“Science fiction is full of bizarre sexuality with no limits at all,” says the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley. “The issue is not admitting that science fiction fandom has a pedophile problem. The issue is that science fiction fandom denies that pedophilia IS a problem.”
May 7, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Moira Greyland, daughter of famed science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley, has recently published her memoirs recounting the horrific sexual abuse she and her two brothers suffered at the hands of her lesbian mother and homosexual father, Walter Breen, a famous numismatist in his own right. Greyland’s book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, has spent weeks on Amazon’s bestseller lists for Kindle and was recently published as a physical book by Castalia House.
In the following interview with LifeSite, Greyland explains the mentality and worldview that animated her parents and that led so many science fiction fans to ignore and even to accept Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen’s homosexualist and pedophilic ideologies. Greyland also provides a context for understanding the sexual deviancy that permeates Zimmer Bradley’s works, particularly her bestselling “Mists of Avalon.”
LifeSite: Your account of life in the madhouse that was your home is truly horrific and simultaneously very credible. Both of your parents were homosexual activists who sexually and physically abused you for years, and your father in particular sexually abused a large number of boys outside of the family. Your home was a moral and physical chaos, a place that was unhinged and seemingly without boundaries, and this was witnessed by many people. How did these two individuals, so famous and highly regarded in their respective fields of work (science fiction authorship and numismatics), and so very public in their interactions with others, get away with such atrocities for so long, and what does that say about the moral state of sci-fi fandom, and the city of Berkeley, where you grew up?
Moira Greyland: There are two reasons my mother and father got away with what they did for so long. Fame and money, with the first being more important.
Fame confers a glamour on its owner. Fame makes it seem as though the one possessing it understands something which mere mortals cannot, and so imitating the famous person will surely lead to success and happiness.
My mother’s fame came from her ability to write, and to express ideas which appealed to a large number of people. Her descriptions of edgy, perverted sexuality appealed to those eager to throw off the rigid moral structure and narrow ideas about sexuality which prevailed in her day.
The fact that these moral structures were protective of both men and women was trampled and tossed aside in pursuit of new internal permissions to do literally anything with anyone. The fact that the consequences of these new internal permissions was disaster for generations of men, women and children who must now live with broken homes, all that was ignored.
In all the counterculture groups, whether the Society for Creative Anachronism or science fiction fandom, the group becomes a stand-in for one’s own family. Fandom is full of the disaffected, the misfits, people from broken homes, even people who were rejected by their own families for one reason or another. The new surrogate family is every bit as broken as the original family, but its value is greatly exaggerated to the people who need it, because it provides not only a common frame of reference but common interests, and a sense of belonging and understanding which they might never have experienced before.
And there you have the true poison pill of science fiction fandom and the sexual revolution: my father viewed himself as a revolutionary and a visionary. He did not see himself as a pedophile. He saw himself as gay. Moreover, since he regarded every man as being “naturally gay” he was doing a great thing, in his own imagination. The real-life failure of his sexual ideas was a source of anger and frustration to him. We simply did not live up to his expectations with all our tiresome crying and protests. My father was perpetually annoyed that the boy prostitutes he saw wanted money, food and presents, instead of “desiring” him, as he thought they should.
I could imagine him screaming at me and his other targets “Hurry up and get enlightened and quit crying right this minute!!!”
Rocking the boat represents the end of the new, idealized surrogate family. The price for standing up for a child is being ostracized by one’s entire family. For someone in a surrogate family, losing the new family is unthinkable. Social death hurt too much the first time for anyone to want to risk it a second time.
So were the Berkeley fannish people morally nebulous? Yes. They took social and moral cues from the writers they admired, and science fiction is full of bizarre sexuality with no limits at all. There was a sense that sexual morality was something left behind with their square, unsympathetic original families. Since sexual morality was so widely questioned, it was easier to assume that the famous people had figured it all out and do the same stupid things they did.
And the blind lead the blind. Sexual morality is questioned, loyalty to the new group is total, and the price is too high, but it does not feel as high as social annihilation. The sexual predators took reckless advantage of the need for belonging exhibited by the followers.
By an absolute fluke, I ended up on the outside. I did not care if my famous mother approved of me or not. Over time, it became more and more obvious that the price of remaining in my family was to overlook conduct which would cause absolute destruction of another human being. When the person being destroyed was me, I figured I could cope. But when the person being destroyed was a child, I didn’t think I had the right to make him cope.
And I was furious at what I was being asked to overlook! How could the adults in my family encourage a woman to leave her son with my father for a week, and make sure she did not ask me, the only person in the whole family who would have told her to keep her son away from my father?
By reporting my father to the police, I broke the central rule of the community by visibly siding with the authorities against sexual license which included exploitation of a little boy. I fell on my sword and lost all my people. And it hurt, like nothing had ever hurt before. But there were gifts in the agony. I lost horrible people, not decent people, and I decisively took a moral stand that let me know I was not one of them. I would not be bought, I would not be silenced, and if it upset a million apple carts to get that little boy out of danger, it was worth it. After losing horrible people, I found decent people. People who would never have dreamed of making the sort of moral compromises my mother made every day.
For the best possible picture of the moral atmosphere of Berkeley, look to the situation in my family when my father is trying to “adopt” Barry, his twelve year old sexual partner. My mother is completely aware of what my father has been doing, and suggests that once Barry is adopted that he be a son instead of a sexual partner.
Can you imagine being in a house where the mother takes for granted the fact that her husband is sleeping with several little boys, and she is so unconcerned about it that she simply suggests the sexual relationship between her husband and a child end once he is adopted?
The fact that my father had no interest in complying with her wishes was beside the point.
How many women would tolerate a child being sodomized under her roof?
LifeSite: The homosexual movement has a long history of association with organizations and groups that are sympathetic to pedophilia or promote it outright. Your father was a homosexual activist and an open advocate of pedophilia. For decades the “North American Man-Boy Love Association” (NAMBLA) marched in homosexual “pride” marches, and major homosexual organizations, like the International Gay and Lesbian Association, used to have NAMBLA as a member. Do you see the embrace of pedophilia as a natural outgrowth of the homosexual movement?
Moira Greyland: In my father’s book, Greek Love (J.Z. Eglinton, 1962), he explored at length the fact that pedophilic and pederastic relationships are the historical norm, and peer-to-peer gay relationships are a modern phenomenon. Where I completely deny my father’s contention that pederastic relationships do anything positive for young men, I do believe that nearly all gay men were initiated in this fashion as boys by older men.
Attempts to sanitize these “initiations” of younger boys by older men are ongoing, including in the recent movie “Call Me By Your Name” which Hollywood gushed over, despite its appalling content.
Since the reality of gay culture depends on these initiations, there are only two choices: keep the reality of the genesis of a gay identity secret, or yank it out of the closet and risk the outrage and hatred of the general public.
Here is the trouble: screaming “homophobia” at anything which has a problem with homosexual conduct will only go so far. As soon as our children are endangered, and their seduction praised, the torches and pitchforks rightfully come out.
After all, this is the Big Secret, and the truth behind a gay identity. Father-son porn is the number one topic of all gay pornography. Why is this the actual reality? In male nature, there is the need to pursue, to vanquish, to conquer. This is much easier with a young, vulnerable, hairless and helpless male. They can be manipulated into adoring an older male, putting up with darned near ANYTHING for his love and approval (read: fathering) and they submit. Always in male homosexual relationships, there is the top and the bottom, the giver and the receiver, and these roles are predicated on age and the ability to project masculine dominance.
This is the conclusion I reached, not only from knowing far too many young boys seduced by my father, but also reading the words of former gay men like Joseph Sciambra and Robert Oscar Lopez.
Male homosexuals know, and count on the fact that a young man who does not have a present, protective father in his life will be much easier to seduce than either a masculine boy who obviously has a strong father, or an older man who might well beat or kill them for a sexual overture. They seek out boys who are unsure or effeminate, precisely because of those qualities.
How can they persuade those they persuade? Boys tend to be perpetually sexually frustrated, and know that vanishingly few girls will go along with their advances at that age. Predatory male homosexuals take advantage of this knowledge, and offer porn and intoxicants to lower the inhibitions of their target. Once the sexual assault has taken place, even involuntary arousal on the part of the male victim is used as “proof” that the boy is actually gay.
This attitude assumes that being gay is a physical, inevitable reality which other gay men can “see.” But the truth is that the first sexual experience will usually create an indelible impression, a longstanding change to a male fantasy life, deliberately imposed. These raped and molested boys are not “gay,” they have been forcibly imprinted with a sexual act meant to permanently alter their fantasy life.
Claiming the involuntary arousal suffered by the boy “proves” they are gay is like claiming that bleeding as the result of a stab wound proves the victim wanted to be stabbed.
In any case, the raped boy is destroyed three times. Once by the betrayal of the sexual assault, even if they end up going along with it, once by the permanent alteration to their fantasy life, and once by the forced imposition of a “gay” identity which is made to seem inevitable and indelible.
Without pederastic relationships, there would be no adult gay men. But as it is the Big Secret, don’t expect any admissions about this. When Milo joked about his own initiation at thirteen, he was demolished in the press. Shortly thereafter, he admitted on video that he actually had been raped, and it actually was a horrible experience.
It is no joke. When I see a man who identifies as homosexual acting out in a flamboyant way, I see the thirteen year old boys in my house screaming with rage: “I meant to do that! You did not hurt me, I am no victim, and you will not own me, you BASTARD!”
LifeSite: Many science fiction and fantasy authors have treated pedophilia, incest, and homosexuality with a creepy sort of sympathy. For example, Robert Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love,” has a protagonist who has sexual relations with his adopted daughter, clones himself as two women and “marries” them (as well as two men), and finally travels back in time where he has sexual relations with his own mother. The book was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards and Heinlein was called the “dean of science fiction writers,” and his followers have created a “Robert Heinlein award” for science fiction writing.
My question is this: as one who grew up in this world and was so terribly victimized by such attitudes, why do you believe sci-fi and fantasy writers and their fans have such a thirst for this kind of material? What is the connection between these genres of literature and these pathological tendencies?
Moira Greyland: People wanted to have promiscuous sex and the books gave them a map. The authors writing about the promiscuous sex were hailed as Great Thinkers, and it was assumed that if the people in the books were happy and promiscuous, then it would work out that way in real life.
Throwing off sexual morality meant more sex, more often, with no way for women to refuse without being labeled “prudish.” It meant an end to the sexual dominance of the biggest and the strongest, and meant any ugly jerk could get laid if he had drugs and a good line.
Sexual morality is questioned, and all the rules are thrown out. Suddenly, instead of having one husband and one wife, people are having all kinds of sex with all kinds of people, and a lot of people like it. Some are too drug-addled, drunk or stupid to think through the implications, and others have weak personalities and go along with anything their husband or wife demands provided they can stay married.
But here is the trouble. Since the new social circle operates on a new rulebook, whether it is the Stranger in a Strange Land rulebook or the Darkover rulebook, it is no longer acceptable to do things the old way. In practice, the wife who has a broken heart because her husband is carrying on with five women, or five small boys, had better keep her mouth shut or risk losing him.
Since the books delegitimize jealousy and fidelity, troubles in the relationship which normally result from adultery must be blamed on something else. Now instead of it being normal to hate the other woman, the wife is in the atrocious position of having to blame her own jealousy and possessiveness for her agony. She can no longer blame her husband for his conduct, and must instead blame herself.
Naturally, in practice, this is a recipe for disaster. The result is divorce, abortions, broken homes, single parenthood, and always the blame was misplaced. Adultery does not work. Promiscuity does not work. Polyamory does not work. But if you are in a social circle where they are normalized, you have to swallow the poison pill or lose your social group.
Even in the weirdest social circle, there will be a few good couples who love each other and who just can’t get into the poly stuff no matter how fashionable it might be. One might even think that those people have a moral compass or a backbone, and they are probably the couple that heads on over to church while the rest of their circle are sleeping off the debauchery. Are they aware that their morality has saved their marriage and their family? Maybe. But you can be sure they do not trumpet their differences. And years after the dust settles, it will be those couples who say “I always felt funny about the weird sex in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books.”
And it will be those couples who have stayed together.
LifeSite: According to your account, your home was a place of pagan rituals and your parents apparently considered themselves to be pagans, at least in the 1970s. How did pagan beliefs and practices contribute to your parents’ worldview?
Moira Greyland: As I mentioned in my book, I do not believe my mother or father actually believed a shred of the goddess-worship nonsense they peddled. Goddess-worship translates loosely to “men worship women as goddesses, so let’s all have lots of sex with our goddesses, because in paganism, worship is confused with sex.”
What my mother actually believed in was occultism. She frequently referenced the Rosicrucian church, and believed in ghosts, spirits, and psychic powers. My father believed in psychic powers, and in aliens. They denied both hell and heaven and spoke of “The Other Side” as the realm of the afterlife.
Both believed in reincarnation. Not Hindu reincarnation, which holds that a bad man is reborn as a woman, and a bad woman is reborn as a cabbage or an insect. Instead, they believed in New Age reincarnation, which holds that our promiscuous, oft married, divorced and shacked-up parents are so amazingly enlightened that they will be successively reborn to greater and greater planes of existence.
After listening to the psychic gobbledygook for decades, I came to a few conclusions. First, it is nonsense, and second, it is not well thought out nonsense. Telepathy could be replaced by the far simpler and more effective expedient of picking up the phone, or paying someone a visit and actually talking to them. Psychokinesis or teleportation could be replaced by simply getting up, picking up the item you want moved and moving it yourself. Levitation, which at best seems to amount to sages bouncing around on their bottoms, could be easily replaced by getting up and walking where you want to go, getting into the car, or booking a flight on Southwest.
Being impressed with or claiming psychic powers was just another way for strong personalities to manipulate weaker ones. “I am A Heap Big Powerful Psychic Magic Person” really meant “I am stronger, smarter and more powerful than you. I am Alpha, and I therefore have sexual privilege, and you will obey me.”
Perhaps the most important thing to notice about the entire culture of the Sixties and Seventies is this. Traditionally, the ones with the power and the social dominance were the biggest and the strongest. The advent of the hippies and geek culture turned that on its head. All of a sudden, you did not have to be big, strong or beautiful to obtain status. All you needed was an idea, like permissive sexuality, which allowed people to do the things they had previously only fantasized about in secret.
The big, muscular bullies were no longer on top, while the proverbial 97 pound weaklings had sand kicked in their faces. Now ideas and intelligence held sway — Not good ideas, but ones which gave moral license. Not intelligence of the sort which enables problem-solving, but the flashy intelligence which confers status around fellow geeks with weaker personalities. Little did we know how much the proverbial “Geek’s Revenge” would cost us, or how stupid the intelligentsia would eventually prove to be.
LifeSite: You recount in the book that, despite the pagan practices and anti-Christian attitudes in your home, at some point you secretly became a Christian. How did this come about and what effect did it have on you during this terrible period of suffering in your life, as well as after you left home?
Moira Greyland: I was about ten, and staying at the houses of friends in order to escape my home. I used to listen obsessively to Jesus Christ Superstar, which my parents did not tolerate well in their house. I would cry and cry and not know why. One day I heard Jesus talking to me, very quietly, and very gently. He told me what my father would never say. He told me he loved me, and that I was His, and that He would take care of me.
The effect that my secret conversion to Christianity had on me was to give me enough strength to eventually go to the cops about my father’s sexual abuse of children. He made it possible for me to quietly question the nonsense I had been programmed to believe, and He gave me the hope of eventual escape.
I know that most conversion stories are more dramatic, with more fireworks, but mine was not like that. It was more like He showed me the reason for the iron backbone He had given me all along, and He made it so I was eventually strong enough to break the lies in my family and end the active abuse of the children in our home.
One thing my faith in God did was to help me understand why speaking the truth about the family secrets was so important to me. For all that people try to claim how “tolerant” Jesus was, that is a conclusion born of no actual knowledge. Jesus challenged people right and left, whether they were committing sexual sin or some other kind of sin.
Jesus sat down to eat with tax collectors and prostitutes, who stopped being tax collectors and prostitutes, and became disciples and followers. At no point did Jesus encourage or tolerate sin, but called it out openly at every turn. There were times when his scoldings included calling people “whitewashed sepulchers” and even “broods of vipers.” Just how tolerant is that?
Jesus never stops loving sinners, but understands that sin hurts us, and it hurts the people around us. Allowing it to continue, or claiming that sin is magically acceptable, only prolongs suffering.
Paganism seeks to reinterpret sin, and in so doing, to out-shout our own consciences. We are meant to regard promiscuous sex as being holy and Christianity as being evil, because it “judges and blames.” The fact that all the sin has the predictable results of destroying our lives and our relationships is conveniently overlooked. Something other than promiscuity must be blamed, because since sex is a “sacrament” it cannot possibly be the problem.
I had to be old enough and strong enough that I would be able to handle the break which would inevitably come when I went to the police. I could hardly expect my mother and her girlfriend Lisa to back me up when they knew what had been happening for years, and had done nothing about it.
LifeSite: Worldcon, which is the largest and most important gathering of sci-fi and fantasy literature fandom in the world, recently banned famed science fiction writer and Worldcon member Jon Del Arroz from its annual convention this year in San Jose, California. Their reasoning was a vague and unexplained accusation that he meant to stir up trouble at the convention. Others say it was because he is a conservative. At the same time, your publisher, Vox Day, pointed out in a recent post that Worldcon has never banned any pedophile or other sex criminal in its whole history. Does this surprise you? Why is Worldcon behaving this way? Do you believe that Worldcon has adequately addressed its past tolerance of pedophiles and other sex abusers?
Moira Greyland: Jon Del Arroz, who is a friend of mine, was banned from Worldcon because he is conservative, and because he stated that he would wear a bodycam in response to the threats and doxxing he received. I saw a photo of the springloaded, genital-shaped glitter bomb which was mailed to him and went off in his kitchen in front of his children.
Why would Worldcon ban Jon Del Arroz, while gleefully allowing my mother and father to attend in the past? My father, Walter Breen, was banned from Worldcon for only one day, after his molestation of at least ten children was announced to the sci-fi community in an affair that came to be known as the “Great Breen Boondoggle” or the “Breendoggle” (https://breendoggle.wikia.com/wiki/Breendoggle_Wiki).
It is simple. As I mentioned earlier, fame brings with it the assumption that the famous person has some amazing secrets to share which ordinary mortals cannot imagine. People do not see my parents as ordinary schmucks with perverted ideas, but imbue them with nearly mystical importance. Since they Wrote Books, they are smart and possessed of a special something which their fans believe can only be obtained by drawing as close to them as possible.
Jon Del Arroz is a new author, up-and-coming, and not a legend like my mother. Since his ideas are so different from those of my mother, he is a threat to the status quo. After all, in effect, my mother, Heinlein and Piers Anthony told several generations of science fiction fans that all the sex they wanted was OK, and they shaped their very lives around these ideas.
In fact, it was their enlightened sexual sensibilities which made them so very superior to the “mere mortals” of the rest of the world. Conservatives, prudes, Christians, and anti-abortion weirdos are regarded as being mentally inferior, unenlightened, and needing the patient guidance of the superior minds of the science fiction community. The assumption is that the Conservatives will all eventually get a clue and follow along.
Jon Del Arroz, John C. Wright, and other conservative authors challenge that mindset. But the Old Guard in science fiction fandom is both hidebound and totally dependent on alternative sexuality as a framework for the universe. Anything which goes against alternative sexuality and Liberal values is deeply threatening to fandom. After all, their Great Ideas all concluded that promiscuous sex would bring happiness. Conservatives and Christians are spoilsports who have no place at the table.
The fact that much of the very best fiction being written today does not come from the population of aging perverts which comprise the core of fandom must be grating indeed.
LifeSite: In a recent radio interview you were asked a question that was so difficult for you to answer that the interview needed to be ended at that time. I hope it isn’t too burdensome to ask you, but certainly our readers will want to know. The question is, quite simply: How are you, following the writing of this book, and following such horrible trauma for so many years in your childhood? Has writing the book helped you to heal in any way? How did your siblings fare after reaching adulthood?
Moira Greyland: How am I? I am not good. I am lucky in that my job allows me to work at home, where I teach voice and harp, and my performances are limited right now of necessity. I have a lot of distress from flashbacks and nightmares. I wish this was not true but it is. I had a very severe episode of major depression after writing the book, which I have only begun to come out of.
It is a blessing that I know that it is a major depressive episode, rather than buying into every stray thought which walks across my head. It does not reduce the pain to know it is only a depressive episode, but it does reduce the chance of my doing anything irrevocably stupid. I think of it as having “bad brain” rather than using my misery as an excuse for self-reproach or self-hatred which would only compound the issue.
The part which many people do not understand is this. It is not thinking about the past which is the problem. It is the fact that severe trauma rewires your brain and alters your responses to things. Where a normal person would not respond at all to about a million different things, from a loud noise, the sound of someone crying, or even a tap on the shoulder, my brain interprets these things as catastrophic danger or threat.
I have taught myself to reality-test very quickly and shut down my inappropriate responses to things, but although I can minimize and shorten my response, I cannot alter it or eliminate it. This is isolating, because I know if I am in public and someone taps me on the shoulder, I will gasp in terror and look like an idiot for several seconds before I shut it down, apologize, and do my best to act normal.
People always want to know if it was healing and cathartic to write the book. Healing? No. Maybe. Cathartic? Yes.
The popular notion is that a catharsis will bring healing. It can, but the trouble with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is that a catharsis can be profoundly retraumatizing, like ripping off a scab, or re-breaking a partially set fracture.
I wrote my book because I thought the story needed telling, not because I expected it to heal me. I have spent many years reading and studying, learning to stay calm instead of dissolving in terror and tears and panic. But still, those are my first responses, no matter how quickly I have learned to blunt them.
Writing the book has allowed me to come to some unwelcome conclusions, like understanding the pivotal events when I was ten in the destruction of my relationship with my father. So many things float by and we do not necessarily understand what they mean at the time.
But frankly, writing the book was the most excruciating task I have ever done. It is my hope that it will empower others to speak up against their own trauma, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the perps and at the feet of the idiots who dreamed up the sexual anarchy which made so much of it possible.
What a bill of good we have been sold! Just because Kinsey wrote about how allegedly harmless all this sex was, and my mother and others wrote pansexual and intergenerational sex into their books, suddenly every jerk who wants extramarital sex is a Great Revolutionary Thinker, not just another sexual degenerate.
The one really good thing that came from the book, apart from a profound sense of relief, is my brand-new ability to be angry with my father. My previous inability to be mad at him kept me stuck in a childlike posture in relationship to him, and it left me dependent on his ludicrous opinion of me. He felt I was a failure because I was a prude, because I would not bring his Grand Vision to the world, and his final assessment of me was that I was his murderer. His murderer. And for many years, I felt I had no choice but to believe this. Even as I rejected his ideas, they still mattered. The judge at my father’s trial was a much better model, regarding my father as sexually dangerous, completely lacking in remorse, and likely to offend literally from his deathbed.
If nothing else, I hope my book will demonstrate that a pedophile is not an unmarried straight man born in a trenchcoat who hangs around playgrounds and entices children with candy. Pedophiles are married, have gay and straight sex, usually lots of it, and look like everyone else.
How are my siblings? My brother David died in his fifties, estranged from my mother but in close contact with my cousin Ian. He never married, though he was in a long term relationship with a woman who did not always live with him. He died quite suddenly from heart failure. He lived on SSI, complete disability. He had had a head injury resulting in epilepsy, but I am positive it was more than that.
My brother Mark is still alive at 53, and his health is very bad. He has poorly controlled diabetes. He lived with me for a time, but I asked him to move to Greyhaven, our multigenerational family home, after two episodes of diabetic coma nearly killed him. I figured that where I am often traveling or performing out of town, at Greyhaven, there were plenty of people who would look in on Mark every day, and he would not be risking coma like he would be by being alone in my house.
Poor self-care is very common among the severely traumatized. Passive suicide, the same. It cannot be ignored or minimized. Like most men, my brother is quite stoic, and suffered in silence. As a result, his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been virtually untreated. I cannot begin to describe to you how distressing PTSD is when there is no way to understand what is happening. There is a reason so many vets with PTSD kill themselves. It hurts less than being alive.
PTSD rewires the brain, and causes us to react to nearly everything as though it was a threat. Since everything seems like a threat, we cannot always respond effectively to actual threats, although the ability to do so is often the dividing line between a miserable quality of life and the ability to improve our condition. Also, the perpetual state of hypervigilance our brains are locked into is profoundly exhausting. We want to relax, yes, we really do. But it feels dangerous to sleep, lest we miss a threat. Much of this is unconscious, and reality testing does not improve it. Yes, I know I am safe here. But my brain does not know it, and it refuses to be talked into believing it.
For a time, Mark spoke openly of what our parents had done, notably in his interview “Secret Keeper No More” (published on line several years ago, but since removed) but then he became frightened and stopped wanting to talk once he went to Greyhaven.
Also, when two of my voice students complained about hearing my uncle Don talking about sleeping with his ex-boylover’s children, I went to the cops, and so did they. As before, my family sided with my uncle Don, and not with the children, and my brother told me he had to side with my cousin Ian, who sided with Don. My father is still defended in that house.
I trust that sheds light on how this continues through the generations.
So how are my siblings? Dead, nearly dead, and in my case, not dead.
LifeSite: Your book has been available for sale on Amazon in e-book form since mid-December and has spent much of that time in the top 5,000 best-sellers. It now has over one hundred and twenty reviews, most of them with five-star ratings. Has the response to your book surprised you? What have readers been telling you about the book, either personally or in the Amazon reviews?
Moira Greyland: I expected a lynch mob.
I was astonished and pleased with the reviews, with the heartfelt empathy of the reviewers, at their insight, and at the consistency of their horror of what my “home” was like.
I have been inured to the horror, because I was used to it. Although I railed against it and despised it, it was “normal” for me. Knowing others thought my experiences were distinctly NOT normal was like a safe hot bath after being dipped in slime, or an old injury finally being cleaned and treated.
There were only two really bad reviews, both by people who had obviously not read the book. Both were removed. A third bad review, which is still up, screamed against my family with tremendous ire and sympathy, but then went off the rails and called me a bigot, as though I came to my conclusions by mail order instead of by observation.
One final note about pedophilia and fandom: when my story broke about my mother in 2014, quite by accident, when I answered a friend’s letter and allowed her to print my responses on her blog, nobody in fandom offered to publish my story. The offer came from Vox Day, who also published an expose of pedophilia in fandom called “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness.
Why would a conservative publisher offer me a book contract where fandom argued about the merits of separating the art from the artist? Simple. Although there were many who were outraged at my mother’s conduct, most were too star-struck by her and her Revolutionary Ideas to allow the facade to crack before a wider audience. The Old Guard of fandom had to stay sex-positive. Anything else would be admitting the failure of the sexual revolution, and that was a bridge too far.
The issue is not admitting that science fiction fandom has a pedophile problem. The issue is that science fiction fandom denies that pedophilia IS a problem. Although this reality is kept away from straights, Christians, and other stupid, backward people, the common belief is that children allegedly have sexual agency, they supposedly WANT sex, and should be encouraged to make their own decisions.
So then it is up to us. Do we accept a counterculture that wants our little children to “make their own decisions” when perved on by some creep, or do we stand up and absolutely, irrevocably REJECT a culture that regards intolerance as literally its only sin?
The answer should be very obvious.
Click here to purchase a copy of Moira Greyland’s book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon