The Story of Moira Greyland
I was born into a family of famous gay pagan authors in the late Sixties. My mother was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and my father was Walter Breen. Between them, they wrote over 100 books: my mother wrote science fiction and fantasy (Mists of Avalon), and my father wrote books on numismatics: he was a coin expert.
What they did to me is a matter of unfortunate public record: suffice to say that both parents wanted me to be gay and were horrifed at my being female. My mother molested me from ages 3-12. The first time I remember my father doing anything especially violent to me I was five. Yes he raped me. I don’t like to think about it. If you want to know about his shenanigans with little girls, and you have a very strong stomach, you can google the Breendoggle, which was the scandal which ALMOST drummed him out of science fiction fandom.
More profoundly, though was his disgust with my gender, despite his many relationships with women 
and female victims. He told me unequivocally that no man would ever want me, because all men are secretly gay and have simply not come to terms with their natural homosexuality. So I learned to act mannish and walk with very still hips. You can still see the traces of my conditioning to reject my femininity in my absolute refusal to give in and my outspokenness, and my choice of theatrical director for much of my life. But a good part of my outspokenness is my refusal to accept the notion that “deep down I must be a boy born in a girl’s body.” I am not. I am a girl reviled for being a girl, who tried very hard to be the “boy” they wanted.
and female victims. He told me unequivocally that no man would ever want me, because all men are secretly gay and have simply not come to terms with their natural homosexuality. So I learned to act mannish and walk with very still hips. You can still see the traces of my conditioning to reject my femininity in my absolute refusal to give in and my outspokenness, and my choice of theatrical director for much of my life. But a good part of my outspokenness is my refusal to accept the notion that “deep down I must be a boy born in a girl’s body.” I am not. I am a girl reviled for being a girl, who tried very hard to be the “boy” they wanted.
Suffice to say I was not their only victim of either gender. I grew up watching my father have “romances” (in his imagination) with boys who were a source of frustration because they always wanted food and money as a result of the sex they were subjected to, and didn’t want HIM. (OF COURSE!) I started trying hard to leave home when I was ten, after the failure of my first suicide attempt, and to intervene when I was 13 by telling my mother and her female companion that my father was sleeping with this boy. Instead of calling the cops, like any sensible human being, they simply moved my father into their apartment, which I called “The Love Nest” and they moved back into our family home.
Naturally that made things much worse. I had already been couch-surfing at the home of my directors from the Renaissance Faire for some time, but nobody could take me all the time. As might be imagined, where my father was, there were teenaged boys, drugs, and not a whole lot of food, though I wasn’t really starved in my teens once my mother’s books began to sell really well. I lived all kinds of places as a teen, though I moved back in with my father when I started college.
One day he brought an eleven year old boy to stay with us for a week, with his mother’s permission, which horrified me. I made sure he had a room and bedding. When I saw my father holding him upside down kissing him all over, and saw the porn books out, I called my counselor who had already agreed to call the cops if I ever saw anything happen, and my father was arrested. For that offense, he was given three years of probation. However, word got around, and a man who had given him a place to stay in Los Angeles realized his son was of the age to be a target, and asked questions, which resulted in my father’s conviction on 13 counts of PC 288 A, B, C, and D. (Suffice to say that these are varying kinds of forcible sexual offenses that should never be committed on anyone, let alone a child!)
He died in prison in 1993, after my initial report in 1989. It should be noted that far from being a first offender, his first arrest had been in 1948, when he was 18.
As might be imagined, although my mother was perfectly well aware of my father’s crimes, and so was my “stepmother,” I was disbelieved almost up to the moment of his conviction, and discounted as “hysterical.” Again, much of that is in the public record: my mother’s cold indifference and my stepmother’s pretense of complete lack of responsibility is sickening in and of itself. Her words ought to suffice. She knew what he wanted to do.
At no time did I try to get justice for myself, because in my moral structure I was the protector of others and I loved my father very much. So although I thought I could forgive my father for what he did to me, in no way did I think it was my place to forgive him for what he did to someone else, and his latest victim was not a hooker, but an innocent child who was very badly hurt.
In any case, where my family had closed ranks around my father to protect him, more recently they’ve closed ranks around my nameless male relative, who stands accused of molesting his ex-boy-lover’s kids, whom he thinks of as his “grandchildren” as he “adopted” his boy-lover as his “son.” Yes I know, that is so sickening it is hard to read, and I am very sorry. Once more I am marginalized, called “crazy” and “hysterical” because after all, why would someone with a long history of molesting teenaged boys keep doing it? So as I did when I turned my father in, I’ve moved away. I made a police report, as did my students, who were horrified by what he said about his “grandkids.”
Now it should be noted that boy lovers do not think of what they are doing as “molestation.” To them it is sex, they imagine it is consensual, and any objections will certainly be overridden by the orgasms they are certain they can produce, and it is the shame of these orgasms that silences the boy-victims, and persuades them they “must” be gay. (Regardless of subsequent heterosexual marriages and children.)
Apparently, 33 reports against my nameless male relative for pedophilia were not enough, and he’ll skate on all this. Not my circus: not my monkeys. I did what I could, and I am easy to find, if ever I am needed to testify. Pardon my fatalism, but serial sexual offenders don’t stop, and there is likely to be another victim. Either someone will come forward, or he’ll offend again, or perhaps, being that he is older, he’ll pass on before he ever has any consequences.
Between the time of my reports of father’s offense and my nameless male relative’s, I went and got a Bachelor of Music Performance, and had a career as a wedding harpist and singer, then I married and had children, then I got a Master of Music Performance, and since 2007 I have mainly taught voice and harp and directed operas with two opera companies I founded: one in Southern CA and one in Northern CA. I also made an album of Celtic music. Yet I’ve always been dissatisfied with my career: artists need to tell their story, and mine was rather too ugly to be told.
Yes, I stupidly returned to Northern CA. My beloved cousin’s wife was dying of cancer and I wanted to be part of a family, hoping that since my father was dead his evil might have died with him. I was wrong.
Last June, (2014) a blogger named Deirdre Saoirse Moen asked me if there was any truth to the rumors about my parents, and I told her yes, that both of them had molested me and my brother as well as a HOST of other children, and I sent her two poems that I had written about that, never having breathed a word about what they had done to me in public before.
She printed my emails and poems on her blog, which promptly went to 92 countries around the world, to my utter shock. I was flooded with letters from survivors of sexual abuse, all of which I tried to answer promptly with sympathy and warmth, (which knocked me out, emotionally, in a way I can barely describe!) Everyone who wanted to send money, I asked them to send it to RAINN (Rape Abuse Incest National Network) and there were even anthology authors associated with my mother who turned over every cent of their royalties from her to charity. Other people burned their copies of her books, because they couldn’t stand to sell them and make any money off her evil. Still other people deleted her works from their Kindles and iPads.
The reason I have given, and stand by for not talking is this: I know many people found value in my mother’s books, and I did not want to harm them or disturb their lives. Thus my shock and embarrassment at how far this story went. Ironically, the survivors who benefited from her books have found more strength in standing against abuse than with her, and my admiration for them is ongoing!
Naturally, there was a lot of debate about her and my father. Every time someone tried to doubt my story, a hundred people would shout them down. The age-of-consent creeps came out and were also shouted down. I was, to my shock, believed. After watching what had happened to Woody Allen’s daughter, I had no expectation of anything other than a virtual public execution were I so stupid as to speak out, but in a way, my mother “protected” me with her OWN WORDS. She had testified, blandly, when accused of molesting me, that “children don’t have erogenous zones” and didn’t bother denying tying me to a chair and attacking me with a pair of pliers, claiming she was going to pull out my teeth. With her cold admissions, nobody could put much of ANYTHING past her.
In any event, since the truth came out, the pedophilic themes in her books became very obvious to people who had previously chalked them up to history or the license granted to an author of fiction. My father had written, with her editorial assistance, a book of apologetics for sex between adults and children called “Greek Love” under the pseudonym “J.Z. Eglinton.” All of a sudden, nobody could have any question about what had been so obvious to me all along.
So what has changed since last June? Since my (and others) report of my nameless male relative back in November and my decision to go No Contact with my family due to their response, it began to dawn on me that maybe the gayness WAS an issue. Naturally, I had been brought up to be completely tolerant. Years ago I read Satinover, who believed that gays were largely “pansexual” that is, preferring sex with EVERYONE of EVERY age and EVERY gender rather than wanting to be limited to one person, and he regarded it, credibly, as a moral and ethical problem, rather than a sexual “orientation.” I can’t tell you how many lesbians I know who simply hate men, or who have been raped and can’t face sex with men because of that. For me, my research about homosexuality was almost a guilty secret: me thinking the unthinkable. After all, gayness had always been presented to me as the natural state: I was “hung up” and a “prude” because despite my mother’s pleading with me to “try it the other way” and “how could I possibly know I was straight?” I just couldn’t hack being gay myself.
My observation of my father and mother’s actual belief is this: since everyone is naturally gay, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited. Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become “who they really are.” It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other “isms.” If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be “normal” and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish. As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as “straight culture” goes the way of the dinosaur. As my mother used to say: “Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”
I know, I know. The stupidity of that particular thesis is boundless, and the actual consequence is forty-year-olds in therapy for sexual abuse, many, many suicides, and ruined lives for just about EVERYONE. But someone needed to say it. Will anyone hear it? There were six Johnny Does at my father’s trial, who would not testify, and two victims, who did. One of the victims I am in touch with. He was silenced so fiercely by fans of my mother years ago that he is not able to talk about it to this day. I don’t know the fate of all the Johnny Does, but I do know one of them is dead in his forties from an eating disorder, never having been able to talk about what happened, and I know at least one of the people on the list of 22 names I gave the cops as a potential abuse victim died from suicide last year. I also know a number of victims of my father who would not testify because they love him. As a personal note, I can understand why: of my parents, he was by far the kinder one. After all, he was only a serial rapist. My mother was an icy, violent monster whose voice twisted up my stomach.
A very brief note on my “stepmother:” she now denies ever having been gay, after 22 years with my mother, and she has married a man. So what was was she “born”? Was she born gay, and is now living in “denial” of her “true nature” as the gays would have it, or was she besotted in a childish way with my mother, who did what celebrities do, and took advantage of her innocence and emotional infantility? She was 26 when she got involved with my mother, and told me later she felt she had been “molested” by my mother. I can’t use that word for her: she was 26. But she DID call my mother “mommy” and most of the emotional content of their relationship was an attempt to prove that she was a “better daughter” than I was: a competition that for me, was over before it began. I am my mother’s daughter. It is a biological reality. Giving my mother orgasms does not make my stepmother a better daughter, simply a fool. And as it can be noted now, she MUST be the “better daughter” because I blew the whistle. I don’t speak to her.
This March I met Katy Faust online: one of the six children of gays who filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court opposing gay marriage. We corresponded, and I left CA. I am still reeling from the death of my last bits of denial. It IS the homosexuality that is the problem. It IS the belief that all sex all the time will somehow cure problems instead of creating them that is the problem.
So I have begun to speak out against gay marriage, and in doing so, I have alienated most of even my strongest supporters. After all, they need to see my parents as wacky sex criminals, not as homosexuals following their deeply held ethical positions and trying to create a utopia according to a rather silly fantasy. They do not have the willingness to accept the possibility that homosexuality might actually have the result of destroying children and even destroying the adults who insist on remaining in its thrall.
Now for all well-meaning people who believe I am extrapolating from my experience to the wider gay community, I would like to explain why I believe this is so: From my experience in the gay community, the values in that community are very different: the assumption is that EVERYONE is gay and closeted, and early sexual experience will prevent gay children from being closeted, and that will make everyone happy.
If you doubt me, research “age of consent” “Twinks,” “ageism” and the writings of the NUMEROUS authors on the Left who believe that early sexuality is somehow “beneficial” for children.
Due to my long experience with the BSDM community (bondage/discipline, Sado-Masochism) it is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are. To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.
What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial, and the sure knowledge (don’t think for a second that they DON’T know) that the only way to produce another homosexual is to provide a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be “ruined” by attraction to a girl.
If you’re OK with that, and you might not be, it is worth your consideration. If you think I am wrong, that is your privilege, but watch out for the VAST number of stories of sexual abuse AND transgenderism that will come about from these gay “marriages.” Already the statistics for sexual abuse of children of gays are astronomically high compared to that suffered by the children of straights.
Naturally my perspective is very uncomfortable to the liberal people I was raised with: I am “allowed” to be a victim of molestation by both parents, and “allowed” to be a victim of rather hideous violence. I am, incredibly, NOT ALLOWED to blame their homosexuality for their absolute willingness to accept all sex at all times between all people.
But that is not going to slow me down one bit. I am going to keep right on speaking out. I have been silent for entirely too long. Gay “marriage” is nothing but a way to make children over in the image of their “parents” and in ten to thirty years, the survivors will speak out.
In the meantime, I will.
Moira Greyland
**Note from Katy Faust: This is the first time that Moira has chosen to tell her story publicly. She and I had very different childhoods, and both perspectives are valid. Respectful comments and questions for Moira are welcome. Degrading and slanderous comments won’t see the light of day.
