Copyright
The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon
by Moira Greyland
Castalia House
Kouvola, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.
Copyright © 2017 by Moira Greyland
All rights reserved
Editor: Vox Day
Cover: Steve Beaulieu
Version: 002
The Last Closet
The Dark Side of Avalon
Moira Greyland
Table of Contents
The Monster’s Lullaby
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Closet is Built: My Mother’s Early Life (1930–1949)
Chapter 2: My Father’s Early Life (1928–1961)
Chapter 3: My Parents Meet and Make Some Odd Agreements (1962–1964)
Chapter 4: The World’s Weirdest Engagement (1963)
Chapter 5: My Father’s Grand Vision (1962–1964)
Chapter 6: Greek Love, His and Hers (1962–1964)
Chapter 7: What Haunted the House of my Brother’s Birth? (1964–1972)
Chapter 8: Science Experiment (1966)
Chapter 9: The SCA and the Cruel Mother (1966–1967)
Chapter 10: The Nurse and the Lunatic (1967–1972)
Chapter 11: My Father Begins My Education: Sex, Pot, and Kindergarten (1970–1971)
Chapter 12: I Start School, and Reap the Whirlwind (1971–1972)
Chapter 13: Greenwalls, Greyhaven, and the Basement (1972–75)
Chapter 14: All Summer in a Day (1972–74)
Chapter 15: The Lonely House with the Lemon Tree (1973–1976)
Chapter 16: The Sad Waltz (1976)
Chapter 17: My Strange Love of Faire (1975–1977)
Chapter 18: Wind-Up Dolls Don’t Eat (1977)
Chapter 19: From the Looking Glass to the Funhouse Mirror (1977–1978)
Chapter 20: The Stormqueen and the Queen Mother (1978)
Chapter 21: The Lisa of Two Evils (1979)
Chapter 22: My Father’s Imaginary Relationships (1979–80)
Chapter 23: Letters from Beyond the Grave (1980)
Chapter 24: Religion of the Month Club (1980–1982)
Chapter 25: The Breaking of Nick
Chapter 26: Flings, Fosterlings and Folly (1979–1982)
Chapter 27: The Cat that Walks by Himself (1979–1982)
Chapter 28: Hunting Girl (1980–1984)
Chapter 29: The House on the Hill, and the Tacky Mansion (1984–1987)
Chapter 30: The Ermine Violin (1984–1987)
Chapter 31: The Goldfish Bowl (1985–1988)
Chapter 32: Boundaries, Bathrooms, and Betrayal (1989)
Chapter 33: My Ultimate Crime (1989)
Chapter 34: Prison for Him and Hell for me (1990–1993)
Chapter 35: Climbing out of Hell (1989–1993)
Chapter 36: An Opera and a Funeral (1991–1993)
Chapter 37: The House of the Rising Sun (1994)
Chapter 38: Marriage, Merriment, and Mother (1994–1999)
Chapter 39: Aftermath: What has the past done to now?
Chapter 40: The Blog Heard Round The World (2014)
Chapter 41: I Break my Silence (2014–2015)
Chapter 42: The Last Closet
Appendix A: The Breendoggle and the Loyal Opposition
Appendix B: Mother’s Complete Deposition (1998)
Appendix C: Lisa’s Complete Deposition (1997)
Appendix D: Walter’s Annotated Bibliography by David Fanning
Appendix E: Mother’s Bibliography
Castalia House
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the people who helped me with this book. My husband, Michael, who brought me endless cups of coffee, read chapters, and listened to me talk and cry, even when I felt like a lunatic for doing so.
My best friend Elizabeth, who read chapters, listened, offered editorial advice with patience and clarity, and tolerated my transformation from a sex-positive Berkeley chick to something entirely different. Despite my rather unfashionable views, she has always accepted me as I am.
Thanks to Deirdre Saoirse Moen, who broke my story and gave me the courage to tell the rest of it. Thanks to Vox Day, my editor and publisher, who inspired me to be bold in my approach.
Thanks also to Gary Bryant, Deacon Jim Hunt, Chris Angus, and all the other men of God who listened to my story and encouraged me to tell it.
Thanks to the COGs, (Children of Gays) who let me know that I was not alone. Robert Oscar Lopez, Katy Faust, Denise Schick, Brandi Walton, Heather Barwick of Heather Has Two Mommies, Millie Foxx, Brittany Newmark, and all those who wisely do not use real names lest the bullying get any more dangerous.
Thanks to Pete Smith, who sent me many, many newspaper clippings to help me fill in the blanks about my father and his peculiar history; David Fanning, who constructed the annotated bibliography of my father’s works; and Jack Sarfatti, who related some interesting facts about their friendship.
Thanks, much love, and hugs to Nick Bosson, who bravely told his own story of survival at my father’s hands. Thanks also to Nick’s late wife Kelly, a beautiful woman who stood by him and made it possible for him to tell his story., so you can see the real-life consequences.
To Kenny, Jean, Sterling, Sean, Rick, Smiley, Eric, Patrick, and the many others who suffered and could not tell their stories. It is for you that I write, both those of you who have died, and those who live through emotional death through being, as Tori Amos put it, “silent all these years.”
Thanks, blessings, and strength to those of you who have written letters to me, so many of which began with the fateful words: “I never told anyone about this before.”
Also, blessings and strength to all survivors who cannot talk about what happened, and to all of you who will, one day, gain the courage to share your own stories.
Your pace, your life, and your story: They all belong to you and you alone. Don’t accept pressure either to keep silent or to share. You will know when you are ready. It is for you that I am writing, and it is for your freedom that I am praying.
The Monster’s Lullaby
You’re lying awake with the sheet over your head…
The memory of heartbreak just crept in your bed
And no tears or pleading could stop what they did
Fight back now, take your life back, put the monsters to bed!
Put the monsters to bed, tuck them all into bed
And be the good Mother you wish that you had
Put the monsters to bed, ugly claws into bed
They can’t hurt you when they’re sleeping, put the monsters to bed!
Sometimes so much pain comes you feels like you’re dead
And you know you’d fill an ocean with the tears that you’ve shed
But take back your time, and take back your bed
And just like little children, put the monsters to bed.
Put the monsters to bed, tuck them all into bed
And be the good Father you wish that you had
Put the monsters to bed, scaly wings into bed
They can’t hurt you when they’re sleeping, so put the monsters to bed!
And sometimes it feels like your mind’s not your own
Or that you’ll give in to the pain you’ve known
But hang on my love, because y
ou’re not alone
Hang on and you know we’ll survive!
Put the monsters to bed, put your anguish to bed
And take back the future that you should have had
For your life’s worth much more than the pain you ignore
Let your nightmares see the daytime…
Let them vanish in the sunshine…
Make a future instead,
Put the monsters to bed.
La la, la la, wake your dreams out of bed!
La la, la la, try hope instead!
—Moira Greyland
Foreword
I read four or five of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books in high school. I started with The Heritage of Hastur, then read two or three more Darkover novels that caught my eye in the Arden Hills library. While I didn’t find them sufficiently entertaining to continue with the series, they were just interesting enough to inspire me to pick up a trade paperback of The Mists of Avalon not long after it was published by Del Rey in 1984. As it happens, I still have that much-ballyhooed monstrosity, its long-untouched pages now yellowing on a dusty bookshelf in the attic.
The Mists of Avalon was a massive 876-page bestseller heavily marketed as a feminist take on Camelot and the legends of King Arthur, and was critically hailed for being very different than the usual retellings of the classic tale. It was different, and in some ways, with its grim darkness and overt sexuality, The Mists of Avalon might even be considered a predecessor of sorts to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I found it to be too much of a soap opera myself, and certainly not a patch on Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, or even T.H. White, although there were a few salacious sections that did serve to liven up the book considerably.
But even as a red-blooded young man, some of those sections struck me as perhaps a little too salacious. While I can’t say that I had any inkling of what the author’s habits or home life were at the time, I can say that I detected a slight sense of what I can only describe as a wrongness from the book. Arthur didn’t love Guinevere, but was pining away for his half-sister? Sir Lancelot was not only Galahad, but also Arthur’s bisexual cousin? Instead of being a tragic love triangle, Arthur, Launcelot, and Guinevere were a swinging threesome? And Mordred was not only Arthur’s son, but the product of incest knowingly orchestrated by Merlin for pagan purposes to boot?
Yeah, that’s not hot. That’s just weird and more than a little grotesque.
I don’t recall if I ever actually finished the novel or not, but I know I didn’t bother reading any of its many sequels. I felt that I had given this vaunted feminist author a fair shake and delved as deeply into Ms. Bradley’s strange psyche as I wished to go, little knowing that what I dismissed as freakish feminist literary antics were merely scratching the surface on what was actually an intergenerational psychosexual horror show.
Three decades later, despite being a science fiction author and editor myself, I found myself increasingly at odds with the creepy little community known as SF fandom, which can best be described as the cantina crowd from Star Wars, only depressed, overweight, and sexually confused. At the same time, I was also becoming increasingly aware of a wrongness that emanated from that community like a faint, but unmistakably foul odor.
There were rumors about the real reason behind science fiction grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke’s bizarre relocation from southern California to Sri Lanka. There was the arrest of David Asimov, son of science fiction legend Isaac Asimov, for the possession of the largest stash of child pornography the police had ever seen. There were the public defenses offered by many science fiction authors on behalf of the SFWA member and convicted child molester Ed Kramer. There was the naming of NAMBLA enthusiast and homo-horrorporn author Samuel Delaney as SFWA’s 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.
And then, of course, there was the historical Breendoggle, a fifty-year-old debate among science-fiction fandom concerning whether a child molester, Walter Breen, should have been permitted to attend the science-fiction convention known as Pacificon II or not. Believe it or not, the greater part of fandom at the time was outraged by the committee’s sensible decision to deny Breen permission to attend the 1964 convention; science-fiction fandom continued to cover for the notorious pedophile even after his death in 1993. In “Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley”, Martin Wisse wrote:
Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims? Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so.
The fact that fandom had been covering for pedophiles for decades was deeply troubling. And yet, we would soon learn that this wrongness in science fiction ran even deeper than the most cynical critics suspected.
On June 3, 2014, a writer named Deirdre Saorse Moen put up a post protesting the decision of Tor Books to posthumously honor Tor author and World Fantasy Award-winner Marion Zimmer Bradley, on the basis of Bradley’s 1998 testimony given in a legal deposition about her late husband. When Moen was called out by Bradley fans for supposedly misrepresenting Bradley, she reached out to someone she correctly felt would know the truth about the feminist icon: Moira Greyland, the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen.
Little did Moen know how dark the truth about the famous award-winning feminist was. For when Moira responded a few days later, she confirmed Moen’s statement about Marion Zimmer Bradley knowing all about her pedophile husband’s behavior. However, she also added that her famous mother had been a child molester as well, and that in fact, Bradley had been far more violently abusive to both her and her brother than Breen!
I will not say more about the harrowing subject of this book because it is the author’s story to tell, not mine. But I will take this opportunity to say something about the author, whom I have come to admire for her courage, for her faith, and most of all, for her ability to survive an unthinkably brutal upbringing with both her sanity and her sense of humor intact.
Moira does not wallow in her victimhood. Nor does she paint her victimizers as soulless devils, indeed, her empathy for those who wronged her so deeply is more than astonishing, it is humbling. Her strength of character, her integrity, and her faith in a God she was raised to believe did not exist are almost inexplicable, particularly in an age where adult college students cannot face unintended microaggressions without the support of their university administrations, the campus police, and physician-prescribed pharmaceuticals.
Her story is more than a triumph of the human spirit, more than a tale of survival, and more than a devastating indictment of a seriously depraved community. It is an inspiration to everyone, particularly for anyone who has ever been subjected to abuse or ill-treatment as a child.
Moira’s message is clear: they can hurt you, they can harm you, and they can leave you with scars that last a lifetime, but they cannot touch your soul. Their sins are not your sins and their shame is not your shame. And there is a light that is always waiting to heal those who summon the strength to walk out of the last closet and turn their back on the darkness inside it.
Vox Day
4 December 2017
Introduction
I am the child of three gay parents.
The first was my notorious father, Walter Breen. In 1989, I turned my father in to the police after witnessing him molest an underage boy. He died in jail after being sentenced to thirteen years in San Quentin.
The second was my famous mother. Marion Zimmer Bradley was an award-winning science-fiction author with a history of poverty and heinous abuse from her drunken father and a life she tried to fill with charity and love. During an unhappy marriage, she found her true love in my father, a paranoid, schizophrenic, polymath genius and life
long pedophile. During her 27-year involvement with him, my mother both abetted and participated in his crimes.
The third was my mother’s former lover, Elisabeth Waters, who I was taught to call my stepmother. These days, however, Lisa prefers to pretend she is nothing but my “cousin,” which begs the question: what on Earth was my “cousin” doing in my mother’s bed? More than that, why would she dishonor my mother’s memory by denying the substance of their 20-year relationship? Elisabeth spent two decades at Marion’s side and in her bed, and helped her cover up some of Walter’s crimes. She has tried to whitewash my mother’s history, pretending that my mother was a “church-going Episcopalian,” when in fact Marion was a pagan priestess who was happiest when she was leading occult rituals.
My mother’s story is ultimately a tragic one, even though some of the tragedy came in the form of the tragedies she inflicted on other people. Can my mother be blamed for acting as she did, given the horrors she herself lived through? I believe that regardless of the pain one endures, we are all responsible for our own actions, and she must be responsible. After all, one might expect that enduring abuse would lead any reasonable person to not want to subject anyone else to it.
The reality of gay relationships is nothing like what we are led to believe. As a child, I was expected to approve and champion them as gay parents, even though they were parents who rejected each other and rejected me. I was supposed to become a lesbian and even to cooperate with their efforts to make me become one, but I always knew that I was not supposed to talk about that reality, let alone oppose it. They made it clear that exposing others to the truth would be the worst thing I could ever do to them. It would be an unconscionable personal betrayal.
One wonders why simply telling the truth about my life and theirs would be considered a betrayal, unless there really was something wrong with what they were doing.
In our culture, closets go far beyond sexual choices or identity: They represent what we are not allowed to want. The difference between who we are and who we must pretend to be is contained in a closet. The closet to which I am referring involves the depths of my very soul.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 1
