From the White Crane Journal, Summer 2003

In the spirit of Primal Scream Therapy and anger release treatment, Aaron and his voluptuous Tahitian French wife and partner taught that the solution to neurosis, mental illness, and behavior problems lay in getting to the root of negative feelings, bringing them into consciousness and acting them out (however socially unacceptable) in the presence of the loving and accepting community. Life at the Rancho Vista commune was a constant group therapy session with every stray feeling or interpersonal annoyance or mistake discussed and analyzed rigorously. Aaron was remarkably successful; he had a thriving private practice in Beverly Hills with rich and influential clients; and Rancho Vista became a model for wilderness therapy with many successful and grateful graduates.

But within the small community of the staff, the psychotherapeutic processing was getting a little crazy. "Sexual surrogacy"—and downright sexual manipulation of clients—turned out to be one of the processes. (Dr. Aaron was impotent and needed the hard young cock of one or another of his followers servicing his wife while he kissed and "made love" to her.) And drugs and alcohol were flowing within the staff, all in the interests of bringing suppressed material into consciousness, but getting Aaron deeper and deeper in his cups and Susoyev more trapped and confused than ever.

At the height of the group’s success in the industry, Aaron’s wife was replaced with a new woman whom none of the others particularly liked and who set the stage for the community’s collapse when in the name of open relationship and non-attachment she included two underage kids, a boy and a girl, in her coupling with Dr. Aaron. Soon most of the staff—and Steve Susoyev in particular—are deeply complicit in the crime of statutory rape and a subsequent flight to Costa Rica to avoid prosecution. Susoyev actually saved the day, but alienated himself from the community and brought on the downfall of the therapeutic experiment (and Aaron’s ten year imprisonment).

The high point of the plot—this reads like a novel—comes when all the males in the commune, including the gay ones, under Aaron’s direction and with clinical documentation and cameras rolling, ritually and sequentially fuck the doctor’s new wife (who’s bound and gagged) to help her get in touch with her "needy pussy" and fears of abandonment. The shit hits the fan (literally, in a "psychotherapeutic process" called the Horseshit Vesuvius that makes primal scream and anger management pale in comparison).

Perhaps I found People Farm so engaging and interesting because I came close to such an experience myself during that same period of utopian enthusiasm for psychotherapy and especially small group process as the source of enlightenment, truth, health, and happiness. I was on staff for four years at a conference center in the mountains above Mendocino north of San Francisco called The Mann Ranch Seminars. I spent the summers living in semi-wilderness, cooking and serving and cleaning up after the seminarians who came to the Mann Ranch to hear lectures on Jungian and new paradigm psychologies and religions by such luminaries as Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Bruno Bettlelheim, and Stanislav Grof. Fortunately the staff were not trying to do psychotherapy on one another, and we were not all having sex with each other. (Tho’ I have to admit one summer we did an awful lot of acid and there were one or two awfully curious sexual escapades I found myself in—all in the name of idealistic utopianism.)

The difference between my experience at the Mann Ranch and Steve Susoyev’s at Rancho Vista is, I think, instructive, not only about psychotherapy and intentional community, but also about religion and collective belief in general. At the Mann Ranch, there was no charismatic leader or guru; we were just employees in a variation of the hospitality industry. Certainly we joined the staff because we enjoyed lectures and seminars on psychology and were seeking personal growth. But there was no personality at the center of it all. "Cyrus Aaron"’s Rancho Vista. in contrast, was centered on one man’s ideas, personality, and charisma. And it apparently went to his head. The text on the back of People Farm begins "They say power corrupts. But did they warn you about the guy who claims he doesn’t want it?"

People Farm is quite a book. I highly recommend it—if only for its entertainment value. It’s beautifully crafted, well-written and well-plotted. And it’s an eye-opener and a warning for all of us dreaming of utopias.

People Farm is available through Amazon.com and peoplefarm.com [and, since publication of this review, through local booksellers]. Read it. You’ll like the author and be pleased to have met him. He’s a nice example of the gay man as seeker, as victim, and as redeemed and redeemer. Steve Susoyev currently practices law in San Francisco, specializing in the needs of people with life-threatening conditions.