Lafayette Morehouse — A brief history & resource guide

The Lafayette Morehouse is an intentional community founded in 1968 by Victor Baranco and his first wife, Susie. When Vic died in 2002, leadership of the community passed on to  his second wife, Cindy Baranco.

The Morehouse concept became very popular in the 1970s, where reportedly over 70 Morehouses sprung up and Vic was called the “the Colonel Sanders of communes”. Currently the main campus is in Lafayette California, where about 60 people live, with houses in Oahu Hawaii (where Cindy resides), Oakland, and Atlanta.

Vic developed a curriculum around group living, communication, sensuality, and man-woman relationships, and created concepts and practices that are (to my mind) as powerful and relevant today as they were 40 years ago. Much of this curriculum is still taught at the Lafayette Morehouse and at other hosts in New York, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. These concepts have to do with the inherent perfection of human beings, the importance of pleasure goals in living a full life, the nature of effective communication, the nature of man-woman relationships (which includes many practical aspects on learning how to please your partner and win with the opposite sex), effective governance structures for communal living (the “One No Vote”), and expansion of orgasmic potential for both men and women. Vic had many students who later became well-known using his materials, as he never attempted to limit people from using what they had learned from him. Former students include Bob and Leah Schwartz (author of “The One Hour Orgasm”), Regena Thomashauer (founder of “Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts”), Patricia Taylor (author of “Expanded Orgasm”), The Welcomed Consensus (an intentional community in San Francisco), Nicole Daedone (founder of the OneTaste communities in San Francisco and New York), Steve and Vera Bodansky (authors of many books including “Extended massive orgasm”), and also, it is rumored, John Grey of “Mars and Venus” fame. Vic was a contemporary of and knew Werner Erhardt and many other figures in the consciousness development movements of the sixties and seventies. Vic coined many words that came into common usage including the “do-date” (a sexual practice where both partners focus all their attention on one partners’ pleasure) and “win-win.”

Vic was and remains an extremely controversial figure, which seems to have been partly due to suspicions over his sexual research at a time where it was not allowed to say “vagina” in the public media, partly due to the unusualness of the lifestyle experiment him and his group were conducting, and partly out of his own litigiousness (he was involved in many lawsuits, mostly libel suits he originated, most of which he lost).  There was also a lot of controversy surrounding More University, which was for over 15 years a California  accredited institution granting doctoral degrees in sensuality and other topics.  However, he was also a person with a rare insight into human character, who had an ability to call people on their shit very accurately in a way that one immediately got the truth of; and he had a tremendous zest for life and ability to enjoy himself under all circumstances, despite increasing physical pains and disabilities as he got older.  The personal impact he has had on many people’s lives is huge, and the lifestyle that he inspired is still very much alive 6 years after his death.

For more information see the Lafayette Morehouse website, the new Wikipedia article on Morehouse, and the fascinating article A Tale of Two Men (from the blog Life of a kept woman).