LifeSiteNews recently interviewed Moira Greyland, who was raised in a home very similar to Steven Sitler’s household. The parallels are all there, starting with “the counterculture group,” which in this case would be Christ Church, and ending with the normalization of sexual abuse of children. The following excerpt is from that interview, which you can read here. Bottom line: There is no happy ending, just horror upon horror, followed by various degrees of pain & suffering:
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May 7, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) — Moira Greyland, daughter of famed science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley, has recently published her memoirs recounting the horrific sexual abuse she and her two brothers suffered at the hands of her lesbian mother and homosexual father, Walter Breen, a famous numismatist in his own right. Greyland’s book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, has spent weeks on Amazon’s bestseller lists for Kindle and was recently published as a physical book by Castalia House.
In the following interview with LifeSite, Greyland explains the mentality and worldview that animated her parents and that led so many science fiction fans to ignore and even to accept Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen’s homosexualist and pedophilic ideologies. Greyland also provides a context for understanding the sexual deviancy that permeates Zimmer Bradley’s works, particularly her bestselling “Mists of Avalon.”
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Moira Greyland: . . . In all the counterculture groups, whether the Society for Creative Anachronism or science fiction fandom, the group becomes a stand-in for one’s own family. Fandom is full of the disaffected, the misfits, people from broken homes, even people who were rejected by their own families for one reason or another. The new surrogate family is every bit as broken as the original family, but its value is greatly exaggerated to the people who need it, because it provides not only a common frame of reference but common interests, and a sense of belonging and understanding which they might never have experienced before. . . . And the blind lead the blind. Sexual morality is questioned, loyalty to the new group is total, and the price is too high, but it does not feel as high as social annihilation. The sexual predators took reckless advantage of the need for belonging exhibited by the followers.Moira Greyland
By an absolute fluke, I ended up on the outside. I did not care if my famous mother approved of me or not. Over time, it became more and more obvious that the price of remaining in my family was to overlook conduct which would cause absolute destruction of another human being. When the person being destroyed was me, I figured I could cope. But when the person being destroyed was a child, I didn’t think I had the right to make him cope.
And I was furious at what I was being asked to overlook! How could the adults in my family encourage a woman to leave her son with my father for a week, and make sure she did not ask me, the only person in the whole family who would have told her to keep her son away from my father?
By reporting my father to the police, I broke the central rule of the community by visibly siding with the authorities against sexual license which included exploitation of a little boy. I fell on my sword and lost all my people. And it hurt, like nothing had ever hurt before. But there were gifts in the agony. I lost horrible people, not decent people, and I decisively took a moral stand that let me know I was not one of them. I would not be bought, I would not be silenced, and if it upset a million apple carts to get that little boy out of danger, it was worth it. After losing horrible people, I found decent people. People who would never have dreamed of making the sort of moral compromises my mother made every day.
For the best possible picture of the moral atmosphere of Berkeley, look to the situation in my family when my father is trying to “adopt” Barry, his twelve year old sexual partner. My mother is completely aware of what my father has been doing, and suggests that once Barry is adopted that he be a son instead of a sexual partner.
Can you imagine being in a house where the mother takes for granted the fact that her husband is sleeping with several little boys, and she is so unconcerned about it that she simply suggests the sexual relationship between her husband and a child end once he is adopted? The fact that my father had no interest in complying with her wishes was beside the point. How many women would tolerate a child being sodomized under her roof? . . .
How am I? I am not good. I am lucky in that my job allows me to work at home, where I teach voice and harp, and my performances are limited right now of necessity. I have a lot of distress from flashbacks and nightmares. I wish this was not true but it is. I had a very severe episode of major depression after writing the book, which I have only begun to come out of.
It is a blessing that I know that it is a major depressive episode, rather than buying into every stray thought which walks across my head. It does not reduce the pain to know it is only a depressive episode, but it does reduce the chance of my doing anything irrevocably stupid. I think of it as having “bad brain” rather than using my misery as an excuse for self-reproach or self-hatred which would only compound the issue.
The part which many people do not understand is this. It is not thinking about the past which is the problem. It is the fact that severe trauma rewires your brain and alters your responses to things. Where a normal person would not respond at all to about a million different things, from a loud noise, the sound of someone crying, or even a tap on the shoulder, my brain interprets these things as catastrophic danger or threat.
I have taught myself to reality-test very quickly and shut down my inappropriate responses to things, but although I can minimize and shorten my response, I cannot alter it or eliminate it. This is isolating, because I know if I am in public and someone taps me on the shoulder, I will gasp in terror and look like an idiot for several seconds before I shut it down, apologize, and do my best to act normal.
People always want to know if it was healing and cathartic to write the book. Healing? No. Maybe. Cathartic? Yes.
The popular notion is that a catharsis will bring healing. It can, but the trouble with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is that a catharsis can be profoundly retraumatizing, like ripping off a scab, or re-breaking a partially set fracture.
I wrote my book because I thought the story needed telling, not because I expected it to heal me. I have spent many years reading and studying, learning to stay calm instead of dissolving in terror and tears and panic. But still, those are my first responses, no matter how quickly I have learned to blunt them.
Writing the book has allowed me to come to some unwelcome conclusions, like understanding the pivotal events when I was ten in the destruction of my relationship with my father. So many things float by and we do not necessarily understand what they mean at the time.
But frankly, writing the book was the most excruciating task I have ever done. It is my hope that it will empower others to speak up against their own trauma, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the perps and at the feet of the idiots who dreamed up the sexual anarchy which made so much of it possible. . . .
If nothing else, I hope my book will demonstrate that a pedophile is not an unmarried straight man born in a trenchcoat who hangs around playgrounds and entices children with candy. Pedophiles are married, have gay and straight sex, usually lots of it, and look like everyone else.
How are my siblings? My brother David died in his fifties, estranged from my mother but in close contact with my cousin Ian. He never married, though he was in a long term relationship with a woman who did not always live with him. He died quite suddenly from heart failure. He lived on SSI, complete disability. He had had a head injury resulting in epilepsy, but I am positive it was more than that.
My brother Mark is still alive at 53, and his health is very bad. He has poorly controlled diabetes. He lived with me for a time, but I asked him to move to Greyhaven, our multigenerational family home, after two episodes of diabetic coma nearly killed him. I figured that where I am often traveling or performing out of town, at Greyhaven, there were plenty of people who would look in on Mark every day, and he would not be risking coma like he would be by being alone in my house.
Poor self-care is very common among the severely traumatized. Passive suicide, the same. It cannot be ignored or minimized. Like most men, my brother is quite stoic, and suffered in silence. As a result, his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been virtually untreated. I cannot begin to describe to you how distressing PTSD is when there is no way to understand what is happening. There is a reason so many vets with PTSD kill themselves. It hurts less than being alive. . . .
So how are my siblings? Dead, nearly dead, and in my case, not dead.
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May God deliver Moira Greyland from her past.