apocalypse thou
Or, the nonbinary cult-adjacent adventures of the Public Universal Friend.
Hi friends!
Happy New Year, and welcome to the first regularly scheduled Dirtbags Through the Ages post in a longer-than-ideal span of time! The world is what it is, but I’m here to tell you weird stories from history for as long as you all are out there wanting to hear them.
Without further ado (I’ve already given you three months of ado), let’s dive into today’s story, which has been a long time coming:
The Public Universal Friend, the Nonbinary Ex-Quaker Doomsday Cult Leader Whose Story I Was Never Taught In School Despite Learning the American Revolution Twice, Thus Illustrating the Failure of the US Education System
The Public Universal Friend was born in 1752 as Jemima Wilkinson (she/her), to a Quaker family in Rhode Island. Usually I wouldn’t intentionally deadname a historical dirtbag, but due to the extremely awesome logistics of this story I’m making an exception, and you’ll see why.
Jemima’s mother died when Jemima was about 13, in the process of giving birth to her twelfth child. There are some sentences that make me want to lie down and take a deep breath and two Tylenol upon writing them, and this is one such sentence. Whether to cope with her mother’s death or for general vibes-based reasons, Jemima was a regular attendant at the local Quaker meeting-house for a while and could quote long passages of Quaker text from memory.
Shake ‘n’ Quake, Baby
Everything changed in 1776, when Jemima very publicly refused to return to Quaker worship. Instead, she joined up with the New Light Baptists, a group that really sounds like they would run a megachurch on the side of the interstate near my parents’ house. I’ll never know, because I spent about three minutes reading up on the Great Awakening in the 1770s before immediately realizing it doesn’t interest me and closing the tab.1
Point being, Jemima found a shiny new church that preached personal enlightenment and offered better snacks at youth group (or the 1776 equivalent), and she walked away from Quakerism. The Quakers were not chill about this—to my surprise, given my apparently incorrect associations with the Quakers as being generally chill Montessori-type people—and publicly disowned her in front of the meeting-house. Unfortunately, the New Light Baptists were also a bit of a wash for Jemima, which found her 24 years old, doubly church-less, and on the outs with most of Rhode Island.
Oh yeah, and the American Revolution was actively happening. So all told, not her best year.
But wait! It gets worse!
Actual Archangel Shia le PUF
I don’t care if you think this is funny. It made me laugh and that’s what counts.
In October 1776, Jemima becomes deathly ill with what we assume is typhus, although given the state of 18th-century medicine you could sub in any disease it sounds like Beth March from Little Women could have and it’s just as plausible. She was so ill that the entire neighborhood was sitting at her bedside on a death watch for multiple days.
And then! The artist formerly known as Jemima Wilkinson sat up from their bed, locked eyes with Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, and said “Jemima is dead. I’m an angel named the Public Universal Friend, and Judgment Day is coming.”
I’ve been obsessed with this since the minute I heard it. All coming-out conversations should happen this way. So should all gender reveals, for that matter. Are you having a boy or a girl? Surprise, bitch, it’s a secret third thing: a genderless messenger of the Lord speaking through the vessel of your dead daughter.
Whether this was a true religious experience or simply the most metal hard-launch of new pronouns in history, the Friend never looked back. They forbade anyone from referring to them as Jemima or using she/her pronouns, either yelling at them or ostentatiously feigning deafness whenever anybody slipped up.
In fact, the Public Universal Friend discouraged people from using any pronouns at all, steering their followers toward “The Friend” or simply “P.U.F.” I’m using they/them for legibility, but I concede that a “PUF/PUFs” button in the hypothetical Dirtbags Through the Ages merch store would fly off the shelves.
Aside: the Friend also navigated the challenge of extremely gendered 18th-century clothing by dressing almost exclusively in flowing black robes, which I love because it’s also my preferred gender expression.
Putting the “End Times” in “Public Universal Friend-Times”
Throughout the late 1770s and 1780s, the Public Universal Friend packed their bags with billowy robes and apocalyptic fervor and began traveling up and down New England as an itinerant preacher. PUF brought five of their siblings with them, all of whom had by now been disowned by the Quakers for having illegitimate children or participating in the American Revolution or believing an archangel was piloting their sibling’s corpse.
Important side note: the Rhode Island Quakers publicly disowned the Public Universal Friend a SECOND TIME, this time under the new name, which I find oddly trans-positive.
The Friend wasn’t really preaching anything too unusual for the time, is the funny part about all of this. Maybe I’d have a better sense of the general environment if I’d forced myself to finish reading that article about the Great Awakening I mentioned 10 paragraphs ago, but I am who I am, so we’re all going to have to get by with the context available.
Basically, from what I can glean, the Friend’s main points were these:
First of all, I am a genderless angel sent by the Lord, so write that down.
Judgment Day is scheduled for April 1780 (subsequently revised to “the Book of Revelations will begin its slow rollout in April 1780, starting on that one day it was really cloudy, thou remember’st that one”).
Thou must repent.
The absolute best way for thee to repent would be to join my religious community of Universal Friends and travel with me to repeat Points 1 through 3.
Also free thy slaves, thou dumb bitch, I’ve met God and He really hates slavery.
As far as doomsday cults go, this is a pretty benign doomsday cult! But to be honest, most of the huge crowds showing up to hear the Friend preach weren’t really interested in Points 2 through 5. They—honestly, like me—heard Point 1 and were like “Wait. Pause. Hmm?” The Public Universal Friend was pretty soon a Public Universal Celebrity, with fascinated write-ups in all the local papers wherever they went.
Historically Very Universal Friends
The attention PUF received was less belief in their religious message and more positive-to-neutral interest in their gender presentation, which I bring up mostly as an opportunity to point out that Colonial-era Rhode Islanders were more progressive than JK Rowling. But there were some people who freaked out that a traveling apocalyptic preacher and their groupies were taking over the town commons doing their best re-enactment of that one movie where Robert Pattinson is a preacher and screams “DELUSIONS!” in an accent I haven’t stopped thinking about for the past five years.
In one notable example, the Friend and their followers were chased out of Philadelphia by an angry mob carrying bats. It’s sort of comforting to know that 250 years later, Philly has stayed exactly the same.
At about the same time as the bat-wielding Philly mob, the Friend met up with a couple named Sarah and Abraham Richards. The Richardses were very unhappily married, but that’s OK, because Abraham died in 1786 under mysterious circumstances on a visit to the Friend, and immediately afterward Sarah got the same haircut as the Friend, started dressing like the Friend, started imitating the Friend’s overall mannerisms, and changed her name to “Sarah Friend.” History tells me there was nothing intimate between these two, because apparently History thinks it’s totally normal to kill your friend’s husband so she can take your last name, travel around the country with you, and gradually merge your lives together like a Quaker-inspired amoeba.
Oops! All Cults
Now, if your reaction through all of this has been “Man, Allison, that really sounds a lot like a cult,” boy are you going to love what happens next. Because in 1790, the Friend packs up their followers and moves to upstate New York, where they have established their very own town exclusively for members of the Society of Universal Friends. Cult compound?? Very much so, I would say.
The town was called The Gore, because The Public Universal Friend was not about to name something without a Definite Article in front of it. And it went better than I would have expected for about a decade, until something to do with property taxes made it untenable for the Friend to maintain any longer. So they moved a little upriver to Cult Compound Number 2, which the Friend called “Jerusalem.”
If you want to discourage the neighbors from thinking you’re forming a cult, might I suggest that you refrain from setting up your own town and naming it Jerusalem? The Venn diagram between US religious cults and “this town in the woods is now named Jerusalem and I will live in the largest house on a hill in the very center of it and deliver my sermons from the veranda” isn’t EXACTLY a circle, but the overlap portion is very large.
Anyway, the neighbors didn’t love this, and nearby townspeople repeatedly tried to arrest the Friend for blasphemy and other cult-related crimes. Once, the women of Jerusalem—presumably led by Historically Very Good Friend-of-a-Friend Sarah Friend—barricaded the door and stripped the angry mob naked until they ran away.
I do feel like if I saw an angry mob head off to town looking like this:
and returning two hours later like this:
I would probably be like “You know what, let those weirdos live their lives.”
The Public Universal Friend continued preaching and cult-leading for another 20 years or so, though their health was in continual decline. They died (a second time?) in July 1819 and were buried in the basement of their cult house for a few weeks before being dug up and buried somewhere else in an unmarked grave. The Society of Universal Friends lasted another decade or two, but without the incredibly charismatic cult-leader-slash-embodied-archangel, the Society’s messaging just wasn’t as good, and it dwindled out by the 1860s.
Fun fact: There’s a new book coming out about the Public Universal Friend in a couple weeks! I haven’t read it yet, so this is an uninformed endorsement, but it looks great and I will report back on any new PUF facts I learn as I read.
OK friends, that’s all for now! Thanks as always for your patience, your enthusiasm, and your willingness to follow me down a rabbit hole into early-United-States nonbinary cult life. Until next time, be well, and if you can think of a reason for me not to legally change my name to Public Universal Dirtbag please let me know quickly because that paperwork is calling,
-Allison
Note for new readers: we refer to this as the “Prussia Approach.”
There seemed to be many side churches and cults created by religious dissension in the 18th and 19th centuries, like what the Friend did, but the only real survivors from this era now are the Mormons.
I love starting my day with a laugh - thank you!