REVIEW: The Last Closet – Moira Greyland (Castalia House, 2018)
Some books leave an impression so vivid that you have to put the book down, consider a drink, and think “well, that’s enough for the day.” For some, it’s the first account of a major raid in Blood Meridian, when the Apaches drag the children out of tents to murder them. For others, it’s the work of 20th century hacks like Hubert Selby or Samuel Delaney. What did it for me was on page eighty of Moira Greyland’s book, when she briefly describes taking a bath with her mother. The passage will not be quoted here.
Moira Greyland is the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen, two writers notorious for very different reasons. Bradley, already nationally known for her work in the fantasy community in the sixties and seventies, won international renown for her still-famous Mists of Avalon, the hyper-feminist, sexually revolutionized take on the Arthurian legend cycle. Breen was active in the science fiction convention community as early as the fifties, and was somewhat known for his open advocacy for pedophilia—a position on sexuality that was not as uncommon as is generally assumed for the time. Breen was eventually convicted on thirteen counts of child rape and died in prison. Good riddance.
Sometime last decade, Greyland began being more vocal about the abuse she and her brother suffered under her parents. It began with a blog post, was followed by attacks and hit pieces from the sci-fi and fantasy community, and has culminated in this: The Last Closet, a 600 page book of which about half consists of appendices: mostly depositions and bibliographies. The meat of the book could be called a memoir, but more on that in a bit.
Speaking in terms of its cohesion and narration, The Last Closet is something of a mess. It’s written halfway between an anti-pedophilia polemic and what you’d expect to be the memoir that the title implies. To some degree, it can be easily argued that this only strengthens the book; the sort of narrative disorder that combines the research and condemnation of pedophile apologism with the memoir of a prominent fantasy writer’s daughter mimics, on a textual level, the psychological disorder no doubt experienced by Greyland herself. The brief, graphic depictions of her own molestation help to deepen this impression.
Context
But before we get to all of that, you might be wondering something. Back up a second. Who would possibly go on the record as a pedophile apologist? Who would possibly plant their feet in the earth and declare, themselves, in no uncertain terms, to be pedophiles? Well, Walter Breen, her father, was one such man. He published Greek Love, after all, and go ahead, feel free to look it up. Alan Ginsberg, another. He was quite happily a member and public defender of NAMBLA, inclined toward homosexual proclivities himself, and a man intimately involved in the romantic dramas of the Beat Generation—a den of self-styled sexual deviancy that precipitated the cultural revolution of 1968. And then of course there were intellectuals like Michel Foucault. Well.
These were not obscure people, let it be remembered. These were people at the forefront of the ideological revolution of the time. They were what we’d call influencers, writers, poets, professors, academics. You’d send your kid off to college and their professors would be using the works that these sorts of people churned out for teaching material. Pederasty and pedophilia were far more open to public theoretical discourse in the fifties and sixties than they are now. Why this is the case is hard to fathom in retrospect; the culture of flagrant homosexuality remained contained and suppressed to remote and seedy urban regions that polite society mostly ignored—perhaps it’s for this reason that organizations dedicated to theorizing on the sodomy of children could even exist in the first place. Membership in a sort of homosexual underground back then immediately granted one access to the sort of horrific material that requires TOR networks or a police badge today. And the avant-garde of the culture, those beatniks and drug aficionados who professed the merits of free love and open societies, they harbored similar proclivities even when they weren’t homosexual themselves.
It’s one of the greater ironies of the sexual revolution that, as noted before, the normalization of sodomy divided the radicals between those ideologically committed to social revolution and those psychologically weak freeloaders who sought only a social acceptance of their appetites. Maybe one is simply a more extreme version of the other, I wouldn’t know, but the normalization of same-sex relations over the past thirty years has coincided with, fortunately, a much higher social guard against child sexual abuse. You can still find places where debates about ages of consent and radical free love are discussed, particularly on the internet, but it’s exceedingly rare to find well-known and established intellectual or public figures going on the record endorsing such abuses. Even when we consider things such as Drag Queen Story Hour, defending child sexual behavior is always cloaked in language about self expression and gender ideology. Granted, most of us all know exactly what’s going on when they start prattling off about it, but the fact they feel the need to cloak it at all is at least more than can be said of the 70s free love radicals. The problem, of course, is that so many members of polite society seem willing to believe them. And, of course, that it’s being shoved down our throats.
Neither Ginsberg nor Foucault have anything to do with The Last Closet. I mention the monsters here in order to give some perspective to how discourse around sexual liberation has changed over the last fifty years. This is one of the few sectors of public life that noticeable moral ground has been gained, although the cutting edge of the revolution has attempted to circumvent it. Make no mistake: there is still an interest in pushing for the normalization of child molestation, and the prevalence of such attitudes can still find advocates and allies in the seedier corners of the pride community. The normalization of homosexuality and sodomy in general, however, has complicated the issue. Rather than framing the argument around the innate goodness of sexual pleasure or around definitions of consent, pedophile apologists have turned to gender ideology. More on that some other time.
Ideology
Meanwhile, my father’s fame was increasing. He was the keynote speaker for NAMBLA’s second conference in New York in 1979. I am still puzzled that anyone had any doubt about what my father was doing.1
Some background on Greyland has already been provided, but it’s hard to over-emphasize how high profile her parents were. Breen is not as well known today as he was at the time, perhaps; his trial, imprisonment, and subsequent death—as well as the general attempts to sweep away the long history of pedophile advocacy that found champions within free love movement—did much to undermine whatever memory or legacy he left. Marion Zimmer Bradley, however, is a different story, and it was in large part due to her surviving fanbase that Moira found it difficult to publish The Last Closet in the first place.
The Last Closet is less a memoir than it is two other things first. Primarily, it’s a categorical warning against those hyper-sexualized sorts whose main lens for understanding the world is the sexual revolution. You surely know the type: the kind whose romantic relationships make about as much sense as their depraved proclivities, who insist that open talk of fetishes is natural conversation, and whose go-to for comedic relief invariably consists of off-color and lascivious vulgarity. As the sexual revolution has become normalized, this behavior has become far more widespread than it was in the sixties; although elements dominate common culture today, it’s more frequently seen in self-styled geek communities both on and offline. The fantasy and science fiction geek cultures, most of whose adherents self-identified as misfits already, were the precursors to many of these subcultures today.
Greyland characterizes her father’s behavior along similar lines, although it no doubt typifies the entire free love movement at the time. Both of her parents had tragic upbringings, at least according to material that Greyland herself could track down. Breen’s was the life of an adopted orphan whose new parents divorced and whose mother came across as a psychotic. His brief stint in the military ended with a severe beating by fellow soldiers, likely over his homosexuality. The beating left him with a fractured skull, a long recovery time, and a diagnosis that included schizophrenia. Bradley’s childhood included being raped by her own father. It doesn’t take the armchair of a psychologist to recognize how the cycle continued. Her parents both had genius or near-genius measured IQs, and both belonged to Mensa. Both also “were convinced that they had been abducted by aliens”.2
In describing her father, she makes a short note that’s worth considering in greater detail, as it touches on one of the two biggest takeaways from The Last Closet:
What we may think of as a pervert—a flasher or a child molester—is more clearly described as a sexual addict. Where many sexual addicts do not reach the level of criminal behavior, some do, and among these some are very dangerous indeed. It makes the most sense to view my father and his conduct through the frame of sexual addiction.3
She goes on to compare this sort of addiction to gambling and relates it to playing with your brain chemistry, but something more practical can be taken away from this: normalization of fetishes encourages sexual addiction, as does the widespread proliferation of pornography. We know from other sources already how pornography itself, as well as the general unchaining of the libido, is a form of political and social control. And, it need not be mentioned, that those who end up addicted to sexual vice will not always find themselves, as Breen did in 1954, arrested under a boardwalk at Atlantic City for exposing himself to a minor.
For Breen, however, this addiction metastasized into a conscious obsession and the formulation of an entire ideology, at least according to Greyland.
My father believed that the best, most intimate way to express love to children—to everyone—was to have sex with them. In his mind, sex was love, and any effort to separate love and sex was a consequence of limited thinking. Since love is best expressed by sex, everyone should have sex with all people all the time. He believed that the practice of unlimited sex would bring about a utopia that would end all the ills of human society.4
His line of thinking is not at all dissimilar from other NAMBLA-affiliated pedophile apologists of the 70s. The emphasis at the time was not, per se, the pursuit of social acceptance according to a sexual identity; pedophilia was not considered within the context of “minor-attracted persons” the way homosexuality is presently considered within a context of “same-sex-attracted persons”. Consider Alan Ginsberg’s referral to child molestation as “consensual intergenerational (sic) affections and affairs”, of which “such erotic inclinations or fantasies are average” for NAMBLA members, and thus “are commonly sublimated into courtly sociability.” Such musings do not indicate the categorization of pedophilia to a specific sexual identity so much as the demolition of sexual morality and any means of understanding it altogether. The only reason someone wouldn’t be engaging in these sorts of fantasies, he’s saying, is because they’re a prude—and this is exactly the sentiment expressed by Walter Breen.
This of course extends to homosexuality as well, but modern normalization of sodomy has altered that narrative. Homosexuality, in fact, was understood by its advocates under its more radical and revolutionary senses: the divorce, completely, of sexuality from its intended ends, and the substitution of its ends with total sensual pleasure. How, where, and under what conditions that pleasure could be attained did not correlate to a sexual identity in any meaningful sense, except as a mark of convenience in the bathhouses or, when dealing with normal people, as a way to distinguish one as a sexual revolutionary.
Greyland addresses some of this at the end of her book, when she details, both in brief and at length, her decision to go totally public with posthumous accusations against her parents.
I have heard all the customary protestations. “Your parents were evil because they were evil, not because they were gay”, but I disagree. The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is that central belief:
All Sex is Always Right No Matter What.5
On a more hopeful note, it was precisely her father’s ideology that contributed to him going to prison, albeit at the end of his life. By the late 1980s, there was reason to suspect that the man had serious cancer—large, mysterious growths on one’s abdomen tend to imply something with the body has gone horribly wrong, after all.
Breen’s arrest came after the father of one his victims finally went to the police. In two years he went from being at the top of the world for his main career—a top expert in coins—to wheelchair bound, partly blind with cataracts, and behind bars. Greyland recounts the trial:
His book Greek Love had come up during one of the hearings, and he had reportedly tried hard to convince the judge that what he had done to his victims was right and that the laws should reflect that. The judge did not agree and sentenced my father to a total of thirteen years in San Quentin. The judge noted his total lack of remorse and concern for the victims and determined that he was too dangerous to even be allowed into a hospice to die.6
It would be easy to claim that the behavior, beliefs, and crimes of Walter Breen were fringe cases of a socially awkward schizophrenic, that it was his mental illness which made him molest those children and consider child rape to be positive goods for society. But this is why putting the ideology of sexual liberation into context is so important. Walter Breen, despite his cognitive problems, was not so mentally ill as to be unaware of what was going on. Moreover, his beliefs about sexuality match up perfectly with those other high profile pederasts that were known to be sane, functioning members of the intellectual elite—sane, at least, insofar as a pedophile can be.
Look the Other Way
The second takeaway is that nobody seemed to care what was going on. This recurring theme is the most evident one in the book, as Greyland herself struggles not merely with the severe abuse inflicted upon her, but the abuse she witnesses firsthand inflicted on dozens of children that end up in the company of either of her parents.
Bjo Trimble was a sci-fi author in the LA area who visited the family before their brief move to New York in 1967. For perspective, Trimble was one of the original Star Trek fans, who publicly lobbied for the show’s third season, had participated in science fiction cons going back to the fifties, and ended up being one of the forces behind the first Star Trek encyclopedia efforts. If SoCal has a first generation of ‘fandom’ actors, she’s very certainly one of them.
At the time of her visit to Greyland’s house, Greyland would have still been near infancy and her brother in his toddler years. She had been invited over by Breen “to talk a bit,” but he hadn’t mentioned that his wife was seriously ill with the flu. Breen, presumably with his mental illness playing a significant role, failed to keep house in any capacity. Bjo’s description of the place upon her arrival, with soiled diapers piling up in the kitchen, dishes stacked up and unwashed, and Marion’s flu vomit uncleaned in the bathroom and bedroom, reads like something out of a horror story. Perhaps worse still was Breen’s utter disinterest in his own children, who Bjo recounts as having basically ignored.
Greyland quotes Bjo from an email exchange that occurred many years later:
I only wish someone had known how dysfunctional your family was. Had anyone noticed and spoken up about their suspicions, you kids might have been spared a great deal of trauma and harm. This was something that local people should have done. We lived too far away to judge the situation.7
The worst, by 1967, was yet to come. Greyland goes on to recount her rape by Breen in 19718. She recounts Greg, a recurring figure in the book and one of the victims key in Breen’s eventual arrest. She recounts Barry, a young delinquent that Breen and Bradley tried to adopt through entirely licit channels, only to decide against it because “he kept stealing from everyone”9. With regard to this particular episode,
Mother and Father went through all the proper channels, filled out all the right forms and lied their brains out about what was actually going on. I don’t know whether it was more a matter of the agency not looking closely enough to discern sexual abuse or my parents managing to lie convincingly while being “Famous, Important People.”
One night after the adoption effort was over, Barry sneaked into the house and I found him there. I called Lisa and Mother over a t the Love Nest, and they had him picked up by police. Tragically, when the police asked him if my father had molested him, he denied it. That meant that later when he tried to report my father for molesting him, he was not believed.10
Many of Breen’s victims were children with either no parents or, at the very least, absent fathers. Barry belonged to the former group, Greg the latter. The sexual abuse was contingent upon emotional manipulation that fed on two things: Breen’s own reflexive psychopathy and the typical neglected child’s desire for love. What Greyland describes in these relationships is exactly the sort of thing one will see described in just about every child molestation report ever written. This put several guards on his being reported: firstly, the victim’s own sense of guilt; secondly, the family situation of the child at home; and thirdly, a general sense of not wanting to rock the boat.
Much of this review has had to do more with Breen’s sexual excess than Bradley’s own abusiveness and proclivities. Apologies for that; there’s only so much space and there’s a lot to go over. It’s worth the note here that in spite of all this, all of Breen’s abuses and manipulation, Greyland insists several times that she preferred him to her mother.
Fantasy and Libido
It seems prudent to mention that there is a personal element to this book that specifically attracted my attention. I have never read Bradley’s work, though I was familiar enough with the name to recognize her from Mists of Avalon. I recognized her, moreover, from something I’d read in passing when I was much younger: as it turns out, she was the mentor—presumably in just a literary sense, though given the extent of these fandom networks in the seventies and eighties, possibly more—of Mercedes Lackey, a fantasy author whose writings I was introduced to in high school because my mother had collected so much of her work. My mother was particularly a fan of the Valdemar series, which I read just about all of what had been published by the time I was fifteen.
It’s difficult now to recount much of the stories contained in those novels, mostly because I consumed them so quickly and there was a lot going on in my life at the time. What does stick out, however, is the omnibus novel The Last Herald-Mage, a story about an extremely powerful sorcerer who grew up sickly, frail, and misunderstood—and as soon as he went away to boarding school to learn his magic, was effectively preyed upon by an older homosexual boy with a death wish. The relationship, of course, was not depicted as predatory, but glossed over with the sort of homoerotic romanticism befitting the nonsensical delusions of a 1970s love child. The omnibus contains a trilogy of novels that spans this protagonist’s whole life; the last book rather detestably includes the romance between the protagonist, now in his sixties, with the very late reincarnation of that first homosexual partner, who has no memories of his past life and is only in his mid teenage years. Reading this story as a teenager, although thoroughly indoctrinated at the time into the general sex-positive framework of homosexual advocacy thanks to public schooling and the then-prevailing liberal attitudes at large, was still striking enough that I can remember it today.
Whether Lackey herself shares the full extent of her literary mentor’s sexual ideology is impossible to tell. If I had to guess, I’d say “probably not.” That she subscribes to the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, however, and considers the beliefs of sexual deviants like Bradley to be more or less congruent with her own is self-evident. Positively depicting the sort homosexual relationship that includes something like a forty year age gap, wrapping it in the mysticism of new age pandering, and reframing coercion as romance, to say nothing of the overall frankness toward sexual openness and free love that pervades the Valdemar universe, all point toward the same sorts of attitudes.
The Last Closet illustrates well the key difference between the fantasy works of, say, the Inklings, and those of the convention-oriented geek or misfit markets. Tolkien’s works certainly found fans among the latter, certainly—Breen himself frequented a number of such fan groups in the fifties and sixties, as Greyland mentions. But the works themselves are cut from an entirely different cloth, despite sharing exterior similarities such as being about elves or taking place in magic kingdoms. The Inklings, although they may not have all shared a common Catholic mindset, did agree on a general sense of Christian morality. The fantasy market that consumed the works of Bradley, on the other hand, and likewise of those writers themselves, did not.
There is something to be said for distinguishing between the life of an artist and his work, particularly in the modern age, now that most if not all of our artists are drug-addled, sex-addicted psychotics and most if not all of our art is stupid, kitsch, or depraved. That said, of course, what shouldn’t be overlooked is when the artist inserts their moral beliefs into their work—something inescapable in literature and film, and present by a sort of aesthetic osmosis in music and the visual arts. An artist whose interior life is so willfully and purposefully disordered as to embrace, endorse, and advocate for the proliferation of grave mortal sins will find this disorder expressed in his work regardless of whether it is his intention to do so or not.
The unrepentant homosexual, one who seeks to normalize his disorder and seeks the natural order to conform to his erroneous beliefs about sexual behavior and identity, has a completely mistaken understanding of what is true, good, and beautiful. It isn’t reasonable to presume such a person capable of then expressing what is true, good, or beautiful in his writing, or his artwork, or in his music. The modern cope that artwork is merely a form of self-expression feeds directly into this justification of sexual misbehavior; if we can deny any exterior measure of aesthetics, then it becomes possible to dissociate the moral ugliness of a given work with the moral depravity of the one who made it, and even more possible to socially ostracize those who call out that ugliness for what it is.
Conclusion
There are, then, two main things to take away from The Last Closet: a justifiable wariness of sex-addled types who frame their world entirely around sensual pleasure, and the recognition that people, by and large, do not want their understanding of the world changed, even when the safety of children is at stake.
Greyland concludes her narrative with a fitting polemic against those defenders of the Obergefell decision of 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Not least of her criticisms is the oft-touted problem of same-sex couples lacking the complementarity of parenthood; two dads, even if one feigns a sense of femininity, is not the same as a mother and a father. The same obviously goes for two moms, and this is all to ignore the genetic impossibility of truly having two parents of the same sex; one will always be adoptive in order to make the unnatural union appear legitimate.
But Greyland’s criticism is more penetrating than simply repeating old talking points. The rates of child sex abuse within such “families” is a talking point that many conservative pundits refused to acknowledge before they simply surrendered same-sex marriage as a front in the culture war. And it’s not hard to guess why; pointing out that children raised in gay couples are, at low estimates, five or six times more likely to be molested—and severely abused, at that—will attract the ire of people more than willing to falsely report your words as exhortations to violence. Accusations of homophobia in the 2010s carried a lot of weight.
At the beginning of this review, it was noted that The Last Closet is less a memoir and more a combination of two things. The first is what has been detailed above. The second is this: a cross-sectional catalogue of UC Berkeley’s abject degeneracy. Most of the book takes place in this college town, and its name is somewhat infamous among even center-right conservatives as one of the primary nexuses of American psychopathy. One wonders how poorly the United States would have really fared had the Soviets nuked the neighborhood off the map in 1967, and whether we’d have been spared the grotesque psychological torture of the globalized sexual revolution instead.
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1161.
215.
321.
439.
5335.
6238.
773-74.
883.
9161.
10Ibid.
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