Isis Aquarian Source Family Archives photo
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Forget everything you think you know about cults. Yes, even you, Investigation Discovery junkies. Filmmaker and publisher Jodi Wille has drawn on 25 years of research to curate a new, expansive exhibit at Allapattah’s Museum of Sex that explores how sexuality, intimacy, and relationships influence America’s alternative spiritual communities.
Here’s what you won’t find inside the museum‘s new exhibition: Yet another depiction of dangerous, headline-making cults like the People’s Temple (Jonestown), the Manson Family, or Heaven’s Gate. Instead, Wille is interested in utopian societies that, while sometimes problematic, have contributed to the broader, mainstream society through art and alternative thinking.
“We’ve been taught to think of utopian communities in America as these misguided social experiments that never last and harm the people within them,” Wille tells New Times. “We can see, reviewing the evidence at the Museum of Sex, that these groups have existed as long as the country has existed — even before — and that they’ve added great value to a number of people’s lives, and influenced the larger culture in some remarkable ways.”
“Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes” premiered at the Museum of Sex’s original location in New York and is on view in Miami from May 7 through November 2026, featuring more than 300 pieces across two floors, including artwork, photographs, films, records, printed materials, garments, and rare artifacts from 20 different subculture communities.
The Source
You may be familiar with Wille’s work as the documentary filmmaker behind The Source Family (2012) and Welcome Space Brothers (2023), which chronicles the histories, ideologies, and members of The Source Family and the Unarius Academy of Science, respectively. The Museum of Sex showcase is an expansion of that work, examining these groups through the lens of sexuality and intimacy.
“[Sex] is a foundational aspect of being human, but it hadn’t been a focus of my research until the senior curator of the Museum of Sex approached me and asked if I might want to do an exhibition,” Wille tells New Times. “I thought, what an excellent touchstone to bring the subject to a larger audience, because many of the groups had very unusual sexual practices. [For example,] a number of the groups were abstinent.
“What I love about these groups and what I wanted to show through the Museum of Sex is that many of these communities — which we are taught through corporate media largely to believe are these decadent devils — if you study them deeply enough, if you study the scholars who have spent decades understanding these groups, you see that many had a very sacred view of sexuality and they incorporated sexuality into their belief system, their world view, and their daily and weekly practices in a way that was spiritually centered.”
Not a New Phenomenon
One of the oldest groups explored in the exhibit is the Society of Universal Friends, a Quaker community dating back to the late 1700s. Their leader, The Public Universal Friend, was a nonbinary preacher who encouraged female members of the group to practice abstinence as a means to subvert patriarchal control.
“The Public Universal Friend was born Jemima Wilkinson and had a near-death experience when they were around 24 years old. They came back from that experience saying that they had been reborn as a divine messenger, a genderless servant of God, at a time when women were not respected and had very little freedom. They would boldly ride their horse across the eastern seaboard, upstate New York, western New York, and other states, wearing a man’s cap, a cleric’s robe, and a woman’s petticoat,” says Wille.
The Source Family is another well-documented subculture within the exhibit. The subject of Wille’s first documentary, the group rose to prominence in 1970s California and was led by Father Yod, a charismatic man who had 14 wives and preached the virtues of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
“Jim Baker, AKA Father Yod, the leader of the Source Family, was very intentionally conveying to the members that he was interested in taking these very powerful energies of the time — sex, drugs, music — and sanctifying them, showing the sacredness within those practices and art forms,” says Wille.
Welcome Space Brothers
Wille’s newest documentary, Welcome Space Brothers, chronicles the Unarius Academy of Science — an extraterrestrial-channeling spiritual community founded in 1970 that is still active today — whose work is also on display at Utopia. If the previous sentence made your brain hurt, you aren’t alone. As a review from Film Threat put it, “If I didn’t know Jodi Wille’s film was a documentary, I’d swear it was a WTF, insane, sci-fi tale of weirdness.”
Under the tutelage of its outlandish (now-deceased) leader, Ruth E. Norman, also known as Archangel Uriel, the Unarians became a commune focused on the “interdimensional understanding of energy — the joining of science and spirit” and are publicly known for donning otherworldly costumes in numerous self-produced films and music videos.
Wille speaks with reverence and more than a tinge of admiration when describing the group, telling New Times, “Of all the deeply wild groups and communities I’ve explored over the last 25 years, I think Unarius is potentially the wildest with the largest creative output.”
“I just love the Unarians because they’re such sweet people. I’ve gotten to know them over a period of over 10 years, [since] I’ve been documenting them. I’ve been putting their works in museums and galleries across the country and in the U.K., and it’s really nice to work with a group that, over time, has been misunderstood as either kooks or even as a potentially dangerous group, in the wake of Heaven’s Gate. And to be able to tell their story and show these people as human beings, and also show the love. I was so surprised by just how much love there was in that group, and you can see it in the film and hopefully feel it in the work.”
Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes. On view Thursday, May 7, through November 2026, at the Museum of Sex, 2200 NW 24th Ave., Miami; 786-206-9210; museumofsex.com. Admission costs $24 to $36.
Welcome Space Brothers. 5:30 p.m. Friday, May 8, at Coral Gables Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $14.75.
