Banning books is never right

By Alfred P. Doblin

This is Banned Books Week, and to be clear, since we are living in strange times, the week was launched by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982 not to celebrate the banning of books, but rather “in response to a sudden surge in the number of book challenges in libraries, schools, and bookstores.”

That quote from the ALA’s website sadly sums up the current situation in America where book bans are on the rise. The theme for this year’s Banned Books Week is: “Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights.” The theme is a nod to George Orwell’s dystopian novel.

The ALA also has released the list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2024. I haven’t read any of the books on the list, but according to the ALA’s summaries of each title, four of the 10 books have LGBTQ themes; the others are flagged for sexually explicit material.

In my youth, people were still up in arms over the likes of Henry Miller. Perhaps no one is trying to ban Tropic of Cancer anymore because they think it’s the basis for a Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Jack Black film. Yes, I know that was Tropic of Thunder, but I wonder whether most Americans have even heard of Henry Miller. According to a 2025 study by the University of Florida and University College London, daily reading for pleasure in the United States declined by more than 40 percent over the last 20 years.

It's a little ironic that there is a rise in banning books while there is a decrease in reading them. 

Certainly, there is a difference between a government ban of a book that could result in criminal charges and a local book ban. But it is not a great difference because the latter is just one or two exit ramps away from the former.

As an author of an LGBT book, this is more than an academic exercise to me, although I doubt my book will rise to the level of attention needed to become a source of outrage for anyone. That isn’t the point. Writers have something to say, and you can listen or not, but in a free society your choice should not become, by default, my choice.

The thing about books is that readers will find things in them that the author never thought they put there. When I was in high school, we read A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a prep school in the early 1940s, centering around two boys, Gene and Finny. When I read that story as a closeted teen, it read gay to me.

Years later, I learned that I was not alone in that interpretation. Yet, I also have read that Knowles steadfastly rejected that there was any homoerotic subtext to his book. OK… but, I still believe there is.

I found all sorts of hidden sexual innuendo in dozens of classic books – it didn’t need to be spelled out because I had an imagination. I could romanticize and fantasize to my heart’s content over characters that were not appearing in sexually explicit novels. I can still recall a Tom Swift book – a once-popular series of books for boys – where our hero Tom is stripped, placed in a small boat, and set adrift at sea. It was not written to be erotic, but you cannot control what’s in the reader’s mind. That was Orwell’s point, wasn’t it?

We live in the age of YouTube, phones with apps, and songs with lyrics that are not just sexually explicit, but racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. The 10 most challenged books are books; they are not how-to videos. And let’s be honest, young people have been figuring out the how-to part without the help of authors since the beginning of time. They don’t need a book for that.

What adolescents do need are books where they can find people like themselves. When we’re growing up, we often feel no one is like us, and that is amplified if you realize that you are part of a marginalized community. Books are friends to anyone, but most importantly, they are friends to people who need a friend like themselves.

I’m not a parent, so I cannot fathom what it is like to watch your child navigate their way into adulthood. I get that. I respect that. And I believe parents have the right to determine what their minor child reads and watches. But the ALA notes that “pressure groups and government entities” initiated 72 percent of the demands to censor books in either school or public libraries in 2024. The rise in book bans is not the act of individual parents with a concern, but of organized movements.

I’m not a very “woke” person. I am not moving all that easily through my late 60s, but the opposite of woke is unconscious and that isn’t very appealing either. I would prefer to be curious – open to new ideas, to new points of view even if they are hard for me to hear. I will accept or reject them as I see fit.

It is my choice to make; Big Brother has no place in our society. After reading the list of the 10 Most Challenged Books of 2024, I went out and bought the number one challenged book, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson. It is a form of activism that I am comfortable with – buying books and reading them.

I hope for the sake of our society in these strange times that I am not alone.

Until next time, Alfred with a P

Holding out for a hero

By Alfred P. Doblin

I watched Superman on HBO. I saw it before, going a few weeks into its theatrical release. It was an early screening and there were few people in the auditorium. There was no audience reaction to gauge. No cheers, chuckles, or groans. Moviegoing, like life, is at its best experienced in a community.

By the time I saw director James Gunn’s take on Superman, I had read comments about this iteration of the Man of Steel. Many praised the film, but some criticised it as “too woke” or that it had reduced Clark Kent’s human parents to Ma and Pa Kettle. Does anyone younger than me even know who Ma and Pa Kettle were?

Having grown up watching reruns of the 1950s television series, Superman has been part of my life since as long as I can remember. The first film series came out when I was in college. It was fun, campy, but also reflective of a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam time when most Americans wanted to feel good about being Americans.

There were too many sequels with the late-Christopher Reeve. The second coming of Superman was a one shot. The third iteration had Henry Cavill. As a gay man, I don’t think I need to say more than it had Henry Cavill. But that aside, it was very dark—too dark for my taste.

The arrival of the new version with David Corenswet is welcome. It is not dark. It is not brilliant, either. The storyline doesn’t push any boundaries. Rather, it is the core ethic of this Superman that makes it worthwhile.

When I was a boy, my heroes were John Glenn, Frank Borman, and Neil Armstrong. They were astronauts—Glenn the first person to orbit the Earth, Borman part of the Apollo team that first orbited the moon, and Armstrong who put his NASA shoes on the face of the moon.

These were not easy time for heroes, the 1960s — Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. But astronauts were heroes. Real heroes. Looking back more than 50 years, it seems impossible to conceive that men racing incrementally to the moon could become the national icons they were in such unsettled times, but they were.

We are living in unsettled times. Violence is widespread—the violence of guns and other weapons of destruction, and the violence of weaponized words. I know little about firearms, aside that they were created to do harm. I know more about words, and they were not created to do harm.

The gift of speech elevates us as people. Using it for destructive purposes is a societal tragedy. I recently read an opinion piece in the New York Times by Roxane Gay, “Civility Is a Fantasy.” I disagreed with everything, aside from the punctuation. The premise was that civility is a cudgel brandished by the far right to guilt others into submission.

Civility is not an act of submission. It is an act of power. It shows we are capable of seeing the arguments and the threats for what they are, without adding superficially driven insults. In many cases, we can find points of agreement. And in those cases, we should.

Civility prevents us from mocking our opponent; it does not prevent us from challenging them.

I could quote Scripture on the subject of turning the other cheek, but I prefer Patrick Swayze’s Dalton in Road House: “I want you to be nice until it’s time not to be nice.”

Civility is not a fantasy. It also was never the solution. It is a means toward a solution, but not the only one. Which brings me back to the latest version of Superman, an alien trying to be the best version of a human. He struggles with the choices his powers give him. He fumbles and stumbles, but he perseveres. This Superman believes in civility, while also believing that there is a time for action.

That is neither woke nor weak. Clark Kent’s human parents do not look like action figures, but they are people of action. They are not stupid because they are not trim or tech-savvy. To think less of them because of either is a reflection not of them, but of a smaller version of us.

Civility is not a fantasy. It is very real and, in these unsettled times, the use of it would be a far more impressive feat than effortlessly benching 135 pounds at the gym. And like the strength needed to lift a barbell, it gives us the power to move what is heavy.

Back in the 1980s, there was a pop song. “Holding Out for a Hero.” Part of the lyric reads: “Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat, it’s gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet.” Not Shakespeare. Not even Dalton from Road House, but I wonder if we, as a society, are still holding out for a hero. If we believe civility is fantasy, and that the depiction of people struggling to do the “right thing” is somehow corny or irrelevant, what does that say about us?

As a boy, my heroes flew to the heavens. The 1950s Superman series began, “Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It’s Superman!” Again, look up for your hero.

Having watched the new Superman twice, the message is don’t look up. Look ahead for your heroes. They are us… or they could be. And that is not a fantasy.

Until next time, Alfred with a P.

It has to start somewhere

By Alfred P. Doblin

I begin this first blog with a general announcement: If you are looking for Alfred Döblin you are in the wrong place. Döblin was my grandfather, and despite all the sophistication of AI, it often conflates my grandfather, who died in June 1957, with me, who was born in November 1957.

And for the record, while I am an out gay writer, my grandfather was decidedly not gay, queer, or in the least bit attracted to men. AI needs to expand its understanding of the alphabet to include LGBTQ. Döblin and Doblin are not the same men.

My grandfather was an acclaimed German writer – see Berlin Alexanderplatz – as well as a physician. Many scholars rate him as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. On the other hand, my achievements are more modest. But, during the many years I worked as a journalist, I was careful to differentiate myself from my grandfather by always using my middle initial, P.

I never knew my grandfather or broached this subject with my father when he was living, yet I feel comfortable writing that I am much more about showtunes than was Alfred Döblin. So allow me the liberty of stating it’s Alfred with a P, not Liza with a Z, S, or an umlaut.

I am proud of my literary heritage and would have welcomed the opportunity to have engaged with my more famous and talented grandfather, but I have been determined to forge my own path – a winding one that is unique to me.

My debut book, Tales of the Lavender Twilight, came out this spring. I am 67 – not exactly a boy wonder. I wrote several novels when I was in my twenties and early thirties. None found a publishing house. All three found my basement, where they reside in boxes covered in the dust of youthful exuberance gone astray. The use of phrases like that no doubt limited my publishing opportunities 40 years ago.

If you have not yet jumped off the page, my intentions with this blog are honorable. For decades, I wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column about many things, but much of it was about politics. This blog will not be about politics – at all. It is not that politics doesn’t interest me, but politics in the 21st century is about division, and I am now more interested in multiplication.

Anyway, there is much to talk about besides politics. Did I mention my love of showtunes?

The cardinal rule in a gay bar is never talk about politics, religion, and if you are over 40, your real age. I’ve already broken the first and last admonitions and I am barely 500 words in. I will go for the trifecta: Religion will pop up in my conversations.

The older I become, the more I believe in the need for forming communities, and often those are communities bound by shared beliefs and values, and that may include religion. Many of the stories in Tales of the Lavender Twilight are about just that.

No, it is not the division of politics that is worthy of exploration, but rather the multiplication of living that is. And there is nothing more wondrous than the multiplication of words – whether in a lyric or a piece of fiction or a poem.

Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George: “The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not, you have to move on.”

James Joyce, The Dead: ”His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Lord Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses: “Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

Then of course, there is Chuckles the Clown: “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

Yes, there is much for us to discuss and if I have one ambition in this endeavor, it is to foster dialogue and discourse about the lofty and the ridiculous.

This initial blog is but an introduction. I am not Alfred Döblin. I am Alfred P. Doblin.

Until the next time, Alfred P.