Daren Fonda

Saturday, Dec 11, 1999 5:00 PM UTC

The spirit and the flesh

Out of her storefront church, ordained minister Kellie Everts mixes religion and hardcore fetish videos.

By Daren Fonda

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Kellie Everts’ obsession with sex was coming between her and God. Raised a strict Catholic, she considered herself a spiritual person. She’d tried celibacy several times, but her libido was too strong and she’d broken down, usually at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when she’d have a man waiting in bed. By her own account, she’d slept with more than 1,000 guys by 1978. A stripper and exhibitionist, she’d never had a problem finding partners.

In May of that year, she had a vision in her Brooklyn apartment. Kneeling at her altar to the Virgin Mary, the 33-year-old prayed for guidance in her dealings with men. Everts asked the Virgin to be mother not only of her soul, but of her body.

The room, as Everts tells it, filled with a bright, white light and the Virgin appeared. “I want you to stop having sex with men,” she commanded. Then she vanished. It was the epiphany Everts had prayed for. For five days she thought about the Virgin’s words. “I saw good-looking men everywhere,” she says. “But I thought, if I don’t do this I’ll be a coward.” So Everts pledged herself to Mary, promising never to have sexual intercourse again.

More than two decades later, Everts has kept her vow. And though she didn’t exactly get herself to a nunnery, she leads a cloistered life. Everts lives alone in her 19th century house on the outskirts of the Catskills in upstate New York. Animals form her only company: Ducks, dogs, cats, possums, chickens and roosters roam her 50-acre spread. Stained-glass windows and paintings of cherubs adorn her home; she keeps a statue of the Virgin in her second-floor window, which she lights up at night for passers-by. According to Everts’ business card, which features a cross superimposed over a flower, she is a faith healer, reverend and hypnotherapist. “Your healing is waiting for you,” the card says.

The Gospel according to Everts, however, would make most preachers blush — if not want to banish her straight to hell. Spiritual to the core, she also happens to be a stripper, a Goddess-worshiping feminist, a preacher of sexual liberation and a star and producer of fetish and domination videos.

When Everts isn’t preaching her New Age philosophy — she rails against male-dominated religion, asks men to cast away their guilt over sex and to get closer to God through respectful treatment of women and animals — she makes some of the nastiest, most bizarre videos in America. Everts will pee for the camera to a soundtrack of classical music; she will squat down in a field, as if defecating, then show a guy licking what looks like chocolate pudding from her ass. She and her girls — mainly amateurs whom she recruits locally or hires from New York City — sit on guys’ faces; she frolics in pond mud, squats for an extreme close-up, sticks things in various orifices. “We Cover a Multitude of Sins,” the tag on her video line says. Hustler magazine recently published an Everts video review headlined “Her Shit Don’t Stink.”

Everts isn’t the only sex worker trying to reconcile religion with raunch. San Francisco’s spiritual-sex movement has long drawn followers, and pro-sex feminists like Camille Paglia write extensively about Christianity’s long history of oppressing women’s sexuality. In matriarchal times, women were worshipped and temple priestesses performed divine sex acts; the only conflict between religion and sex came when men took over.

Like her counterparts, Everts talks a lot about society’s double standard, about reestablishing ancient female-centered body worship; of hypocritical men who capitalize on fantasies of women, while condemning them for taking money for sex work. But as an ordained minister who earns her living producing homemade porn, she takes the apparent paradox to an extreme.

Not long ago, I visited Everts at her home. We spent an afternoon chatting about God, sex and sin. She’d prepared a stack of clips: spreads in men’s magazines, newspaper articles and reviews of her shows. At 54, she didn’t look much like the fantasy doll she once was. She was pale and covered in makeup. Her hair was cropped short and bleached platinum blond. Dressed in a conservative, black pleated blouse, she looked more like a prim suburbanite than a sexual deviant.

But she still has her fans: men who appreciate her deep, forceful voice, her 44-inch chest, her ability to humiliate convincingly. Men will drive hours and spend $1,500 for a session of her charms.

She wasn’t always so hardcore. “I realized I was an exhibitionist,” Everts tells me, “when I started posing topless at age 15.” A year later, she ran away from her home in New York and landed in Hollywood with vague dreams of modeling or acting. Neither career panned out, though, and by her early 20s, she was a single mom stripping to make a living.

Back then, she was a free-love activist: A picture at a rally shows her carrying a placard that reads, “Nudity is God’s Creation.” Crowned Miss Nude Universe in 1967, she spent the next two decades touring honky-tonks in the United States and Canada, taking time off to study yoga and faith healing. Between 1968 and 1979, she appeared in Playboy nine times, and would pose for about 30 other men’s magazines. In between, she explored other interests: bodybuilding, writing pro-sex articles and co-authoring a book about women’s physical fitness.

Everts’ idea to blend stripping and preaching came in 1973. A California faith healer named Verna Talbot told her she had a revelation that Everts should use her body to raise money for Talbot’s sect, the Church of the World Light. Everts was, as she put it, “under Verna’s spell.” Dancing one night at a place called the Follies Theater she decided to give a little sermon before her next number. She told the men that God loved them, that she would pray for their souls and that she felt compassion for their lustful thoughts. The men were stunned but they listened because they wanted to see more of her booty.

Everts proved as comfortable preaching the catechism as shaking her breasts. It was a paradox the press adored, and she played it up, giving interviews wherever she went. “God wants me to use my body to make money for his church,” she told a Montreal newspaper in 1977. “I have felt his presence.”

She became known as the “stripper for God.” It was a bit of a misnomer: Everts wasn’t really stripping for God; she was doing it to make a living. But as long as she captivated men’s eyes, she thought, why not try to save their souls. One night, before a show at the Playboy Club in Chicago, Everts was in her hotel room when she says she saw Jesus. He gave her three rings, signifying her betrothal to him, and he told her she was on the right path.

Her career peaked in 1987, the year she was offered $5,000 a week to dance at the Millionaire’s Club in Canada. But she was burning out. “I told my agent I was through,” she says. At 42, she felt she was getting too old for the road. The job seemed taxing and the fame was more work than it was worth. She’d also stopped preaching as part of her act. “I got tired of being attacked and getting death threats,” she says. Figuring she’d earn enough making videos, Everts retired from the stage, bought a house upstate and holed up as a living-room pornographer.

At first, she balked at her clients’ demands — especially the scatological stuff — but she quickly discovered that raunch sells. Her videos got more explicit; it’d be better to feed their fantasies, she thought, than have them sublimate their sexuality. Twelve years later, Everts is an underground success, marketing about 450 tapes through her catalog and Web site and selling about 100 each month.

A refining of her religious philosophy has come over time. She’s canned the parts of Christianity she finds offensive and replaced them with elements of Hinduism, Buddhism and her own ideas of feminine worship. Her commercial Web site links to her Church of the God Within, where, with drawings of a topless Goddess and a woman in thigh-high boots and bathing suit, she explains her ideas.

“All creation,” Everts says, “comes from one source: God the Mother; all life is spiritual and animals can ascend into heaven.”

Men misinterpret the Bible, she claims. Fornication, adultery and masturbation aren’t sins against God; instead they’re constructs of male-based theology designed to oppress and control women.

“The Christian religion has some excellent doctrines,” says Everts, “but also contains the poisons of male domination — most notably the denigration, enslavement and exploitation of women. Women are punished for charging money for sex — because in doing so, they claim their own bodies as a resource to exploit for their own benefit. If fornication and adultery are sins, then punishment should be applied to both sexes.”

Such concepts haven’t made Everts popular in her community.

“People curse me as a man-hating lesbian for speaking out against men. They think I must have had an abusive father. They call me ‘the porno lady,’ say I have sex with children and animals.” But her father was kind, she says, and she has no interest in actually having sex — with men, women, children or animals — though she will allow guys to perform orally on her for the camera.

For now, Everts is trying to find followers for the storefront church she opened in Binghamton, N.Y. Living in such an isolated place makes her lonely, she admits, and she’d like to meet some spiritually minded companions. But it’s hard to find disciples.

“At my storefront church they came for the free food; but it was mostly horny guys hoping to see me dance,” she says. “They didn’t really care about what I was saying.”

Indeed, this has always been Everts’ curse: Her body and striptease act got people to notice, but then they wouldn’t take her seriously. Yet she perseveres because she feels she’s been chosen — and she doesn’t know what else to do. She likes her land and she loves her animals. It’s a little patch of her own, a place to continue her crusade: preaching redemption through sexual openness, hoping for a society that condemns neither the sinner nor the sin, working, as she puts it, for “global salvation.”

As I drove back to the city from Everts’ home, I wondered what I’d learned. I didn’t feel enlightened, sexually or spiritually. Instead, I felt like I’d spent an afternoon with a lonely woman who believes with all her heart that she is doing God’s work. A prophet who makes porn to earn a living might not be what the Apostles envisioned, but Jesus was an outcast, one might reason, so Everts is perhaps following his example.

Whatever the case, I admire her strength of character. It occurs to me that there’s something sad about her isolation; that she seems hungry for love — if not physical then spiritual. At home, I watch one of her videos and see her pee in a cup for the camera. I hope the Virgin’s touch is enough to sustain her.

Friday, Feb 5, 1999 10:53 AM UTC

Death wishes

Georges Minois' exhaustive study traces the long, strange history of suicide.

By Daren Fonda

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It is Christmas Eve, 1773. France’s ancien régime is nearly bankrupt. Social tensions are simmering. Voltaire has issued a battle cry against moral absolutism; Rousseau is demanding government that reflects the people’s will. Against this backdrop two young soldiers take a room at a St. Denis inn. They order supper and retire early for the evening. The next morning they stroll about town and return to their room for lunch, dining on a brioche and some wine. Afterward, seated at their table, they perform a final act: They point their pistols into their mouths and shoot themselves.

As Georges Minois tells the story in his new book, “History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture,” the deaths of Bourdeaux, 20, and Humain, 24, created an enormous buzz in Paris society. Their suicide note, released by the police, prompted reactions ranging from sympathy to stupor. “The curtain has been lowered for us,” wrote Bourdeaux, the mastermind of the pact. “We have tried all pleasures, even those of obliging our fellows. Disgust with life is our only reason for quitting it.”

What possessed these young soldiers to kill themselves? Undoubtedly, they were overwhelmed by the pressures of hiding their homosexuality. Had they been outed, they could have been executed for sodomy. But more significant to their final decision was that they accepted a logic of suicide: Because they could no longer endure a life that wasn’t worth living, it made more sense to kill themselves. To the French authorities, such reasoned behavior was a radical assault against the fraying social contract between subject and ruler. The soldiers’ bodies were punished accordingly: Their cadavers were dragged through the streets, pierced with stakes, hanged and burned. The state hoped such grisly spectacles (which, incidentally, were not unusual for suicides deemed of sound mind) would dissuade others considering taking their own lives. Bourdeaux and Humain, who had planned their deaths with methodical precision, had no chance of getting a Christian burial.Their ashes were scattered on a trash heap.

The history of suicide, as one might expect, isn’t pretty. But if you set aside the sad but essentially a historical fact of men and women taking their own lives — usually because of unbearable misery — this thread of history yields a surfeit of bizarre funeral rites, church- and state- sanctioned condemnation and a running soap opera of moral outrage. After reading the deranged details that Minois so carefully documents, it’s tempting to see our own customs as enlightened compared to those of our ancestors. But if we consider some recent public spectacles of suicide-as-entertainment — a police chase ending in a suspect’s suicide caught by nightly news crews, “60 Minutes’” broadcast of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s helping a terminally ill patient into his good night, breathless newspaper reports of “suicide by cop,” in which desperate men goad police into shooting them — Minois’ historical view reminds us that suicide is not simply an act of private will but an ever-evolving problem of social meaning.

Among Minois’ most compelling ideas is that power will try to stop suicide in any context. “Whatever its nature,” he writes, “power seeks to prevent and conceal suicide. The subject must dedicate his life to the king; the citizen must conserve his life for the homeland. Desertion is out of the question. The social contract requires everyone’s participation in maintaining the state, which, in exchange, watches over everyone’s well-being.” It’s an idea alive today through crisis-intervention centers, suicide hot lines and the analyst’scouch. But its roots, as Minois shows, go back to medieval Judeo-Christian ethics and European folklore. At least as far back as the Middle Ages, those who tried suicide and failed could expect prison terms or death sentences. Those who succeeded faced eternal damnation. The Christian church revived ancient traditions — like the Greek rite of cutting off the cadaver’s right hand so the ghost couldn’t commit a crime. In England, the corpse would be banished from the community and buried at a crossroads, so the ghost couldn’t find its way home. The family might pay a fine to cover the cost of an inquest. As far as the church was concerned, suicide was the devil’s work, the deadliest of sins for which a miserable afterlife was guaranteed. Dante’s Inferno described the consequences: Suicides were banished to the seventh circle of hell, below the burning heretics and murderers; transformed into trees, their punishment was to stand immobile while Harpies tormented them by picking at their leaves.

Minois traces the church’s harsh position to St. Augustine, who condemned suicide in the fifth century to stop the thousands of zealous Christians who sought martyrdom by killing themselves. Borrowing arguments from Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Augustine blasted suicide as a violation of the Sixth Commandment, declaring that self-murderers usurped God, “natural law” and the state. The Council of Orlean enforced his doctrine in 533, denying funeral rites to suicides awaiting trial for a crime. In 693, the Council of Toledo ordained excommunication for anyone attempting it. The crown got in on the act too, penalizing suicides with a host of civil penalties including confiscation of their estates. Theoretically, only a coroner’s verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” could spare a suicide victim’s family from forfeiture. In practice, a double standard was often at work: Aristocratic suicides tended to be judged insane and awarded a Christian burial; peasants, serfs and merchants provided steady income for the king’s treasury.

Of course none of these penalties prevented ordinary folk from killing themselves for familiar grievances: financial ruin, terminal disease, unrequited love. Causality is tricky with suicide; each case carries somedegree of mystery. A clearer portrait emerges, Minois suggests, from studying statistics that show that suicide claimed victims regardless ofclass, nationality or religious affiliation. Moreover, such historicalanalysis often disproves the prevailing myths. For example, the notion that suicide was an “English malady” caused by too much rich food and lousy weather was bunk, according to Minois, and had more to do with the factthat English newspapers reported the details of suicides more frequently than those on the Continent.

A century after Shakespeare broke open the medieval taboo on even discussing it (there are some 52 instances of “self-slaughter” in hisplays), suicide began to achieve a renaissance throughout Western Europe.The church’s declining hold on moral authority, coupled with modernism’s eviltwins — secularism and free-market capitalism — produced a climate for itto flourish.

One of the first signs of a growing acceptance of suicide appeared in 1770, when a young Lyons fencing master named Faldoni was informed by his doctor that he was about to die. His lover Therese swore not to live without him; so they holed up in a chapel, bound their left arms with a cord attached to their pistols’ triggers, and waited for the slightest movement to set off the guns. The press wrote about them affectionately and the episode inspired Rousseau to characterize the growing ambivalence about suicide — a kind of guilty infatuation — seeping into English and French society. “Simple piety sees nothing but a crime in it,” he remarked, “sentiment admires, and reason keeps silent.”

Like the two young soldiers of Paris, Faldoni and Therese struck a nerve. They were seen as tragic figures in the heaviest Romantic sense. People were outraged at the financial penalties levied against their families, and their lives inspired a novel and a play. What apparently captured the public’s fancy was the idea that their suicide was somehow acceptable, a reasoned response to an impossible situation. Afterward, Minois reports, suicide fantasies increasingly began filtering from literature into reality. Within a decade, Goethe’s Young Werther would kill himself out of unrequited love for a married woman, spawning a slew of imitators and setting a new standard for Gothic despair. It was an age, Minois tells us, when destitute poet Thomas Chatterton would swallow arsenic at 17 in a squalid London rooming house — instantly acquiring mythic status to the young and depressed. Soon after, Shelley, Keats and Byron would mythologize melancholia in poetry, forging an unbroken link between the artist’s lifeand work.

Minois concludes, somewhat prematurely, with the French Revolution. An epilogue attempts to encapsulate trends in theory and social climate that would characterize 19th and 20th century developments. But it’s a bit of a cop out. Minois might broaden his inquiry here to address someof the existential questions post-Nietzsche: If God is dead can we still condemn suicide on religious grounds? Are there circumstances, terminaldisease for instance, under which it is morally permissible? But Minoischooses to avoid these sticky issues and closes the debate with a few dismissive sentences. “The fact remains that how and why people decide to kill themselves remains a mystery,” he writes. Earlier, in a chapter on the Renaissance, he writes: “Suicide falls outside usual norms. The entire and powerless arsenal of laws and anathem as has no hold on reality; it is like a machine turning in the void, a sword striking a blow in water, a cannonade aimed at a ghost.”

Minois’ book isn’t the first to break down in this respect. The inability of theory to adequately explain individual cases dogged Durkheim’s 1897 study “Le Suicide,” and it continues to undermine much of the literature a century later. In his enthralling personal meditation on suicide “The Savage God,” poet A. Alvarez wrestles with the intellect’s limitations in understanding the desire to forfeit life. Why, he asks, did survivors of the camps (Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi) wait until they got out? Why do some terminally ill patients choose to die while others fight to their last breath? Alvarez implies that each suicide leaves behind questions that can never be answered, even if the act’s proximate causes are known. Science may never ace suicide for the same reason that other areas of human behavior, falling in love for example, defy rational analysis. In the case of suicide, the finality of death blocks absolute knowledge. For those who don’t succeed, there’s always a question of whether they really wanted to die at all and for those who do, there’s no way to contact them. Even philosophers who have tackled the problem manage only a twisted equation. Camus is the classic case, proposing that to reject suicide one must “embrace the absurd.” If life makes no sense, he implies, get over it and try to live to the fullest extent possible. His metaphor for the modern condition — Sisyphus eternally pushing his rock up the mountain — suggests a resignation to be damned. Small comfort at the prospect of the void.

Where can a reader go to explore the elusive and persistent problem of suicide? The most insightful writing on suicide often comes from poets — Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath — precisely because they examine suicide through fiction, privileged with authorial control over character, setting and motivation. But for Minois, the plodding historian, his task of chronicling the untidy, contradictory details of real-life misery, seen through the lens of intellectual history, is bound to leave readers unsatisfied. Yet, if his conclusion — that each self-murderer can speak only for himself — is unsettling, at least it keeps the door open for further study. Maybe one day he’ll write a sequel. One more suicide book, after all, never hurt anyone.

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