The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  This was one example of many of Lisa creating some nauseatingly implausible story to explain how something obvious was miraculously something else. When I complained that Gregg was in my father’s bed, perhaps she thought I was complaining that Gregg did not match the decor!

  Our house was a flop-house. People slept all over the place all the time, and I was used to stepping over them. Such a trivial matter was nothing to complain about—unless they were in my bed. The idea that I would object to either Gregg or Barry occupying an empty bed is stupid and obviously untrue. The issue was sex, not real estate.

  Lisa completely denied the reality that my father was having sex with both Gregg and Barry, possibly because she was afraid that legal action against Walter would compromise her meal ticket. When Lisa first arrived, I had been so full of hope that she would be more like a real mother. She had made me cookies, after all, and even tutored me in math, and she never said horrible things about my costumes or my singing. I needed so badly to have a mother who loved me. I needed her to see the insanity and stop it. Instead, she followed Mother into every bizarre fad, and behaved like an empty-headed nincompoop when there were people all around her who needed saving. What could be the purpose of turning a blind eye, not so much even to my brother and me, but to Nick and Gregg and Barry and Sterling and the rest of them?

  It is also entirely possible that from the very beginning, all Lisa wanted was my mother’s money. If that is the case, all I can say is that she earned it. On her back.

  Chapter 23: Letters from Beyond the Grave (1980)

  “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

  —Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

  In 2008, many years after my father’s death, I received a parcel from a family member. I was standing in my garage, next to a huge trash can when I opened the stack of letters which my father had written to his psychologist back in 1980. These letters described my father’s sexual liaisons with young boys, and his observations about these “relationships” and their endings. I read the letters and threw them away immediately afterwards, not even wanting to bring them in my house. The contents made me feel sick. I did not transcribe them, but wrote about them in my journal. I mention that, because the following does not include direct quotes from the letters, but my observation of the contents as I wrote them down in my journal that day.

  Why was my father writing to a psychologist about the sexual crimes he had committed? And what kind of psychologist would tolerate such a thing? In Berkeley, one can find validation for nearly anything one’s heart desires, and find plenty of other people to hail the “revolutionary” mindset of those who follow their hearts. Or their gonads.

  Back in 1980 and before, my father urgently needed competent mental health care for his paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, not to mention his catastrophic depression and suicidal ideation, but he neither sought nor found it. My father did not look for a psychiatrist who would treat the medical aspects of his condition, but a sex-positive, sympathetic therapist who would allow him to complain, and validate his delusions. He certainly did not want anyone who would help him change.

  He chose Dr. Jack Morin, Ph.D. (1946–2013) Author of “Anal Pleasure and Health” and “The Erotic Mind.” Dr. Morin was openly gay, and steeped in the bathhouse community in San Francisco. Dr. Morin is still celebrated throughout the “sex-positive” community for his assistance in improving people’s experiences with anal sex. Forgive me for not wanting anything like that on my tombstone. The following paragraph is an excerpt from a tribute to Dr. Morin:

  “Inspired by Love and Guided by Knowledge: Remembering Jack Morin

  “Jack was a doctoral student in psychology, and his great ambition was to apply the principles of humanistic psychology to the study of sexuality and the practice of sex therapy. Sex therapy was still a new concept, and many in the field believed that it was their business to determine for the rest of us what was and was not ”normal" sexual behavior.

  Words like “perversion” and “deviance” still appeared in “scientific” papers on sexuality. Jack’s mission was to change all of that. In a time when so many of his contemporary therapists pathologized minority sexual preferences, he wanted to respond to all of his patients from the humanistic principle of “unconditional positive regard.” And in the field of sexology he wanted to replace ancient prejudices with scientific rigor.”

  © Tom Moon, MFT, 2013

  Note the term “minority sexual preferences,” and understand that it means bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, pederasty, and incest among other things. Instead of confronting criminal acts in his clients head-on, Dr. Morin advocated “unconditional positive regard.”

  Also, note how the word “normal” is put in quotes, as though incest and necrophilia are not abnormal, but merely different. According to this school of “thought,” our objections to these things are merely the result of “ancient prejudices,” not a sincere concern for our children and their lives, but also for the lives of any children they will have in the future.

  I am puzzled that Dr. Morin did not insist that my father seek medical treatment. Instead, Dr. Morin went along with my father’s idea that all his thoughts were vitally important and should be written down. This resulted in vast numbers of little notebooks: journals, which my father wrote in every time some grand thought crossed his mind. My father also wrote many, many letters to Dr. Morin.

  According to my father, his therapy ended when Dr. Morin informed him that if my father sent him any more letters about his sexual encounters with boys, he would have to talk to the police. Because of the “Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act,” or CANRA, passed in 1980, Dr. Morin was now legally bound by the mandated reporter laws and any failure to report current illegal acts would result in him losing his license to practice. My father made it sound as though Dr. Morin was very unhappy with the CANRA laws, presumably because he believed Dr. Morin approved of his activities.

  I met Dr. Morin only once. My father brought me to a therapy session, presumably so he could demonstrate just how difficult and awful I was to deal with. It was clear from my father’s comments that Dr. Morin had already heard at length about my father’s animosity towards me and he was prepared for my head to spin around, while I would presumably be intoning ominous threats in Latin while burning crosses and projectile vomiting in Technicolor green. But I was not that interesting, and I made a very poor Antichrist. My father carefully avoided mentioning the real issue: my open opposition to his “relationships” with Barry and Gregg.

  My father said very little about me during the session, and seemed to think Dr. Morin could tell that I was evil. What could he have possibly have said to make his point to Dr. Morin about me in my presence? The topic itself would be a tar baby. My father would not want me to tell Dr. Morin that I hated Barry, because he went through my underwear drawer and stole from me, or that I was furious and disgusted that my father was trying to adopt his sex partner. Nor could he have said openly that he was angry that he kept having to drag Sterling and Nick away from me. That is certainly not a can of worms my father would have wanted to open anywhere. What could he have said? “Stop being female around the boys I want to have sex with!” “Don’t let them like you!” “Stop being their friend!”

  Maybe it will be obvious to a normal audience that most boys of 15 would much rather hang around with a 14-year-old girl than a 50-year-old man, but it was not obvious to my father. He was incensed over it, and would have been more so if he had suspected that they spent time with him only out of obedience, not desire. He thought they should sexually desire him, and choose him, and he regarded the attention they paid to me as infuriating disloyalty.

  I read many unpleasant things about my father’s obsession with pedophilia in the letters he wrote to Dr. Morin. He had an internal image of his ideal lover, who he called “The Golden Boy.” The Golden Boy of my father’s imagination, was 12 years old, completely accepting of my father’s
physical appearance, totally compatible with him in bed, and would never, never, never refuse my father oral sex like his actual partners did. The Golden Boy would also never betray him by reporting him to the cops or robbing him like the others did. The Golden Boy would supposedly want sex with my father, rather than simply enduring it like the real-life boys did, and their imagined sexual compatibility would supposedly heal my father’s heart, finally bringing him the peace he needed so badly.

  According to Patrick Carnes’ book “Contrary to Love,” most sexual addiction works this way: the fantasized sexual activity promises healing and relief which never comes. Even the most carefully planned reenactment of the chosen fantasy never satisfies. Like any sexual addict, my father was looking for healing in the wrong place. He thought that just one more episode of sex with “the right boy” would “heal” him. It is a repetition compulsion: like the drug addict thinking that this fix will make it all better, this acid trip will go back to that first trip and heal the wounds of all the others.

  My father wrote about how jealous and spiteful I was. He also regarded me as being completely untrustworthy because I had told Mother about finding Gregg in his bed, which resulted in him having to move into his own apartment. I can understand how angry he was that I tried to stop him from sleeping with boys; I am not sure how or why I was spiteful. He didn’t say. There was no limit to my evil. I was one more victimizer. Another person who failed to understand his Grand Vision. He had not yet given up hope on me, though.

  In his letters, my father expressed tremendous frustration and anger because he could not persuade my brother to have sex with Gregg. My brother only liked girls, and would sooner have spent a celibate lifetime than slept with Gregg. Although this never mattered to my father, at the time my brother was 15 and already involved with the girl he would later marry. In my father’s imagination, getting my brother to sleep with other boys his own age was a prerequisite to other sexual involvements which would eventually not be limited to people his own age.

  What my father really wanted was for Patrick to be willing to have sex with him and Gregg, preferably simultaneously. It would have been a very different thing to have a willing, “consensual” relationship with his son than what happened when Patrick was too young to get away. Patrick did not discuss the details with me, but in 2014, he was beginning to have a lot of trouble with flashbacks of Walter molesting him. He had never forgotten what Mother did, but it seemed his mind could not handle the reality of having had two insanely abusive parents.

  Walter never took my brother’s relationships with women seriously. To him, my brother’s wishes were an irrelevant distraction. It seemed as though my father regarded my brother’s refusal to sleep with Gregg as disloyalty and filial disobedience. After all, a truly loyal son would have followed his father’s Grand Vision, right?

  At no time did my father ever regard heterosexuality as being real or legitimate. He believed all men who thought they were straight were merely “hung up” and the moment they were exposed to enough experience with other men, they would “embrace their natural homosexuality” and never bother with women after that. Obviously my father felt that homosexuality was something which could be chosen by anyone who was willing to try it.

  My father spoke at length in the letters of his “relationship” with Gregg; he loved Gregg and Gregg loved him, or so he believed, but they were “sexually mismatched.” I can only assume that this meant that Gregg was not compliant enough and refused some of the sexual acts that my father wanted. My father spoke of Gregg’s mother as being “horrified and disgusted” by his sexual relationship with Gregg, but she never went to the cops.

  If I talk about the utter gall of an adult claiming he is “sexually mismatched” with his child rape victim, I will become so angry that I start throwing things. Isn’t it enough to force a child to endure repeated sexual hell without complaining about the quality of the services the child-victim is forced to provide? Maybe Idi Amin could require all his torture victims to scream in a particular key!

  In the letters, my father wrote of his desperate pain and loss over Barry losing interest in him. According to my father, he was in love with Barry and wanted his feelings to be reciprocated. Barry had already been a child-prostitute for some time when he became involved with my father, and to him the “relationship” was all business. He was not interested in being my father’s “Golden Boy.” When my father did not give him enough money and presents to hold his interest, Barry left him, and eventually reported him to one Inspector Bierce. Sadly, because Barry had previously denied being molested by my father, he was not believed by the police when he finally chose to talk.

  My father never understood that he was victimizing these children, and he imagined there was a relationship. It looked like one to him because the boys returned, had sex with him, and were polite. The boy prostitutes knew what he wanted, of course, and as long as there was money they would stay. What choice did they have? A known regular client in a home, or an unknown person—possibly a more dangerous one—in a San Francisco alley or hourly hotel. To the children, it was an unavoidable financial transaction. To my father, it was a love affair.

  Not only did my father desperately want these boys to love him and to want sex with him, but he expected them to “love him for himself.” Since, in his own words, my father had been “tormented by young jocks” in school, he did not want to emulate them in any way lest he risk more rejection and more humiliation. He repudiated everything even remotely identified with masculinity, other than sex. As a result, he absolutely refused to do anything to improve his physical appearance or his scent or his level of fitness. Yet he expected these children to desire him sexually, pot-belly and all, as insane as that might sound.

  Ironically, the one person who loved and desired my father for himself despite his appearance was my mother, but he held her in contempt and often cited her appearance as an explanation for his revulsion with her.

  My father never saw that where his book claimed that Greek Love was the cure for delinquency, the boys he defiled became more delinquent, not less. Gregg was hooked on heroin when they met and never kicked it, though he had some time on and off methadone. His victims robbed him routinely, which never surprised me even if I could not condone it. In a sense, he robbed them of far more: their hearts and souls and minds. They remained prostitutes. A few grew up to repudiate him.

  Why could he not see that what these boys needed was fathering, not sex?

  And here is the central problem with incest or child molestation: it monetizes parenting. Whether the child is a bacha bazi in Afghanistan, a child prostitute, or a molested son or daughter in America, the victim can end up roped into exchanging unwanted sexual favors for anything which looks or feels even remotely like parenting.

  If a child is molested young enough, they will imprint on the first sexual act, much like a BDSM practitioner is triggered into his kink through arousal coupled with violence or bondage or shoes, or whatever it is. My father knew perfectly well that early sexual experience was needed in order to create a “gay child,” and he took advantage of this. He often said that boys had to have experience with a man before they were old enough to be “ruined” by sexual attraction to a girl.

  My father wrote in his letters about spending an entire night cuddling with Ian during a “coming of age” ritual for Nick and Gregg. Ian would have been about 12 or 13 at that point: the age my father thought was ideal. Ian still insists on my father’s innocence, even though my aunt Tracy caught my father molesting him when he was much younger. Ian was never a prostitute. Why wasn’t he protected by my family? I am beginning to suspect that the actual priority, trumping children, jobs, stability and everything, was male sexual privilege.

  I would love to be disproved about this.

  When I was ten years old, Walter became convinced that my mother and I were In League to Put Him In Prison, and that he would DIE there. He told me this again and again. He KNEW he was g
oing to die, and that it would be All My Fault.

  Therefore, he had to write, write, write, and finish the book quickly before he faced his inevitable and tragic end.

  “The book” was his gargantuan “masterpiece” called The Cynic’s Dictionary, a greatly expanded imitation of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. It contained unusual, contrary, and oft-humorous definitions of common concepts. It was so vast that Letter A alone was several hundred typewritten pages long, and it could not be edited for length due to the importance of the material. Walter would trot out parts of it as an answer to any and all questions as a final authority, and he claimed that “every word in it is true, more’s the pity.”

  A central feature of my father’s mental state was his belief that he did not have opinions, only facts. This lay beneath his entire delusional system. To him everything in his mind was true, therefore everything he thought was true. All his feelings were true, all his thoughts were true, and anything contradicting them was a lie.

  He found such mundane choices as dinner to be nearly impossible to navigate, because they involved opinions and desires, and he only had facts. The only “facts” he could draw from for something like choosing dinner amounted to “I have eaten this before and not died, therefore I can eat it again.” Anything beyond that was not possible for him.

  Although my father felt that “The Cynic’s Dictionary was of vast, apocalyptic importance,” he could not persuade anyone to publish it.

  Seriously, who would read something—even a clever something—which is comparable in length to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary?? Two hundred pages of clever and fun I can see. Two thousand pages of dated sociopolitical polemic from the Eighties, even dressed up with epigrams, wit and puns? Spare me. It would have been unimaginably wearisome long before Letter B. Yes, we know: He hates Reagan, he hates Republicans, he hates straight culture, he hates nuclear families, he loves sex with children. Do we really need to slog through any more of this?