Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley

Last year, in a post about that year’s harassment scandal at Wiscon Natalie Luhrs wrote:

I’ve also seen a handful of posts about how, at science fiction conventions, women will work together to let each other know who the serial harassers and creepers are. I find this extremely interesting because I have never been warned about anyone at any of the conventions I’ve attended.

Which I had to think about when reading about the revelations of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s (sexual) abuse of her daughter. It had been public knowledge since at least 2000 that MZB had enabled her husband, Walter Breen’s abuse, who would ultimately be convicted of it, but that she herself was abusive was news to me and a lot of other science fiction fans. The question is, as Agent Mimi put it why didn’t we know earlier, when all the evidence had been there. Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims?

Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so. In the years and decades since, those who knew about Breen and MZB kept schtum and if you weren’t in the know, you didn’t get to know until Stephen Goldin put up the court documents.

But even after this, fandom hasn’t been open, hasn’t been willing to draw lessons from this horrible history, still by and large thinks it’s better to leave molestors in peace than to risk excluding people, is willing to stay silent. What MZB and Breen did and why they did it in fandom is the logical result of a culture that tolerated Asimov’s butt pinching, Randall Garrett’s propositioning or Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis.

There’s a culture of harassment in fandom, mostly of women by men, which fandom has known about and tolerated (or evne actively encouraged) for decades, where those women lucky enough to have the connections were warned against those know to be harassers (everybody knew Jim Frenkel was one of them, but nobody was willing or felt able to say so out loud until Elise Matthesen did so. Because of that culture of silence, those who do get harassed, often those without the network, new to fandom or for some reason an outsider, feel they’re the only ones to have suffered and are less likely to report it, justifiably thinking that they won’t be taken seriously if they do report being harassed by somebody famous.

The “new” revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own actiosn therefore should serve as a wakeup call to fandom, not only to take harassment seriously, develop policies about it, but also to be honest and open about its (our) own history, acknowledge that we do have a problem providing safe spaces for everybody and that we need to change that.