Throughout my life, I have had to cope with living in a series of closets. I could not admit to my parents that I wanted to be a girl because they thought girls were disgusting. I had to hide my femininity away as though I had been born sexless. I could not tell my parents that I was interested in boys because they wanted a gay child. I had to hide my conventional dreams of a family and a white picket fence away and hope I would not be found out. I couldn’t even ask them for something as simple as a doll, because a doll represented the traditional gender roles they hated and would make them think I wanted to be like one of those girls they found so disgusting.
I could never tell my parents that their revolving door of sexual insanity made me wish that I was dead. I could never, ever admit my opposition to the way they chose to live. My feelings, my anguish, and my pain all had to be locked safely away in a closet.
Throughout my childhood, I just wanted my mother and father to love each other, to love me, and to stop bringing other people home for sex. I wanted to live in a normal family where no one would hurt me and expect me to regard it as freedom.
What is The Last Closet? It is the last thing I am not supposed to be allowed to think or to feel, is the bundle of facts that lead me to oppose gay marriage and nontraditional relationships. I know from personal experience that these relationships are social constructs which only exist to create sexual anarchy and to confuse sex with love. Since sex is good, freedom is good, and love is good, sexual libertines believe we should provide sex, freedom, and love all to our children.
And then hope they don’t kill themselves as a result.
There are many people who would like to believe that my mother was not aware of my father’s crimes—especially the fans of her fiction—but this is not true. She wrote a book involving a man-boy love story when she was nineteen, The Catch Trap, and she edited Greek Love, my father’s treatise on pederasty and wrote a companion article for it. Her own court testimony clearly demonstrates her knowledge of his sexual relationships with young boys. Also in the public record is her defense of him during the 1963 “Breendoggle” scandal in the science-fiction world when they were newly involved, so it should be apparent to even her most staunch defenders that she was no victim, but rather my father’s partner in crime.
And then, there is also the fact that she herself molested both my brothers and me.
Although my father was a child molester himself and I doubt he would have objected to any of the sexual acts my mother imposed upon us, I am convinced that he objected strongly to her brutality. I feared her and loved him. One might remark, flippantly, that he was only a serial rapist while she was a violent, icy monster whose voice caused my stomach to twist up with fear. How can I paint my father as a villain when he was the one who comforted me after my mother’s assaults?
It is possible that my mother was never capable of controlling her temper or her sexual desires enough to prevent the violence she committed. I question the completeness of this view, however, because a person who commits crimes while enraged normally expresses some modicum of remorse for them afterward.
I never saw a shred of that from her.
I am not writing this book because I am looking for sympathy, nor do I need anyone to confirm or support what I have written in the pages that follow. My experience is my own, and I am primarily speaking to those unfortunates who have shared an experience that is similar to mine. You may see yourself in these pages, or you may not. My hope is to bring a measure of healing to all who need it and to give a voice to the voiceless.
Throughout this book, I have forced myself to occasionally call Walter Breen “my father” instead of “Walter,” as had been my usual habit. My brother changed his name from Patrick Russell Donald Breen to Mark Greyland as an understandable way to distance himself from our father, whom he now more customarily calls “Beardo the Weirdo.” They were once close, but I cannot blame my brother for now wanting to deny that they were even related.
In this book, I have only talked about my recollections that I have some way to independently corroborate. In a few cases, I have mentioned something that my mother or someone else told me they had seen or done. While I have omitted a number of events that I still clearly recall, the reason is that I cannot provide any material evidence to support those recollections.
Regardless, coming out of The Last Closet means I am finally free to tell the truth about my life.
If you are still trapped in a closet, I hope you will someday feel the same freedom to tell the truth about your own.
Moira Greyland
Chapter 1: The Closet is Built: My Mother’s Early Life (1930–1949)
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
—Marcellus, Hamlet; Act 1 Scene 4
My mother was born Marion Eleanor Zimmer on June 3, 1930, on a farm in Albany, New York. Her mother, Evelyn Parkhurst Conklin Zimmer, ran the farm and was a noted Scottish historian. Her father, Leslie Zimmer Sr., worked the farm and also worked as a carpenter since the farm did not produce enough to support them and he was too proud to go on welfare.
The oldest of three, my mother had two natural brothers: Leslie Jr. and the late Paul Edwin Zimmer, the youngest, as well as one adopted brother, Paul’s childhood friend Don Studebaker. From the time she was three years old Marion made up stories, which her mother would dutifully transcribe. Over time Marion, Paul and Don all became writers, although my mother was the only one to achieve significant success. Leslie Jr. did not write, and he did not get along with any of the other three siblings, being more or less a chip off the old block.
Marion’s family lived in terrible poverty during the Great Depression. She remembered owning only one dress and walking to school every morning after milking the cows and performing other farm chores. She spoke of the cows with great affection. She never got along with Leslie Jr., whom she regarded as violent, and she was often in the position of having to defend both Paul and Don from him.
Marion once quipped that her mother regarded a daughter as a “handy household gadget.” Afflicted with allergies and a serious arthritic condition, pain was a constant feature of my mother’s life. She hated housework of any sort. Once she became a mother herself, Marion tried hard to avoid all housework, preferring to be the family breadwinner instead by earning money with her writing.
Marion loved opera and had dreamed of becoming an opera singer herself one day. Every Saturday morning she would listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio while she did the ironing. She hated ironing, but listening to the opera made it tolerable for her. My mother had a beautiful singing voice, but had, as she put it, neither the health nor the money to pursue a singing career. Even so, she would often walk around the house singing operatic arias. Her love for the aria “Mi Chiamano Mimi” resulted in her brother Paul always calling her Mimi instead of Marion.
There was a cultural schism in her childhood household, where Leslie Sr. regarded women as being fit for little more than cooking and cleaning. Leslie Sr. was a typical man of his era, the sort of man Archie Bunker might have been modeled after. He was often judgmental and narrow minded. He objected to Marion’s wish to attend college and wanted her to stay home and work on the family farm. My grandmother was in favor of my mother going to college, but she would not oppose my grandfather even to help Marion, and she was firmly in agreement with him concerning cooking and cleaning being female tasks. She left Marion to fight her own battle with her father alone.
Marion loved school, regarding it as a refuge from her home. She also loved reading, especially science fiction, history, and music. The only thing she hated about school was the policy of making all girls play basketball. In the opinion of the school, the girls needed the exercise, an attitude which infuriated my mother. Between her farm chores, the constant pain of her arthritis, and the five-mile walk from her home to the school, playing basketball added insult to injury. Once she was done with school, she refused to ever exercise again.
My g
randfather must have had some good qualities in him to induce my grandmother to marry him, but those good qualities vanished once tragedy struck his life. He turned to alcohol to cope with his grief when his sister drowned, and he began to abuse his wife and his daughter. He once threw my grandmother down the stairs and savagely beat both her and my mother on occasion. He raped Marion repeatedly in her young teens, always in the front seat of the family truck. He would drive my mother far enough away to be out of the view of the house and swear her to silence. When she finally called the police about the abuse, he was arrested. However, my grandmother forced my mother to drop the charges against him because his incarceration would end their meager income and the family would starve.
After being released, my grandfather came home from jail, raped my mother once more, and told her, “Now we’re even, we can be friends.”
Marion never forgave her mother for making her drop the charges and forcing her to endure yet another rape, and yet I sometimes heard her speak with kindness toward her father although they did not remain in touch after she left home. My mother seemed to think her father had little control over himself because he was a drunk, and she blamed him less than he deserved. She often said, “People do drunk what they want to do sober.” It was as though she held her father to a lower standard and accepted his crimes as natural failings, but she could not forgive her mother for failing to stop him.
Marion did remain in contact with her mother until the latter’s death even though they did not get along.
Even as a child, my mother was emotionally strong. She was a fighter at every point, always absolutely intent on doing things her own way. She told me that the one thing she said which her mother hated most was “Me do it all myself.” Her mother, naturally, wanted to help her, but Marion’s need for independence was too great to accept it.
Marion always considered herself to be a “dwarf among giants.” She was 5’2 ¾, and very defensive about the ¾ inch, as if it helped her feel taller. I have wondered if her pretense of great physical strength and power was a compensation for the helplessness she felt when she was brutalized by her father.
I find it almost unbearable to imagine my grandfather physically overpowering my mother. It fills me with a fury and an outrage I cannot describe. I think I can understand her need to proclaim strength and endless victory, no matter what was happening. In her own heart, Marion probably felt that she had to win somehow, even if she lost. She found victory in not allowing her will to be destroyed by her father. And yet, her need to win meant that someone else had to lose.
I can imagine my mother thinking “I can’t let him win. He can’t get away with this. It is not fair for him to be bigger and stronger if this is what he is going to do.” Ironically, she ended up emulating him in many ways because to survive required strength, and he was the strongest thing in her home. Psychologists are familiar with this phenomenon; they call it “introjecting the abuser.”
Mother told me that she gave up on God because He didn’t save her from her father. The results of this decision were tragic, as over time, it encouraged tens of thousands of her readers to follow in her footsteps, away from Christianity and into a spirituality that pretended to offer more. But no matter what spiritual practice she wandered into, it amounted to the same thing: a way for her to control divinity as a substitute for her own inability to control her father.
As a result of her stubborn independence, Marion managed to get involved in a few things which upset her parents a lot. In her teens, Mother was fascinated with carnivals and dreamed of running away to the circus. She even worked in a local carnival as a target for a knife-thrower named Dino. She had a scar on her breast because Dino once accidentally struck her in the chest with a knife when a photographer’s flash momentarily blinded him. But it was always the trapeze artists that she loved the most, even though she knew that her rheumatoid arthritis would prevent her from ever becoming one.
Marion’s love for carnivals and the trapeze resulted in her early novel, The Flyers, later published as The Catch Trap. The Flyers was written in 1948 and published in 1979. It involved a love affair between a man and an underage boy. She would tell me much later that John Travolta wanted to make a movie of it, but only if he could replace the boy in the story with a girl. She was very proud of having refused Travolta and of having insisted that her story must remain exactly as she wrote it.
It seems curious that my mother’s vision of sexuality was so twisted by the age of eighteen that she would write a pederastic love story. Did her father’s rapes somehow persuade her that sexuality was invariably cross-generation and coercive? Did it seem less threatening to displace a sexual relationship onto a man and a boy than write about a coercive love interest between an older man and a less powerful and younger girl? Or was there a real-life inspiration for The Catch Trap?
I have heard but I cannot prove that my mother’s brother Don’s adoption came after he had a youthful sexual involvement with her much younger brother Paul. Since the rumors of their involvement are hearsay and I know no details, I can only speculate that Paul and Don were the inspiration for the lovers in The Catch Trap.
Where Don is an author who has been living as an openly gay man for many decades now, Paul became the kind of hyper-masculine man who refused to neuter his male cats and had children with three different women, despite only being married to one of them. He spoke with fury of anyone who tried to “neuter” men by getting in the way of their full sexual expression with anyone. If anyone had suggested Paul was gay to his face, I expect he would have angrily denied it.
Of course in many cases, same-sex liaisons between younger people do not invariably create gay adults, nor even necessarily indicate a tendency that will be reliably followed. It is entirely possible to have an experimenting child end up not only straight, but very straight indeed. There is no shortage of examples of people who have been gay for decades but eventually end up straight and married to partners of the opposite sex by choice.
Marion was involved in science-fiction fandom from the time of its inception in 1945. She was accustomed to spending hours in the school library reading everything she could find, sometimes even playing hooky from school to read at the library. Fortunately, she was well-liked by the librarians, who refused to turn her in. She especially liked the work of Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, and Leigh Brackett, often mentioning the latter in our home.
She wrote her first book in 1947, when she was seventeen: a rewrite of Bellini’s opera Norma, which was published posthumously as The Forest House. Norma is about a powerful Druidic priestess who has a forbidden relationship with a Roman and bears two children by him. He is unfaithful to her with her best friend Adalgisa, a younger and much less powerful woman. After contemplating killing her two children, she reveals the identity of her Roman lover to her people, and he is sentenced to death. She climbs atop his funeral pyre and dies with him.
It might be informative to look through my mother’s books to see if there are any positive relationships in them between older men and younger women or if all such relationships were unequal and rooted in force. There are parallels between Norma and my mother’s relationship with my unfaithful father. Walter abandoned her again and again for very young, powerless boys.
Marion was writing for pulp magazines and publishing what we call fanzines today even before she was out of high school. She was involved with Day*Star, Ad Astra, and Anything Box, which may have been the inspiration for Zenna Henderson’s 1965 short story of the same name. Her first professional sale was the short story “Outpost” from an amateur fiction contest in Amazing Stories. “Outpost” was first published in the fanzine Spacewarp, Vol. 4, no. 3 in December 1948, and then in Amazing Stories Vol. 23, No. 12 the following December.
Marion once said in an interview that she became a lesbian in her teens. Her father broke up one of her early lesbian relationships by calling the cops on her, but this only increased her determination to go h
er own way. It could be said that she had reclaimed her sexuality in a way her father was helpless to either control or to compete with. She was, in effect, conquering her rapist by repudiating his entire gender.
Marion had a number of liaisons with women, including one named Dorothy, who was the namesake for my middle name. My mother always spoke well of Dorothy. There was also a longer, very dramatic, and explosive relationship with a woman named Carrie. Marion seemed to have retained less friendship and fewer good feelings for Carrie than for Dorothy, though I do not know why. But I never knew my mother to accept any responsibility for the failure of a relationship.
She eventually met a lesbian named Barbara Grier, who introduced her to a lesbian group called The Daughters of Bilitis, founded by four lesbian couples in San Francisco in 1955. Its original purpose was to counteract the loneliness felt by lesbians and later to educate lesbians about rights and lobbying. My mother contributed to The Ladder, their newsletter which began in 1956. She also wrote for its gay counterpart: The Mattachine Review.
She wrote a succession of novels for Monarch Books (I Am a Lesbian, 1962, The Strange Women, 1962), and Corinth Books (My Sister, My Love, 1963, Twilight Lovers, 1964, and No Adam For Eve, 1966) under different pseudonyms, including “John Dexter,” “Miriam Gardner,” and “Lee Chapman.” They were considered lesbian pornography at the time, although they were much tamer than anything we would regard as pornographic today. A complete list of her pseudonyms, the works she wrote under them, and their publication dates appears in the appendix containing her bibliography.
Marion’s writing was one of several aspects of her life where she rejected femininity. In 1962, Damon Knight, whom she mentioned often at home, said that “her work is distinctively feminine in tone, but lacks the clichés, overemphasis and other kittenish tricks which often make female fiction unreadable by males.”
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