The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  Traditional relationships are a “machine of death,” and sexualized, molesting adult-child relationships are not? The opposite is true. Children have always done best in families, protected by parents. It is pedophilia which brings misery, behavioral problems, drug abuse, and suicide.

  “We consider contacts which involve pressure, coercion, extortion, or prohibition to be incidences of violence rather than paedophilia. Those who claim that paedophilia consists of abuse, rape, and sadistic force are furthering the fascist discrimination of paedophile love. For us, however, it is fascist to imprison children in families so that no other kinds of relationships are possible.”

  Since children cannot oppose adult wishes, how on earth can pressure, coercion, and so forth ever be separated from pedophilia? Pedophilia is abuse and rape. Claiming that children are “imprisoned” rather than protected by families is insane. This is an extension of the mentality which denies that rape is rape unless one is thrown down in a gutter and raped by a stranger.

  “Paedophilia is our only means of preventing motherhood from being the only permitted form of living together with children. We attack the rapist father, but in no way allow ourselves to be forced into a motherly power relationship/dependency. We demand that children be given rights rather than protection, so that they can escape from families which they do not like or where they are mistreated.”

  Fathers are attacked, motherhood is assaulted, and the dependency of children on adults is vilified. This boils down to wanting children unprotected so they can be sexual targets. A child’s discontent with his or her family is now an excuse for sexual abuse of the child, really?

  “The emancipation of women is not possible without the emancipation of children and childhood. A satisfying sexuality cannot be achieved without discussing the forbidden/suppressed topics of lesbian and child sexuality, without abolishing the divisions between body zones, sexuality and tenderness, sexual and non-sexual areas, age differences, and work. They try to separate every girl and woman from her sexuality so that they can later only function as sperm receptacles and mothers.”

  Sexuality can only be “satisfying” if it is between adults and children, resulting in the sexualization of all relationships? So much for all of human history.

  “Girls are destroyed by adults so that their resistance is broken and they let themselves be treated as victims and protected. They must put up with everything until they give in and are no longer able to resist the macho state. They then pass on this inability to other girls, rather than joining with them to offer resistance…”

  Girls are supposedly abused by men, but the author wants to paint female sexual abusers as emancipators. The author confuses freedom with her wish that female children would want to be sexually abused by adult women.

  “They know that children can become sexually excited, but they forbid sexual gratification. No opposition to families, schools, homes, and the whole moral world remains; rather their influence is becoming ever more widespread. Special courses for teachers, training programs to teach kindergarten children to say ”no" and other such devices to protect children are contrivances to help and protect adults and the state, because they do not allow children to say “yes.” They are the complement to or the substitute for male violence.”

  Children having the capacity for sexual arousal does not mean that they have the need for such arousal, especially from adults! Teaching children to say no to sexual abuse by adults is a way to protect them, even if it spoils the fun of would-be molesters.

  “We are the victims when … other campaigners make no distinction between relationships based on mutual consent and relationships based on force. But they force us to live according to their ideas which they think are suitable for our modern times. We do not want to give any state money to the ”wildwassers" nor do we want to help the pedagogues to control us, but we want to live with children.”

  The poor author paints herself as a victim because she confuses a child’s inability to refuse a sexual overture from an adult with “consent.” Children cannot consent to sexual relationships because there is no way for them to understand the consequences. The author says she wants to live with children. What she means is that she wants to separate children from their parents and have sexual encounters with them, imagining that this will somehow be beneficial. Lunacy.

  There you have it. Pedophilia is the inevitable result of limitless sexual “freedom,” and its defenders are hiding in plain sight in the gay community. My mother and father agreed about molesting children and agreed to live together with this shared outlook. In both my mother and my father’s writings on pedophilia, their premise was the same as that given by the other pro-pedophile writers quoted in this chapter. They all want society to “understand” these “relationships” and judge them by their results.

  Of course, judging these “relationships” by their results might not result in the conclusions my mother might want. In the examples from my mother’s article the usual outcome of a pedophilic relationship is heartbreak or suicide, and in the examples presented by the other lesbian writers the result of being the victim of a lesbian pedophile is to become a lesbian pedophile.

  Invariably, pedophilia is framed by pedophiles in terms of “children’s rights.” Not the rights of children to bodily autonomy and protection from predatory adults but the alleged right to have sex with adults. Those of us who lose parents to insanity, neglect, or death seek substitute parents, for love and nurturing, not for sex. Sex is something we are expected to endure, just as we are expected to endure beatings and whatever else our parents choose to put us through. It is facile and repulsive to hear anyone pretending that their wish to predate overrides our need for safety.

  Talking to a broken adult thirty years after the offense is not the same as talking to a motherless child who is paying for companionship in a twisted and inescapable way. The adult victim might show her wounds, which do not heal. The child-victim is often too frightened to speak, let alone being able to get help. There is no good result, and the judgment on adults who commit these crimes should be swift.

  Chapter 7: What Haunted the House of my Brother’s Birth? (1964–1972)

  “I was born in a house of cards

  I can feel the wind blowing under my bed

  A bad breeze, a cold breeze, hatred and danger

  And no way out that isn’t worse instead.”

  —Moira Greyland

  My brother Patrick Russell Donald Breen, now called Mark Archer Greyland, was born on Halloween of 1964. In later years, he took exception that my mother had named him for Patrick Breen—a member of the infamous Donner Party. No, it was no accident. My mother would have sprouted wings and flown away before she would have missed a literary reference.

  My father did not anticipate that in breeding pet children, one cannot choose their IQ or their interests or anticipate their level of sexual compliance. Where my father loved talking math, music, hallucinogens, and sex with high-IQ children, his interest in us beyond those dimensions was minimal. He wanted conversation and sex. Period. Dressing us, providing meals, doctor visits, or helping us with homework was not interesting to him. Although it is wrong to abdicate all parts of child rearing which do not further personal goals, my father only did what he wanted to do, and anyone who wanted his time and attention was stuck with his interests.

  My brother David left home in 1964, shortly after my father arrived. Although my mother testified in court that at fourteen, he was a little older than the boys my father preferred and that David allegedly liked my father, he voted with his feet and left. Why? He told me that they both invited him to bed. Yes, you read that right.

  Mother and Father lived with my brother Patrick at 1300 Arch Street in North Berkeley. I will relate the household lore about the Arch Street house, not because I believe it, but because they believed it and because my brother Patrick still believes it. It may give insight into the level of suspension of disbelief required in our fami
ly.

  Mother lost a twin in both her first pregnancies and claimed that Patrick’s twin haunted the house. She would tell us in later years that the twin would violently rock the cradle when Patrick was not in it, and she could sometimes see him lying next to Patrick when he was sleeping. She claimed that babysitters refused to stay when they discovered that they could not endure the sound of a baby crying when the only baby they could find was sleeping. Mother claimed that there was a room in the lower story that nobody could ever go into because of the “astral cold” and because it was haunted by a pair of floating eyes.

  Why did it have to be floating eyes? Why not a floating nose or a few floating ears? It could be surmised that this could be an unsurprising consequence of when a fantasy author like my mother is stuck doing baby care instead of writing stories: Her stories leak over into her life. I know I am supposed to believe the stories, but they sound preposterous to me.

  The question that really matters is this: What was haunting that house? Are we seriously to believe that a couple of rational adults think their house is haunted, or might something else be going on? Was the house haunted by pain and misery, and as usual, my mother turned her own feelings and desires into storytelling? Could it be that my father was already proving himself to be less than ideal as a husband and a father, or did we, perhaps, really have floating eyes in our basement? You’ll have to make up your own mind. I find it hard to swallow this kind of lore, especially when the source is a noted author of fiction. Why would this not be simply another fiction, and perhaps the reality was much more boring? Perhaps the “ghosts” in our house amounted to my mother and my father sharing a house and populating it with all their old baggage and misery from their lives before.

  My mother was deeply in love with my father, and by all appearances he was deeply in love with her. She mentioned him running after her in an airport, shrieking, “Beloved!” She felt that this was a mark of devotion rather than derangement. To be fair, she also mentioned a time that he tried to strangle her on the steps of the opera house. I did not witness either event, but Mother remembered them. It should be noted that this encompassed the range of conduct which my mother was willing to accept from my father.

  In the context that my mother had married a man who was already sexually active with several teenaged and younger children and now had inadvertently driven off her oldest son, could it be that the chickens were coming home to roost in the form of a marriage vow that could not result in anything good for my mother?

  After all, the one thing my mother could never be was a teenage boy.

  Chapter 8: Science Experiment (1966)

  I was not born for love

  I was not born for need

  And no human reason would do,

  But Mom thought her genes

  Would go well with his genes

  And my Daddy liked him a lot too.

  Worse luck, Mom and Dad

  Though it made you sad

  You both ended up in the sack

  And your eugenic plan

  Raise a high-IQ clan

  Was now something you couldn’t get back.

  —Moira Greyland, Science Experiment

  My father wanted the high-IQ children he bred to have different fathers so that he could observe the level of IQ variance the different fathers would produce. He was not particular about the age of his intended fathers and chose the sixteen-year old boy genius Kevin Langdon to be my biological father. However, my mother became pregnant by my father before they could arrange for another breeding encounter with Kevin. Kevin Langdon and I later became friends, and a DNA test confirmed that he is not my father.

  He wrote this description of his relationship with my father at my request.

  When I saw Moira’s statement that she was writing about Walter’s youth I had a strange reaction, because when I met Walter I was 16 and he was an “old man” of about 30.

  When I was 15 and 16 I participated in a program, in my last semester in high school, at UC Berkeley. A few other students and I went to Berkeley for half of each day; the other half we were at San Rafael High. Then in the Fall, still 16, I began my Freshman year at Berkeley.

  Partway through my first semester I met Walter Breen on campus. We immediately recognized that we had a lot of intellectual interests in common. Walter became a mentor to me, exposing me to many things that I hadn’t known about before, including the ideas of thinkers in a wide variety of fields, classical music, and unusual cultural practices of various kinds, including science-fiction fandom, Mensa, and alternative sexuality.

  Walter never approached me in a sexual manner, though he made no secret of his sexual inclinations. Perhaps I was outside his preferred age range. He did include me in a threesome with Marion for a short time but there was no sexual contact between Walter and me.

  Walter also carefully avoided the subject of drugs. I knew nothing about his use of pot—and that created an unfortunate situation. One summer Walter was away for several months and he let me stay in his apartment while he was gone. One of Walter’s and my friends, Dennis Crain, visited me at Walter’s and raided his stash of drugs; I was completely unaware of what he was up to. When Walter returned he was furious.

  Walter became one of my closest friends. We spent a lot of time together, one-to-one and in the context of the strange science-fiction fandom scene in the Bay Area in the 60s and the also-strange Mensa community. The cultural revolution was in full swing and all kinds of conventional ideas were put into question; it was hard to have a sense of which way was up in the midst of the chaos. Walter was a weirdo in the kingdom of the weird and for a time everything went well.

  Walter was the editor of the fandom newsletter Fanac. That put him at the center of a lot of the action and he did a very good job of covering it. The scene in fandom in the 60s was very active and very weird, weird enough that Walter was only one of many strange characters who were a part of it.

  However, when the news got out regarding Walter’s sexual offenses many people were appalled and condemned him—but others defended him. It created a huge sensation.

  Walter was barred from attending a Worldcon in the SF Bay Area in the early 1960s, but the organizers of the meeting relented and allowed him to attend the last day.

  I stayed in touch with Walter for many years, but with considerably less contact after the early 1970s.

  —Kevin Langdon

  Here is a selection from my mother’s testimony on the subject. Notice that she lied about his age as she did with the other young men who shared their bed, claiming he was “21 or 22” rather than 16.

  MR. DOLAN: Who was Kevin?

  MZB: He was a young man. At that time there were many multiple marriages, and at that time Walter and Kevin formed a triangle. It went on only for a short time.

  MR. DOLAN: Okay. How old was Kevin?

  MZB: I think he was 21 or 22.”

  I was born on January 10, 1966 in Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, CA. At the time, our family was living in my mother’s dream house on Regent Street in Berkeley.

  I was named Moira Evelyn Dorothy Breen for a few reasons. First for Moira Shearer, the prima ballerina from “The Red Shoes;” then Evelyn for my grandmother, and Dorothy was a woman my mother had been involved with. My initials were no accident: “MEDB,” or Medhbh (Maeve) as it would be rendered in Gaelic, was the name of the evil queen in the most famous tale in Irish mythology, The Táin Bó Cúailnge or “Cattle Raid of Ulster.”

  If that isn’t a preposterous intellectual affectation, I don’t know what is.

  My mother has related a lot of drama to me about my birth. Because she was diabetic, I was nearly ten pounds, and it was debilitating for her to have such a large baby. My shoulders were so broad that the doctor had to break my collarbone to deliver me; she told me that she literally died on the operating table.

  She claimed to have had a near death experience, relating the story with her characteristic drama. While she was “dead,” sh
e met people from her past who told her she could come back and raise the girl she had always wanted or leave me with him to raise.

  Where she was in a terrible situation during my birth, I also had to be revived, but that was much less important in her story. I was “born blue”: not breathing, with the cord wrapped around my neck. I survived as you might have guessed, but what does that matter? Her story makes much better reading, with a death, mysterious words from beyond the grave… Perhaps I am simply a buzz-kill, with no aliens, and no otherworldly voices. I was just a child.

  My mother’s perspective on my birth might lend perspective to everything else in this book. She told me again and again that I “killed her.” It was strange to reflect on the fact she felt it would be so dangerous for my father to raise me that she literally “came back from the dead” to save me from him.

  No matter how many times I have heard this story, I have never been able to accept her contention that she had “always wanted a girl.” After all, I caused her no end of trouble. She also told me that my father never got over the shock of being the father of a girl. She said this as though having a girl could be genuinely shocking to a man, even shocking enough to permanently injure any man forced to endure such a unexpected event. I can make no sense of it though. I have met many fathers who have never described the concept of having a daughter as being shocking in any way.

  With her usual disregard for boundaries, my mother told me that my father never had sex with her again after I was born. It seemd as if she repeated this story to me almost a million times. Walter told me in later years that he had begun to find her to be physically repulsive due to the weight she gained during her pregnancy with me. Marion, on the other hand, believed from that her pregnancy―or perhaps the shock of his wife bearing him a daughter—had rendered him impotent, which was exactly what he wanted her to believe.