How An Alien Sex Cult Swallowed The World’s First Male Supermodel
Hoyt Richards had the kind of face that built fashion houses. Tall, blond and Princeton-educated, he became the first male supermodel of the 1980s. He fronted campaigns for Versace, Valentino and Ralph Lauren, and posed beside Cindy Crawford and Fabio.
Almost every dollar he earned went to a doomsday cult that believed its leader was an alien from the star Arcturus. Bring Me the Beauties, a three-part HBO docuseries from Chris Smith, lays out exactly how that happened.
“Only invite the beauties”
It started on a Nantucket beach in 1978. Richards, then 16, was approached by Frederick von Mierers, a tanned New York socialite with sculpted cheekbones and a bottomless supply of pink Brooks Brothers shirts.
Von Mierers swept beautiful young men off to Studio 54 and back to his apartment, where they slept on futons, lived on fruit and vegetables, and were ordered to give up sex and romantic love completely. “Only invite the beauties,” he liked to say.
An alien from Arcturus
Von Mierers told followers he was a “walk-in,” an extraterrestrial soul sent from Arcturus to recruit New Age leaders before a 1999 apocalypse. UFOs would rescue the chosen few.
He sold healing gemstones and astrology readings and built the operation into a company incorporated, fittingly, as UFO, Ultimate Fitness Opportunities.
Richards bought all of it. “I was becoming a more evolved, better me,” he says in the doc. By his own estimate, his contributions ran into the millions.
“Your angel came down with wings; mine came down in a spaceship.” – Hoyt Richards
The guru who said he was asexual
Von Mierers was gay but insisted he was asexual and above such things, while allegedly having members pay gigolos to service him several times a week. One assistant recalls being sent to Times Square to find “the biggest dicks in the universe.”
Von Mierers died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990, five days before a damning Vanity Fair exposé reached newsstands.
Richards finally walked away in 1999, after falling in love and reconnecting with his family. Smith spent five years getting former members to talk, and the payoff is one of the strangest cult stories you’ll watch this year.
New chapters land on HBO on 8 and 15 June. As Richards would put it: “Your angel came down with wings; mine came down in a spaceship.”
