Everyone didn’t know. Some people had observed some behavior of Breen’s they thought was sketchy, and said so. Some thought Breen was sketchy because he was a long-haired weirdo a few years early. ...
Some collected third-hand stories and decided that Fandom Had To Take Action Now!!! Some suggested that anyone who had enough info to act on should go to the police, instead of publishing “secret” fanzines.
Some believed the gossip *because* Breen was a long-haired weirdo. That is: long-haired weirdo = depraved = sexual deviant = pedophile = guilty of everything charged or suspected.
Counter-arguments to that included “Law and Justice don’t work that way,” and “Fandom doesn’t have the expertise, resources, or authority to investigate & prosecute this matter.”
The public thrash that followed did horrible damage to fandom and the people in it. As is often the case, the more thoughtful and engaged participants took the most hurt.
The Breendoggle fan feuds shared the primary characteristic of an Internet pile-on: no single individual involved thought they were responsible for what happened.
The difference was that the Breendoggle took place on paper, exchanged via surface mail, so it went on for well more than a year. I’ve been in thrashes like that. The minutes don’t hurt any less. There are just more of them.
These were bitter fights, and because the argument had so many angles, they came at people from all directions. Couples split. Old friendships were wrecked. Writers and publications shut down, too heartsick to continue.
To be clear: real, identifiable human beings took emotional damage that perceptibly changed their outlook, behavior, writing, and social interactions, in many cases for the rest of their lives.
I was eight years old when the Breendoggle got started. Decades later, when I got into fanzine fandom, you could still see people flinch if the subject got mentioned.
Few of them had had direct personal experience or knowledge of Walter Breen’s doings. This was true from the start. They knew there’d been accusations, and that the accusers may not have handled things terribly well.
There was no Internet Archive where you could read the original documents. Most fanzines had a circulation in the low hundreds. A fraction of that number survived in the collections of still-active fans.
If you knew and lived near that collector, and knew there was something from that period to ask about, and he was willing to haul them out of storage for you;
and if he had the fortitude to recollect and explain it all, and you could make enough sense of that vanished social context and cast of characters to understand what you were reading —
— then you could have been just as confused and appalled as anyone else who read them when they were being published.
There were many publications (plus a great deal of personal correspondence). No one saw them all. There weren’t all that many fans who saw most of them. Few fans my age or younger have seen any.
Another important point: MZB was never named as an abuser or enabler in the original fan feuds. There was no whiff of her being involved in whatever had been going on.
Bay Area fandom had a sort of ongoing unease about the MZB/Breen household and social surround — which I believe would still have been present if the Breendoggle had never happened.
Most of them knew at least the outlines of the story. For them, it was a local event. The worldcon in question was Pacificon II, in Oakland.
The Breen/MZB household had ties to the SCA, and there was that whole fiction scene around MZB, but aside from that they didn’t mix much with the rest of Bay Area fandom.
(If people more central to the Bay Area fannish scene are reading this, I invite their corrections and additions.)
SF pros who didn’t start out in fandom knew zip about this stuff. Vox Day’s claim that SF prodom knew there was abuse and covered it up is just another of his many lies. (The Pups, of course, profess to believe it.)
I found out about MZB’s involvement at the same time everyone else did, when her daughter went public with the story. My immediate thought was, “So much for any lingering doubt about Walter Breen.”
Semi-random conclusions:
1. Do not blame this one on the SF community. It was fandom that raised the initial alarm, and attempted (very awkwardly) to deal with it.
1. Do not blame this one on the SF community. It was fandom that raised the initial alarm, and attempted (very awkwardly) to deal with it.
2. Don’t blame fandom for declining to try Breen in a kangaroo court. There was nothing good it could have accomplished.
3. The thrash incited by initial attempts to try Breen in a kangaroo court did horrible damage, AND made it harder to talk about the subject for many years thereafter.
4. It’s called the Breendoggle because the original inciting publication was called The Great Breen Boondoggle. That’s history. It has nothing to do with present-day mindsets.
5. Wanting to protect abused children does not oblige you to give credence to Vox Day’s stupid malicious lies about the SF immunity, and you won’t like the company you’ll find yourself keeping.
6. Make friends with neos and kids. Invite them along.
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