Mike Leavitt’s comment that polygamy may be constitutionally protected amounts to tacit approval of the abusive practice. Yet you chose to live in polygamy not once but twice.

I grew up with divorced parents. And at the age of 7, we were distributed amongst other relatives. So I was an orphan whose parents never died. Because of that childhood, I married a man who was older than me. He was 25 and I was 18. I was always needy of a father figure and wanted to be led by someone who was strong. I was always attracted to that. Then once we had married, my husband and I started investigating early teachings of the Mormon Church. We really wanted to please God and not man, to live the gospel as it first originated under Brigham Young and other early leaders. We believed that polygamy was a way of living by the commandments and preparing ourselves for Zion, when Christ would come back.

You read a great deal about Mormonism. How exactly was polygamy justified?

The teachings were vague. It’s in Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132 — kind of a companion to the Book of Mormon — but it’s vague. It doesn’t tell you the reason except to multiply, to build kingdoms and principalities and the hereafter in heaven and here on earth and to bring about the birth of “children’s spirits.”

How do you see it now?

Now I think that polygamy is designed to oppress women and to keep them in bondage to men. Choosing polygamy because of religion, because you fear that if you don’t chose it you’ll be damned for eternity, is very different from choosing polygamy because you really want to take in a lonely widow — to be kind to family, friends and neighbors. I mean, in this day and age do we really need to have polygamy? It’s not as if there aren’t enough men to go around! There are also so many orphan children and other unfortunate children in this world, I don’t know if the answer is to continue having as many children as possible. That’s why I say to polygamous men: “Do a good deed, don’t just spread your seed.”

Presumably at the time you couldn’t stay in the Mormon Church as polygamists. You’d be excommunicated.

Yes, so we returned to Utah and joined a small fundamentalist group and — quite literally — lived in a rock in Moab, a cave blasted into the side of a sandstone rock in the desert. It had a concrete floor and a wood stove. We lived there collectively with a polygamist, his three wives and children. Now it’s a bed and breakfast.

When was it that your husband took a second wife?

We’d been married about seven years and had three children when Greg met her. He had been visiting the Singer/Swapp clan while traveling to and from Salt Lake City to Moab.

The clan was the fundamentalist group in Heber Valley that bombed a Mormon chapel in January 1988 to get back at the “Mormon-run state” for shooting dead their patriarch, John Singer, a few years earlier. And within months of the bombing, a stand-off with the FBI and police in Marion, Utah, left one police officer dead.

Yes, when the leaders of the clan were jailed, Greg had to spend time with Singer’s widow and her family. While living there, he met the young redheaded daughter of the clan’s lawyer, Martha. She was about 19 or 20. He married her and came back and I had to give her to him in a ceremony, which is typical. I put her hand in his. I felt uncomfortable with it, but I wasn’t convinced that it was wrong.

I believed that we would be living polygamously at some other time, perhaps in the next world. I thought that trying to practice polygamy on this imperfect earth was like eating your favorite Marie Callender pie in a dump. I mean, I thought this world is so monogamous. Cars are not built for polygamous marriages. You have only two front seats, not three for a man and two wives. It’s very difficult to fit in if you have more than one wife. When my husband went to business dinner parties, we accompanied him alternately. As a wife, I was also bothered by the imperfections of man. Polygamy meant I had to follow my husband as he was the patriarch. That was what we believed. It was our law. You’re following an imperfect human. And who wants to follow an imperfect human?

So what happened? I know as a family you moved several times, and at least twice lived in Salt Lake City.

Well at first I went along with the marriage. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. We lived in the same home. I was in the marriage for a few years. I lived upstairs and she lived downstairs and we pretty much shared the middle floor. She had a nice big wedding and reception. I had to hide in the background — I was told to act like a friend of the family — because he wanted the image of marrying monogamously for his career. I’d just had a baby a few days earlier. It was so difficult. It was not natural, for me at least. Yet the whole time I was trying to convince myself that polygamy was right and I was wrong because of the religion behind it.

How was it decided who spent the night with whom?

We just had an arrangement, every other night.

What about her — did you like her?

I liked her, but I didn’t understand why he had chosen her. I had always thought that plural marriage would be more charitable, something you do to help women without husbands, the single women. But I knew that in his heart he would not have married somebody who was just a service project. He chose this woman because of her body proportions.

Didn’t that make you jealous?

He had told me he wanted someone who was shapely. He chose her partly for her body. That hurt me, and I realized that he was more in it for himself than anything else. I mean those brownie points in heaven were his. It wasn’t like the law of Sarah in the Bible. It was the law of Abraham. It was all male-oriented. I felt as if I was the martyr of the whole thing. It was just a charade. I realized — and it took me a while — that the dynamics and the institution did not emancipate a woman. I only realized this when all of a sudden our partnership turned into a dictatorship. In monogamy, our relationship wasn’t perfect but it was pretty balanced in terms of power. But when he became the husband of two wives, the only way to keep order in the home was to become more powerful. Otherwise he’d have two wives going different ways. He had to put his foot down to get consensus.

How did he demonstrate this power?

He started saying things like, “You’re mine to dispose of unless I find you worthy.” Or, “I’m the tree with the shade, and if you don’t like my shade, you can leave.” He’d also give my nights with him to my “sister-wife” if he was angry with me. The problem was, he didn’t tell me how I could leave. What was I supposed to do without money and all these kids? I also have a copy of a scripture he wrote in which he said, “If the wife is subject to her husband’s law, then she truly has no right to refuse his taking other wives beside her in her lifetime. She is, after all, under his dominion.” Martha was also obviously his favorite, so it wasn’t at all easy. At various points, Greg would even try and convince me that I was possessed by demons, because I was rebellious and unhappy. Some of the other men in our group would try and exorcise me.

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What was it like for the children?

You have to realize that one of the really deceptive things about polygamy is the love that children have for their siblings, their half-siblings. But it mixes things up in a way. It’s great to have a large family, to think of humankind as all being brothers and sisters and taking care of each other. But when you don’t have your individual families, when you don’t understand the responsibilities and associations of family members, it can get very confusing. When I was picking my kids up this weekend from visitation, my daughter had this present and it was signed from her “Mom and Dad.” All the kids, my kids, have to call their stepmother “Mom.” That’s one of the rules of their family. To them, in the eternity, that’s who they’ve been taught will be their mother because I’m a sinner and I have been cut off from the family for leaving. So it mixes them up. Of course, none of these things you could ever prove in a court of law because emotional and mental abuse is much harder to prove than physical abuse. Their word against mine. That’s the sort of indoctrination we go up against.

What do the children think about calling Martha “Mom”?

Well, I just saw that gift card and we haven’t discussed it yet. I know that if I call the children up when they’re there, they say “Mom said this, Mom said that.” I say, “Well I’m your mother.” But I can’t force them not to say it when they’re there. I’m their mother. I have made a huge sacrifice on their behalf and there’s no way she will ever love those children like I do. I really struggled to be a good mother and the one thing that has really spurred me on, especially to do what I’m doing today, advocating for other mothers, is that I think that motherhood is the greatest job in the whole wide world. I have a hard time when people give lip service to that and to families. It’s been very hard for me as a single mother to leave my children to go to work when I feel they need me at home.

When did you leave your marriage?

I left 11 years after we married when I realized that I’d put myself in a position to be used for his glory, his ego. I’d gotten pretty used to not having an intimate relationship with anyone.

You didn’t want to have more of a relationship with him?

I didn’t know what a good relationship was. Even in monogamy, our relationship wasn’t that great. I’m sure that’s why he took a second wife. It was a relief not having him around sometimes because you could do your own thing. I disciplined and fed the children and did all the same things for him. I had to baby him, and when he wasn’t around I didn’t have to do it. It wasn’t a real partnership when we were monogamous either. But I continued to think that plural marriage was a good thing, it was just the guy I married is a power freak.

So I went into another plural marriage as a third wife. The husband, Carl, knew my first husband and his family seemed like they were very happy in polygamy. The first wife, Judy, had three children and the second wife, Maggie, was pregnant. I told them I didn’t want to be full-fledged wife but I wanted to be part of a family as I want my children to have a father — at least a part-time one.

But then Carl revealed to us that he never believed in polygamy, that he had just taken wives because he wanted to have sex with more than one woman. He was honest with us. Of course it shocked me and I had to run into the bathroom crying and wondering what was going on. I felt sick because I had actually started to fall in love with this man. Another thing that I noticed was the first wife was going through the same things I had gone through when my husband took a second wife — jealousy, insecurity. And her husband was sometimes strutting around like this rooster. She became almost became numb. I could see her almost becoming a zombie. This woman was a really strong woman. Then I became pregnant with his child.

Where were you living?

Salt Lake City.

Did the neighbors say anything about your plural marriage?

I think that here in Utah we’re pretty used to polygamous families. I eventually moved out and moved back to California for a couple of years. I thought I could get some support from my family. I found out that my first husband was praying for my death with my children, because he thought I was such a sinner. He and his wife don’t pray for my death now. But when he did it was almost like a predator, a lion, going for the weakest one. I was very weak.

Why did you return to Utah?

I wanted to do something about polygamy. I went to court because I had a hard time accepting that my husband had visitation rights. The children have always been with me. Raising them has not been a partnership. He was just the breadwinner. He was going from house to house, between his two wives, but my children were always with me. Why all of a sudden when I get a divorce should it be any different? At least with monogamy, the husband is with his children in one home.

You were initially in a shelter when you left because you were so poor.

Yes. That was when I left him and moved to California. When I came back to Utah, I wanted to go to school to get my degree. I was getting some child support but it wasn’t enough. I tried living near my second husband. I rented from him. But it didn’t work. After about 18 months of living there, I left and had to go to a shelter. And I realized that my dream has really been to help women to get out of abusive situations and to get the resources and their needs taken care of.

Do you think polygamy can ever work?

If a woman wants to be treated as an equal and she wants a partnership in rearing her children, monogamy is probably the way. If she wants to have a husband who has sex with other woman and she wants to be submissive and have lots of children, then she perhaps should go into plural marriage. It’s a lot like being a single mother except you still have a leader. But you’re usually lonely and don’t have much money. About 30 percent of polygamous wives in some communities get welfare. As for me, I definitely want something better for me and my children.

Does polygamy attract certain women?

Oh yes. They have to be quite sheltered. Young is good too. Innocent, not very educated. They prey upon women who aren’t strong, with low self-esteem. Often women are just brought up as plural wives. I didn’t grow up in it so it was easier to get out. We’re finding thousands of children are being brought up in it and their lives are ruined. And it’s becoming more prevalent as there are so many different lifestyles. This is just one of them, though it’s based on power and control so it’s not just another alternative lifestyle. Religion is also man-made and this type of marriage is one of those things that men use to overpower women. Any organization that is based on a male book is not my thing.

Why are you speaking out against polygamy now? Because of this upcoming case involving John Daniel Kingston?

I think that all of us [at Tapestry of Polygamy] got sick of the abuse — it’s been so hush-hush. It’s like Utah’s dirty little secret. And because we’ve been involved in polygamy, we wanted to do something about it after we got out. We wanted to help others who are still involved and are trying to get out. We wanted to say to this young girl, “Hey, we’re here for you.”

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In the first of two interviews, the former wife of a polygamist talks about poverty, abuse and Mormon husbands' quest for the eternal screw.

By Ros Davidson

Last week a judge in Brigham City, Utah, ordered John Daniel Kingston, a prominent member of a polygamist group, to stand trial for the recent assault of his 16-year-old daughter. Kingston, a vice president in a Salt Lake City accounting and auditing firm, allegedly beat his daughter unconscious because she did not want to be the 15th wife of his brother, her own uncle, in a marriage arranged by Kingston, 43.

At the pretrial hearing, the teenager — who is not being identified and is now in foster care — testified that on May 24 her father took her to a remote family ranch near the Idaho border, ordered her into a barn and made her take off her jacket, then whipped her with his belt at least 28 times for rebelling against the arranged marriage to David O. Kingston, a blood relative twice her age.

The defendant, who pleaded not guilty Monday, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted. According to former members of the Kingston group, as the fundamentalist sect of the Mormon church is often known, the defendant himself has more than 20 wives. Yet group leaders often deny that the church practices polygamy.

Not surprisingly, polygamy is a public relations disaster for both Utah and the mainstream Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which advocated the practice until the late 1800s. Most Americans find the idea of plural marriage abhorrent and primitive — a woman who has one-half of a husband or less? — especially since fundamentalist Mormon churches usually preach that wives must also be obedient to the husband. There are others, however, who argue that when polygamous adults are consenting, as they usually are, they should be left alone.

Further complicating the matter is that Salt Lake City is desperately trying to update its image in time for the Winter Olympics in 2002. The church, while growing steadily — it has between 7 million and 10 million members worldwide — is highly sensitive about its image. Because Mormonism prohibits smoking and drinking, it is often characterized as conservative and strict. An estimated 70 percent of Utahans are Mormon. And even today many mainstream Mormons are sympathetic to polygamy, believing that although it is outlawed in modern society, it is an ideal that will always be practiced in the highest levels of heaven, according to Utah historian Richard S. Van Wagoner, author of “Mormon Polygamy” (Signature Books, 1989).

There are an estimated 30,000 polygamists in Utah alone and perhaps the same number in other states. Most are members of fundamentalist Mormon splinter groups, of which the Kingston group is one of the most prominent. They often hide their “plural marriage” from the outside world because it is illegal and stigmatized.

The area that is Utah was first settled by Mormons in 1847, but their petitions for statehood were repeatedly denied because of their polygamy. It was only after the church officially repudiated the practice in 1890 that statehood was granted. And although the church has excommunicated polygamists since 1904, it is still a highly sensitive issue. The Mormons who first settled Utah had been fleeing persecution for their beliefs and practices. And to this day, Mormons are often wary of admitting that the church’s early leaders practiced polygamy, or “spiritual wifery,” as it is also known. In fact, Joseph Smith, the church founder and prophet, is often said to have wed more than 50 women by the time of his death in 1844.

The idea of polygamy harks back to the families of biblical figures such as Abraham and Jacob. Smith also had a revelation on the matter, now known as Section 132 of the famous decree “Doctrine and Covenants,” a companion to the Book of Mormon that is still part of Mormon scripture. That particular revelation was also once described by Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, who would become the first governor of Utah, as “one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed.”

So although polygamy is embarrassing for modern-day Utahans, it is entwined with the history and religious beliefs of most of the state’s population. Plural marriages are rarely prosecuted, even though Utah’s Constitution specifically forbids them. In 1991, when a polygamist in Utah filed for custody of six children by his third wife after she died of breast cancer, the state Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision and said the polygamist had the right to adopt despite his plural marriages.

Last week, because of the outcry over the upcoming Kingston trial, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a devout Mormon, seemed to tread a fine political line. He indicated that Utah has not cracked down on polygamy because to do so might curb religious freedom in violation of the First Amendment. “It’s clear to me in this state and many others, they have chosen not to aggressively prosecute it. I assume there is a legal reason for that. I think it goes well beyond tradition,” he said at his monthly news conference. “What needs to be cracked down on, if there is to be such a crackdown, is any abuses of peoples’ civil and human rights.” Even so, the upcoming trial of John Daniel Kingston is attracting international attention because polygamy, especially in the United States, is so inherently fascinating yet so often completely hidden.

Tapestry of Polygamy, an unusual support group for those leaving polygamy, consists of ex-wives and daughters from polygamous households. Eight members of the group attended last week’s preliminary hearing in which John Daniel Kingston was ordered to stand trial. Salon talked with co-founder Rowenna Erickson about what members of her group say is an often abusive and poverty-stricken lifestyle that, under the umbrella of religious belief, relegates women to the role of subservient breeding machines and leaves children virtually fatherless. Members of the group also held a news conference outside the state Capitol in Salt Lake City yesterday to try to draw the governor’s attention to what they say are widespread civil and human rights abuses of women and children in polygamy.

Rowenna Erickson, 58, was born into the secretive Kingston church and lived for 34 years as the second of two wives. She bore eight children in 13 years. For about a decade of that, until she moved in with a daughter, she was so poor that she was on and off food stamps and collected recyclable aluminum cans for money. Then, in 1992, she was excommunicated for questioning what she saw as the church’s harsh treatment of women and children. A grandmother of 10, she says she is all too familiar with those involved in the Kingston case. Her former husband, Leon Kingston, is a first cousin of defendant John Daniel Kingston and his brother David O. Kingston. And the defendant’s lawyer, Carl Kingston, is her former brother-in-law and, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, believed to be the father of 20 children by two wives and another child from a wife who left him.

You’ve lived most of your life as a polygamous wife, but your parents weren’t polygamous. How did you come to your decision to live a polygamous lifestyle?

My mother very much believed in it because of her Mormon background, although my father, a Lutheran, didn’t. My mother idealized it. She felt that, since she hadn’t done it, at least one of her children should. Also, she thought she’d get religious “credit” and that she’d be more likely to get what we called “celestial glory” in the hereafter, which is what Mormons call heaven. That’s because our church believes that polygamy offers the only true path to the “celestial kingdom,” the highest level of heaven, and that no family member will reach it unless a daughter is married to a leader of the Kingston church. Marriage is considered eternal. So she conditioned me. I was married in 1960, when I was 20 years old. My husband, Leon Kingston, was the firstborn son of the church founder, Charles Elden Kingston.

Your husband already had one wife. Did you know her?

Yes, she was my older sister.

Your older sister? Isn’t that rather, er, weird?

It does seem that way to other people. But when you’re in that sort of group it seems completely normal. Your thinking, doing and being are all controlled by the church. If the church said something, we jumped. My marriage wasn’t recognized, though, by the law of the land. Usually only the first of a polygamist’s plural marriages is legal.

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The marriage must have changed your relationship with your sister profoundly.

Yes. She was eight and a half years older than me. It was very, very hard for her. She didn’t know how the first wife typically feels, as no one had talked to her about it. She became depressed. She was angry, hurt and jealous. We talked about it at the time, but it was still hard. In polygamy, the first wife thinks she’s going to live “God’s law” by having a “sister-wife,” and it turns out to be hard. So my sister blamed herself for not being able to please God. They’d had three children and she got pregnant again just three months after I married him.

Did your sister attend your wedding?

Oh yes. The first wife gives the second wife to the husband; the second gives the third, and so on. It’s a religious ceremony. The ceremony is seen as validating the “celestial marriage” for all eternity.

The term polygamy actually refers to having more than one spouse. I don’t suppose a woman ever took several husbands?

Gosh no! (laughs)

Now you were in the marriage for 34 years and you had eight children in the space of 13 years. It sounds like you must have almost always been pregnant.

Yes, I had six girls and two boys. At one point I had three children in the space of three years and two days. And my sister had six children.

So you didn’t use birth control?

Oh no! Oh don’t ever do that! You don’t want to stop any of those little spirits from coming here to earth. You should have as many children as you possibly can. Some people probably practice it, and I thought about the rhythm method. But as my doctor said to me, “You know what they call people who use the rhythm method? Parents.”

How did you work out who spent the night with the husband?

We all lived together for 11 years in the same household, then I lived elsewhere and he commuted between the two of us. We alternated nights and I was dutiful and never refused him. It was very formal and sterile because my relationship, my marriage to him, had to be secret because it was illegal. My kids — like quite a few other kids in our church — didn’t even know who their father was. It wasn’t even known at first within the Kingston group because the group had been investigated by a grand jury in 1959 for polygamy, and I think welfare fraud, so it was all relationships were secret. It seems so stupid now. I’m ashamed and embarrassed. We were so obedient to the organization, so loyal, and we kept all the secrets.

When your children asked about their father, what did you tell them?

I told them he was in the Army. When I think about it now it was such a terrible thing to say. It was cruel because they kept expecting he would come home sometime and be their father. They imagined all these wonderful things about him. They certainly didn’t like the man they thought was their uncle — who in fact was their real father. He reprimanded them so much and never showed any love or affection. My oldest daughter still doesn’t like him at all.

Your sister became depressed after you married. Was it easier for you as the second, younger wife?

Well, I was very strong. I’d grown up competing with four brothers. I was able to do it, but I was so very lonely. I had no affection, no attention from this man. Intimacy was never talked about. I remember I’d shower at night and I’d just cry in the shower so no one could hear me then. It was horrible. I never had male companionship. I never loved him. When I was pregnant he wouldn’t even ask when the baby was due. Never a word.

What about your family’s financial situation? Poverty is common in polygamist families because there are so many children — the wives are almost always pregnant or nursing. And your church practiced consecration, whereby group members pooled their income with the church, although you could withdraw some if you could prove you needed to. You also paid a 10 percent tithe. In fact, it’s not uncommon for polygamous wives to need welfare and to qualify for it as single mothers, which they usually are in legal terms.

We were so poor, I used to watch other people’s children for 32 cents an hour and collected aluminum cans and pop bottles for extra money. I was on and off food stamps for more than 10 years. I baby-sat my sister’s children. The men usually think that each wife should bear as many children as possible, regardless of whether they can support them. And you’re always pregnant. Our church requires you to produce as many children as possible, because little spirits are waiting to enter the world, via a male-female union, so they can be sent on their eternal path upwards and one day become Gods over their own worlds. I began to become aware of a real discrepancy between the spirituality of polygamy — that it’s the ideal marriage — and the poverty and abuse that polygamous families actually live with. It’s demented.

Isn’t the Kingston group affluent enough? It’s been estimated that their business empire is worth up to $150 million. In fact, in the last high-profile case involving the Kingstons, in 1983, the then-leader, John Ortell Kingston, was estimated to have assets of some $70 million. That came out because the state had sued him for massive alleged welfare fraud. It was charged that he had four wives and 29 children who had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in public assistance over a 10-year period. [Editor's note: The case was settled out of court. Kingston repaid $250,000 and did not have to take court-ordered paternity tests.]

Yes, the Kingstons have money, but they use members as virtual slave labor. The money was for God, so it was invested in businesses so the Kingdom of God could grow. We were working for less than minimum wage. At one point the state stepped in, so after that we had to pretend we got minimum wage even though we weren’t. We weren’t supposed to complain or question the church authority or God would disapprove. It’s a big scam.

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At what age do most girls in the Kingston group marry and have children?

Most girls get married at 14, 16, 18, and have a baby every year. They cannot keep up financially, and the children live in poverty, and the mothers are overwhelmed. There’s arguing amongst the women, and there’s a lot of eating disorders because they try to keep slim for the husband because they want to catch his attention because they don’t see him very much.

In the Kingston group, which has about 1,500 members, the patriarchs had multiple wives. John Daniel Kingston, the defendant, has more than 20, and you claim the leader of the group, Paul Kingston, has 30-plus. There must be many young men left single. What happens to them?

They are allowed to marry someone outside of the group and she then becomes an automatic member. But if a girl married on the outside, she was out. That was it. We actually have a man who wants to become part of our group, Tapestry of Polygamy, the brother of one of our members. He’s a child of polygamy. He was physically abused and he says polygamy warps a person’s view of sexuality.

You also said you saw quite a lot of abuse toward children from other wives, so-called sister-wives of their mother, which makes sense to me. Sort of like the wicked stepmother.

My family wasn’t really that way. My sister and I were strong, and we really didn’t need him, our husband, although I suppose he was a good sperm donor because our children are really outstanding. But there was a lot of abuse, and I heard about it a lot in other polygamous groups. The most disciplined children were considered the best children. Mothers would threaten their children to make them obedient. They were under so much pressure themselves and everyone wanted to look good. I couldn’t stand it

When you were still in the church, how did you view the outside world, what members of your group sometimes call “Babylon”?

We more often called them “the outsiders,” and we thought they’d all go to hell. Each polygamous group, including ours, believes that it alone has the key, that their leader is the greatest prophet on the planet. And we believed if a “celestial marriage” is not sealed by the right people — your own church leaders — you won’t have that husband or wife on the other side, for eternity.

Why did you finally leave the group? I know you were eventually excommunicated, but I’m wondering what led up to that.

I was taking classes in hypnotherapy and eventually realized what a lie I had been living. It’s just like [mega-selling author and recovery movement guru] John Bradshaw says, you’re as sick as your secrets. I went on this big spiritual quest and realized I’d never loved my husband and that I was unhappy. I thought, “OK God, all these women here are complaining about you and thinking you’re not very nice to them and how could a God love women and tell them they had to live polygamy?” I was excommunicated in 1992 for writing a letter to one of the church higher-ups telling him off for never preaching love and for ruling by fear, and not many months later I left my marriage. I had been dying inside. I became sick with asthma, I was depressed and stressed out and I had so much tendinitis and bursitis in my hip, I was bedridden. I was broke, although I’d been given a house by my former husband. But I had no skills that would help me get a job.

Were your children supportive?

My children really encouraged me to get out, otherwise I might not have been able to. I realized that I couldn’t still be a polygamist and help people get out of polygamy. When I came out, I started going to the media, and whoever else I could to point out illegal activity in the Kingston group — the IRS, the FBI, the U.S. attorney, anywhere I could find to tell them that the church [allegedly] was cheating on its taxes, paying members less than minimum wage and stealing members’ property.

Are any of your children still members? They were all adults when you were kicked out, so I presume custody wasn’t an issue.

My daughter Stacy is also a co-founder of Tapestry of Polygamy. My children were way ahead of me. They thought polygamy was stupid all along and were waiting for me to catch on. One of my daughters did marry someone from the group. She’s not a plural wife but her husband is still a group member, and he treats her like a plural wife — he’s somewhat abusive, and he can’t get close or emotional to her. She has to work hard and he doesn’t contribute. He has his own money but she’s supposed to support the family. I don’t intervene though. She has to work that out herself.

Don’t your husband and sister still support you, though? How do they view your founding Tapestry of Polygamy?

I try to keep them out of it, as they’re embarrassed by it. My sister has a business and caters to a lot of fundamentalists, so I try not to expose her. But now that the focus is on the Kingstons, because of this case, Tapestry of Polygamy is getting a lot of attention.

You know the Kingstons who are on trial, right?

Oh yes. John Daniel, who’s married to his half-sister, he had his daughter marry his brother when she was 15 or 16. She was the 15th wife, but she couldn’t do it, couldn’t marry him. She kept running away so John Daniel [allegedly] beat the daylights out of her to make her do what he wanted her to do. You beat them up and threaten them. That’s what polygamy’s about — coercion, fear and abuse. It’s a question of power and control and a lot of sex. Polygamists are not as spiritual as you’re led to believe — there’s wife-swapping, ménage à trois, use of pornography. There’s no end to it. John Bradshaw came to Salt Lake City and said, “There’s a high rate of incest whenever there’s a patriarchal order.” And I thought, “Wow John, you’re pretty brave coming to Mormondom and telling them that.” There’s a lot of genetic problems because of the incest.

Do you think polygamy should be outlawed? If the adults are consenting and there’s no abuse?

Some of the women in the group think that polygamists should be prosecuted, others say if you prosecute them, they will become victims and martyrs and go underground. Most of them will never change anyway. I just want the abuses prosecuted. There was a case in Colorado City, Ariz., about 15 years ago where a woman tried to run away and she was returned to her husband by the police.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt recently commented on polygamy and even admitted that his great-great-great-grandfather had “many families,” which sounded to me like a bit of a euphemism. He also said that polygamy may be a constitutional right because of religious freedom.

It was a whitewash. He brushed it off. Polygamy is Utah’s dirty little secret. They just don’t want to deal with it because Mormons and polygamists are kissing cousins. If we have to, we’ll go to Janet Reno to get the abuses prosecuted. I also want people to know that polygamy is not because of God. It can’t be, because of the abuse and the deprivation of women and children.

Can polygamy work? For others, if not for yourself?

No. I don’t think it ever works. You cannot live with polygamy, because that would mean ignoring the pain, abuse, neglect and poverty. As a friend of mine, who’s in pain and agony because of polygamy, said, “It’s one big eternal fuck.”

One big eternal fuck?

Spiritually speaking, you’re going to be with him and have his children to populate other worlds, for eternity. Well what does it involve? He’s going to have sex forever and ever and ever. And she’s going to be pregnant forever and ever and ever. So this woman said, “It’s just one big eternal fuck.”

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Theodore Kaczynski should be in a mental hospital. Instead, he's about to become the star in a grotesque courtroom circus.

By Ros Davidson

Topics:Suicide

Accused Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, who’s been described by his defense lawyers as a paranoid schizophrenic, is this week being tested by a court-appointed psychiatrist to determine whether he is competent to stand trial and to act as his own attorney, as Kaczynski has requested. Unless the Justice Department — which has reopened negotiations on the subject — agrees to a plea bargain, most observers believe that the trial will eventually proceed, with an evidently mentally ill defendant in the spotlight.

What is the standard for “competency”? How could Kaczynski, who has already tried to commit suicide in prison, be judged able to act as his own attorney? And if the trial proceeds, what is likely to happen? Salon spoke with Mark Levy, M.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, who often acts as a forensic consultant in competency cases.

What is “competence” in the legal sense?

It’s basically the ability to understand the court proceedings, to work within the context of the proceedings and function reasonably — these are loose terms — and to work with one’s attorney in mounting a reasonable defense. You can’t say, well, I’ll work with my attorney as long as he argues that the Martians are invading. That’s not a reasonable defense. That’s part of the issue to be evaluated with Kaczynski …

It’s not enough to be diagnosed as mentally ill?

No. There’s three concepts that need to be differentiated in a legal context. One is “psychosis” which is a medical term; one is “insanity” which is a medical/legal term, and comes into play when determining a person’s guilt or innocence; and the third is “competence” which is an entirely legal term. In the legal context, for example, you can be a psychotic but sane; you can also be psychotic but competent to stand trial.

How does a court-appointed psychiatrist go about determining a person’s competence?

The first thing you do is to try and make an accurate diagnosis, which in Kaczynski’s case would mean determining whether the preliminary evaluation that was done of Kaczynski by the defense psychiatrist and psychologist — that this man is a paranoid schizophrenic — is correct.

How do you do that?

Through interviews, a look at his written material and, ideally — and if he’s forced to cooperate — a battery of psychological tests. With paranoid schizophrenia, the tests look for characteristic mental deficits, like difficulty with abstraction. Schizophrenics are concrete in their thinking. You’d find that when you say to him, “Mr. Kaczynski, when you hear the proverb, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’” — despite his high IQ, he may say, “Well, it’s like if you roll a stone on the ground you won’t get moss.” A failure to abstract. Now he may be smart enough to get that one, but someplace along the line, relative to his intellect, you’d find a surprising amount of concreteness to his thinking.

Another indicator may be delusions, which in Kaczynski’s case I think they’ll find.

How do you test for delusions?

The Rorschach Test, the ink-blot test. As long as a paranoid schizophrenic can systematize, he can keep his thinking relatively organized. If you say, “When were you born, where were you born, what was your mother’s maiden name” and ask very specific questions, someone like Kaczynski will perform well. However, if you give them an unstructured environment, like the Rorschach, they fall apart. If you say, “What do you see in this ink-blot?” a healthy person will say, “It’s a butterfly,” or this or that response that’s within a wide array of things that are correlated to healthy people. A schizophrenic will give you more and more bizarre responses: “Well there’s a gun, and in the gun there’s an amoeba and the gun is in the mouth of a woman …” You also see that their anxiety rises. If you ask them open-ended questions, they’ll get very anxious.

Like, “Tell me about yourself …”?

“Tell me about yourself,” “tell me about your feelings in a winter’s night in your cabin …” Because then they’ll be flooded by unconscious or partially conscious impulses that they’re terrified of and they don’t have the defense mechanisms with which to bind.

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Anything else to look for in Kaczynski?

Major depression, which is acute now because his worldview is crumbling. He’s faced with having to give up the house of cards that has kept him partially sane. If his worldview of the threat of technology justifying murder is seen as simply insane, and therefore invalid, then his whole life has been worthless. That’s a very depressing conclusion that I don’t think he’s capable of bearing.

What makes you think that?

He seems to have gotten much worse since the issue of his insanity defense has come up. That was what presumably led to his suicide attempt. You’re seeing an acute suicidal depression that’s emerging underneath as his paranoid defenses are challenged and begin to crumble.

What would happen if he is found not competent to stand trial?

He would be treated against his will in a mental hospital. Usually, defendants who are found not competent initially come back and are tried once they’ve been given medication and whatever other treatment is deemed appropriate. They are tried when they are cured, or more usually when their symptoms are under control.

You believe Kaczynski is incompetent to stand trial?

I believe he is, though I haven’t examined him. But everyone knows. The cop on the corner knows he’s a loon.

Even before he tried to commit suicide.

Normally, someone who puts his head through a noose and says, “I hate this life, get me out of here,” should not be considered competent to stand trial. If he walked into a community mental health clinic at that point, and was deemed to be a danger to himself, he could be held against his will for treatment. If he were in a hotel room trying to hang himself with his underwear and brought in to a clinic by the police, he would be deemed incompetent and would lose his civil rights despite the Bill of Rights.

So how might the court-appointed psychiatrist find him competent?

Well she could find that he’s not psychotic, though I think that’s unlikely. She could find him psychotic but “compensated.” That is, even though he’s got some ideas that people would regard as delusional, he is quite capable of understanding the proceedings. He doesn’t have to be working well with an attorney. He doesn’t have to be a good attorney to be allowed to represent himself. It’s a very low test. It’s dumbed down and made easy to say he’s competent. It’s much more difficult — but correct — to say that he is a paranoid schizophrenic who is decompensating as the psychotic nature of his beliefs come into question, that he’s also acutely suicidal. On that basis alone, he’s incompetent in my book.

But, in defense attorney Ronald Kuby’s words, if he can tell the difference between the judge and a grapefruit …

That’s the thing. Dumbing it down. The easy way out on this one is to say he’s competent because he’s got a 160 IQ and he can answer some simple questions about what the proceedings are, that he said, “Yes of course I’ll work with the attorney.” And the judge will have no choice — I think he isn’t particularly imaginative anyway — but to let the trial go on. And it’ll be a circus like Colin Ferguson, who represented himself (with Kuby as his legal advisor).

You don’t think Kaczynski should be allowed to be his own attorney?

What will happen if he’s deemed competent — which means nobody will be treating him — and argues his own case in court? His fantasy probably is that he’ll get a platform from which to argue the validity of his beliefs, and in some way to try to justify his actions. To Kaczynski, it almost doesn’t matter if he’s executed because he’d be a martyr in his own mind. “The world wasn’t ready to hear the truth I had to offer.” But the reality will be that as his anxiety rises, under the circumstances of the trial, as the prosecutor cross-examines him and rattles him, he’ll become more and more out of control. His actions and perhaps his behavior will become idiosyncratic and bizarre, as you saw with Colin Ferguson.

Some observers think that Kaczynski may be crazy like a fox, that he has known exactly when and how to disrupt the proceedings, in order to save his life.

Oh sure. The less you know about him, it might seem that way. But I also think
it might save his life because the jurors may have second thoughts about imposing the death penalty after seeing him come apart in the courtroom. Depending upon how disorganized he becomes, it might become a mistrial. He can’t try his own case if he has to be kept in another room watching it on television.