“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass

“It’s Not
About the Sex” My Ass

By Joanne Hanks

as told to Steve Cuno

© 2012 Joanne Hanks and Steve Cuno. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108
of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission
of the authors.

While the authors have used their best efforts in preparing this
book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy
of completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim and
implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

ISBN: 978-1-105-99939-0

Dedication

To my best friends, my daughters, who have been in the front car of
this roller-coaster ride with me, hands raised high and laughing through the
screams.

Author’s Note 1: I Didn’t Make This Stuff Up

Author’s Note 2: Quick Primer on the Book of Mormon and Other Mormon
Scriptures

Chapter 1: Trouble from Below

Chapter 2: Coveting Fanny

Chapter 3: The Self-Elected Elect

The righteous Mormon woman persona

I, doormat

Swept off my feet

Welcome to the end of the world

Behold the Handmaid of the Lord

Chapter 4: Into the Protective Bubble

Jim Harmston, Prophet of God

Harmston starts the TLC, God OKs polygamy

Chapter 5: Judith Makes Two

Wife-hunting as a couple

Judith, her boobs, and her other sisters, too

Throwing a wedding bash for my husband

Chapter 6: And Ginger Makes Three

Booted by the Mormons

Life with Judith

Wife Number Three catalyzes a revelation

Chapter 7: And Catherine Makes Almost Four

Chapter 8: Threesomes and Other Penetrating Matters

The Revelation on Threesomes

Sexual predators

Racism

Well, well, well, if it isn’t welfare

Séances

Re-Probates

The men mark our territory

Cursing Bill Clinton

Chapter 9: I Doubt It

My husband went to the Garden of Eden and all I got was this lousy apron

A not terribly secret ceremony

Chapter 10: Celestial Stud Service

Diminishing importance

A step-by-step guide to the Second Coming

Cookies for Jesus

Sewing for Jesus

Chapter 11: Jesus Returns and Destroys the World (And How You Managed to
Sleep Through It)

No sense in letting all that food go to waste

No bath water, no baby

“All of these people are loony”

Chapter 12: Afterlife

Frumpy in Park City

A farewell to magic underwear

My savior, George Carlin

My parents deserve a medal

Full circle

Fifteen minutes of infamy

Divorce

Learning to be me

Appendix A: The Cult Demarcation Problem

The demarcation problem

Human nature

Appendix B: The Mormon Revelation on Polygamy Doctrine and Covenants of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Section 132

Acknowledgments

The Authors

This is how it happened, to the best of my knowledge and
memory. Some of the people who show up in these pages may see things
differently. Fine. Let them write their own book.

Everyone you’ll read about is real, though I have changed
all names with the following exceptions: my ex-husband, Jeff; James Dee
Harmston, leader of the polygamist cult in Manti, Utah, known as The True and
Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, or TLC for short;
Harmston’s “First Wife,” Elaine Harmston; and Arvin Shreeve and Laura Brokaw,
whose convictions are a matter of public record.

Late-night comedian and talk show host Johnny Carson once
defined comedy as “pain plus time.” In that spirit, I chose to write about my experience
with humor and satire. Above all, I didn’t want to whine like a piteous,
helpless victim. Though surely I was to an extent, at some point everyone must
take personal responsibility for the decisions he or she makes.

In particular I want to make it clear that I in no way wish
to vilify my ex-husband. He didn’t drag me into polygamy. I walked into it with
him of my own free will.

Mormons and Mormon-related splinter groups place these books
on a par with the
Bible
(which they
accept as “the word of God as far as it is translated correctly”):

Book of Mormon
—A
Bible-like account of the descendants of a group of Israelites led by God from
Jerusalem to the Americas around 600 BCE. Mormon founder and prophet Joseph
Smith Jr. said that an angel led him to the hiding place of the sacred history,
which was inscribed on gold-like plates, and that he translated it “by the gift
and power of God.”

Doctrine and
Covenants
—A compilation of revelations from God to Joseph Smith Jr.,
with a few additions by his successors.

Pearl of Great Price
—Contains
an autobiographical sketch by Joseph Smith Jr. and writings of Moses and
Abraham, as revealed to Smith.

In addition, Mormons give near-scripture status to the
teachings of Joseph Smith
, whom they
revere as a prophet.
Statements by his
prophet-successors
“when moved upon by the Holy Ghost” also carry weight.

And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if
any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her
consent … then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given
unto him … And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot
commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore
is he justified.

—Doctrine and Covenants 132:61-62

Unbuttoning my blouse, I stepped into the bedroom. I heard
him moan with anticipation.

I dropped my blouse to the floor. Then my bra. He moaned
again, louder this time.

I slipped under the covers.

The sound of the bedsprings was a rhythmic song of passion,
building to a crescendo as if to shake the plaster from the walls. Harder,
stronger, louder, with each thrust of his massive frame, he gasped and moaned
with unrestrained pleasure. Then, no longer able to contain himself, he let out
a scream of ecstasy and relief. It exploded against the thinly insulated
bedroom ceiling. Right below where I had crawled into my bed.

It was a passionate scene, but I wasn’t in it, you see. I
was alone in my bedroom. The sounds I heard were coming from the bedroom below,
where my husband was having sex with Judith, my “sister-wife.”

It was one thing for him to have sex with another wife in my
house. After all, he had my permission. But did he have to do it there, right
under the room where I was trying to sleep, where I was trying to ignore the
whole thing, where I was trying to pretend that it didn’t shred my heart anew
each time, where I was trying to pretend that I believed it was God’s will,
where I was trying to pretend that it didn’t bug me that at just 17 my
sister-wife was a full 16 years younger with way bigger boobs, and did he have
to scream loud enough for God, angels, all the neighbors, any spacecraft that
might be passing by the planet—and me—to hear it whether or not we
wanted to?

I had to do something. Something mature. Something befitting
the righteous, meek, and humble Handmaid of the Lord that I strived to be.
Something dignified, that wouldn’t cause the Holy Ghost to flee our home. After
all, I sure as hell didn’t want to be burned at the coming of Jesus. It was bad
enough feeling burned at the cumming of my husband.

I desperately sought inspiration for the right way to handle
this delicate situation.

Inspiration struck. I marched to the center of the room and
stomped on the floor.

From—if you’ll pardon the expression—the
mounting crescendo in the room beneath my feet, I could tell that my one meager
stomp had had no effect. In a moment like this, I would need to call upon all
that I had learned throughout my life and my marriage about effective
interpersonal communication with my spouse. In other words, I was going to have
to stomp lots of times and lots louder. STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP, went my
foot. It ached for weeks.

The subtlety of my approach paid off, as evidenced by the
fact that now all I heard was crickets.

A moment later there was another sound. It came from the
stairs. I counted seven clomps. There were 14 steps, which meant he was taking
them two at a time. A moment after that he appeared red-faced in my bedroom
doorway, his long-armed, long-legged magic underwear with the special marks
twisted hurriedly on.

He apologized. They hadn’t meant to distress me.

I am an artist. I paint murals and landscapes. People admire
how my mind conjures up pictures and directs my hands to reproduce them on
canvas. It’s a skill I’m lucky to have. The problem is, the vivid movie screen
inside my head has no OFF switch. When my mind cooks up a picture I’d rather
not see, I am powerless to remove it or even look away. So with every moan, bed
creak, and shake of the wall, my mind added brushstrokes in vivid detail to a
non-erasable mental picture of the four of them—my husband, my
sister-wife, and her enormous boobs—going at it. I might as well have
been right there watching.

I felt rage, but also guilt. Like I was some sort of voyeur.

I knew the score when I agreed to polygamy. We repeatedly
told ourselves and emphatically preached to all who would listen that polygamy
was a commandment from God.

“It’s not about the sex,” we constantly lectured the
morbidly curious. It was about building God’s kingdom on earth. It was about
saving desperate single women from unworthy men who could give them no kingdom
in the hereafter. We were fulfilling a higher calling.

I felt bad. I knew that I should have kept quiet and not
disturbed their privacy.

But what about
my
privacy?

The New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage, as we in The
True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days called
it—as did the mainstream Mormon Church—was God’s higher law. If you
wanted to go to heaven, you had to be a polygamist. Yet all the same, there
were times when the higher law struck me as a bit kinky.

During moments of doubt, I knew I was blowing it in the
worthy handmaid department. In the Old Testament, Jacob’s wives never showed
jealousy toward one another. Oh wait, yes they did. But in the early days of
the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith’s and Brigham Young’s wives didn’t get jealous.
Oh wait, yes they did.

No matter. We were The Elect. I could do better. I
would
do better.

If you sense in me a house divided, you are not wrong. I
gloried in an inner conviction that we were following God’s true plan. But
inside I ached, because what God demanded of me was awful and it cut deep. How
I thought a worthy handmaid
should feel
and
how I
really felt
were constantly
fighting it out within. More often the first, but sometimes the second,
prevailed.

I tried to draw strength from my husband’s certainty. He
knew—
knew
—that we were on
the Lord’s path. He told me that the Spirit manifested to him the rightness of
our course by lifting his heart. And, I surmised but didn’t say, from time to
time by lifting his other part.

He returned to my sister-wife’s room—it was still her
night with him—and I spent another sleepless night on my own. Using my
fist to pound a spot for my head into my pillow, I muttered to no one in
particular, “It’s not about the sex, my ass.”

The next day, the three of us wordlessly relocated my
sister-wife to a bedroom at the other end of the house.

And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those
that have been given unto my servant Joseph … if she will not abide this
commandment she shall be destroyed saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God,
and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.

—Doctrine and Covenants 132:52, 54

“The revelation says I must submit or be destroyed.
Well, I guess I’ll have to submit.”

—Emma Hale Smith, wife of Mormon prophet and founder
Joseph Smith

I might not have a story to tell if, back in 1831, a
26-year-old man had managed to keep his hands off of his wife’s attractive
15-year-old housekeeper. But manage he did not, and his wife found out.

Even in those days, a philandering husband was nothing new,
but the excuse he foisted on his increasingly furious wife could have won him a
prize for originality. As he kept having trysts and his wife kept finding out,
he assured her that he in no way desired to have sex with other women. Surely
his wife did not believe that he derived the least pleasure from it. On the
contrary, he had only risen to the occasion—against his will, mind
you—under strict command from God.

In fact, under
threat
from God. You see, the man had valiantly told God no. Honest he did.
But—ask Jonah—telling God no rarely goes well. On at least three
separate occasions when our reluctant hero attempted to resist orders to bed
yet another woman, God responded by dispatching an armed-to-the-teeth angel to
make him comply. Whipping out a sword, the angel commanded the poor fellow to
whip out his own sword and put it to immediate use or be chopped to bits then
and there.

The man was Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon
Church—properly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons
revere Smith as a prophet, as in someone whose job was to talk with God and
then tell everyone else what God said. Not just any prophet, Smith was the
Prophet of the Restoration, called to reestablish the church as Jesus had set
it up some 18 centuries earlier. You know, before people got involved and
mucked the whole thing up.