Yes, his later writing made me uncomfortable.
It's possible he was truly twisted, but as one who read and enjoyed much of his work over the years, I would at least suggest an alternative: perhaps he simply got swept up in the new-age hype of the late '60s and early '70s. I certainly did, although in 1973 (the year Time Enough For Love was published) I was 18 and RAH was 67, so he didn't have the excuse of naivete.
Remembering back to that time, though, it's hard for me not to give him a pass.
1973 could be said to be one of the peak years of the sexual revolution; cynicism had not begun to intrude very much, and the thrill of the new had not really worn off. It was, for instance still a year or two before the first stories of herpes and other STDs began to show up in the national MSM, and the first hings of AIDS was still six or seven years away (although it was initially called GRID).
In the Western World, at that time, we were bombarded by such a pervasive cacophony of messages about how war and strife could be done away with if only we would stop being so sexually hung-up. Young people fell for the hype of course, but many older people did too; the echo-chamber effect was almost impossible to resist.
Perhaps RAH did too. Or, alternatively, perhaps he felt he had to incorporate such themes into his work in order to "stay relevant" (as we used to say) and continue to sell books to his youthful audience.
Recall the "Interlude" sections of TEFL, in which Lazarus Long expresses numerous homespun observations, most of which contain age-old wisdom that has is (if anything) somewhat cynical about the sexual revolution. It's like he was saying "OK, maybe society is actually changing, but certain realities won't change, and you young'uns would be well advised to take heed."
But also, you may be right. RAH was at least in the orbit of that off-the-wall group of weirdos at Cal Tech, that included L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons. I don't think he stayed involved with them very long, so he might not have been present when the whole thing turned into a sordid mess of infidelity, incest, drugs, and — eventually — horrible death.
Parts of that mileau were alluded to in one of his books, in which a character based on Parsons is shunned by his favorite professor, who is called "Zwicky," based on an actual person (Fritz Zwicky of Cal Tech, the groundbreaking astronomer who suggested that galaxies could function as gravitational lenses, and who first proposed the existence of "dark matter").
That said, I still enjoy his works by and large. Somewhere around here I have a copy of his very first novel, which was not published until after his passing. I think this is mainly because it really wasn't very good at all- which is hardly surprising given how young and inexperienced he was when it wrote it. I can't recall the name right now unfortunately.The interesting thing about it though, is that it had a lot of the elements that he incorporated into and expanded upon in his later works, such as the rolling roads and all that stuff. It was cool seeing these ideas in their infancy.