In the Middle East, the day after tomorrow is today

By Alfred P. Doblin

Today is the day after tomorrow in the Middle East. Forget the 2004 apocalyptic film with that title. Today is neither a piece of celluloid fiction nor a cautionary tale about climate change. Today is the day after an extraordinary step toward peace was made in the Middle East.

There are people smarter than I who can and will opine on whether lasting peace is possible, people with a deeper knowledge of the politics and emotions that have swirled above the Middle East like waterspouts above a warm sea.

The images of the final living hostages returning to families in Israel bring tears to anyone with a heart and the belief that we can experience moments of joy so intense that they are proof of the existence of God.

The devastation in Gaza, is tearful, as well. These are not tears of joy. There is little left there except for the hope that refuses to die in all of us that something better is on the horizon – tomorrow.

The Gaza images are reminiscent of photos of bombed-out Warsaw after World War II, a city left in ruins waiting for someone to rebuild it. If you visit Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is an unsettling reminder of what much of Germany’s capital city looked like following the war. The ruined Kaiser Wilhelm Church remains as a testament to the consequences of war. But it is just a building.

Relatively few of the millions of people who lived through World War II as adults still live. And when we, collectively, say “never forget” and “never again,” we imperfectly believe that we will do just that. Yet, history shows us otherwise. Part of the problem is Time, uppercase “T.”

Time does not heal all wounds. Time propels us forward; we have no choice in the matter. We remove the rubble. We rebuild. And we believe we will never forget and never allow such a thing to occur again.

The Holocaust is unique in its horror and its sheer explosion of evil. What we are seeing now in the Middle East is horrific enough, but it is not that. But there is a lesson from the 1940s that must not be forgotten: we can rebuild houses, offices, and roads. We can infuse economies with billions of dollars in aid. But we cannot infuse innocence lost into the survivors of horror. It is when we think we can – or even worse – when we think that we have, that we backslide into the same patterns we profess never to return to.

My dad never talked much about Berlin in the early 1930s before he fled. He did speak at times about an encounter with what he believed was the SS. He was brought into an office on an upper floor of a building and was gradually being “pushed” toward a window. Exactly, how he escaped that fate was never made clear to me. I’m not sure if he remembered all of it. He was damaged just like the Kaiser William Church.

Like that church, my dad continued to exist in an everchanging world. He adapted as best he could, but he remained damaged for the rest of his life. When we rebuild a structure, we replace what was there. When people rebuild their lives, their damaged structure remains part of their foundation.

That foundation is what kept them from crumbling during the conflict, so there is much good there. But it has been altered forever and nothing can change that.

The day after tomorrow holds the promise of the future. That is magnificent. But it also holds the scars of the past. That is challenging.

The freed hostages will be forever changed. Their families will be forever changed. The people living in fear and devastation in Gaza will be forever changed. Most people do not deserve the fate that befalls them. They are entangled by events bigger than any one person. How to untangle them, or untangle ourselves – well, there’s the rub.

Smart people will study the politics and the generations of conflicts responsible for what has recently unfolded in a vast region that gave birth to the teachings of the Gospels, the Torah, and the Quran. The Middle East is a holy place. Perhaps that is why the forces of evil can never resist staining it with blood.

Celebrate the day after tomorrow. Something good has happened, something that offers promise. But do not celebrate too much, because the day after the day after tomorrow – well, that’s the future. The work ahead is the hardest.

Until next time, Alfred with a P

Come out when you’re ready to come out

By Alfred P. Doblin

October 11 is National Coming Out Day. On one level, it does not affect me anymore. If I were to call up one of my friends and say, “I’m coming out,” their response would be: “Again? Did you leave something in the closet? A tie? Or perhaps a pair of shoes?”

That I can joke about it is a sign of progress from where I was 35 years ago, when I finally did come out. There was nothing funny about it then, and the idea that I would become so flippant about it decades later was as improbable to me as the possibility of hooking up with a woman.

But National Coming Out Day remains important to me because there are still many individuals – young and old – who struggle with accepting who they are. To them, I say, “Come out when you are ready. It doesn’t have to be October 11, or in Pride Month, or while you are waiting on a line to see Kiss of the Spider Woman. Come out when you are ready.”

I was 33 when I came out, and the more I reflect on my coming-out process, the more I am amazed at how much I fought what I always knew. My strongest early gay memory is seeing the play, Cactus Flower. Picture it. Not Sicily, but the Royale Theater on 45th Street in Manhattan. June of 1967. A nine-year-old is taken with his parents and sister to see a play with Lauren Bacall. The plot is way over his head. I was small for my age, so everything was way over my head, but I digress. Early in the play – it may have been the first scene, I don’t recall – a young man climbs through a window wearing a towel. That was it. A hot man in a towel. I was transfixed. I think the play ends with the cactus plant on Lauren Bacall’s desk blooming, but I am not sure. Neither Bacall nor the cactus was wearing a towel or for that matter was a shirtless young man.

While I hope my memory of the scene is correct and I have not conflated it with something else, the dates are right because I’ve saved every damn Playbill from every Broadway show I’ve ever seen. They’re in official Playbill binders filled to their maximum capacity. I have 23 binders to date. And still it took me to 33 years to come out of the closet! Lauren Bacall’s cactus wasn’t the only late bloomer.

My story is significant because there was no social media in 1967. No one was telling me to be gay. There were no gay role models. Gay was not even the common word for homosexual men. The word most trafficked began with an “f” and it still cuts me sharply today.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge to a Colorado law that bans licensed therapists from using what is termed as “conversion therapy.” The therapy has been widely discredited by the medical community. Its underlying principle is that gay people can be taught to be straight.

If that were the case, would the therapists who believe sexual orientation is a choice also believe “practicing” straight people could be taught to be gay?

I’ve never met a straight man who could be pressured into being gay. And I have never met a gay man who said society or some outside influence made him gay. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t have a medical degree – it’s not as if I could tell you with impunity not to take Tylenol if you’re pregnant – but I have almost 68 years of lived experience and I can say with surety, I did not choose to be gay any more than I chose to be. Period.

If there were gay role models in the 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps I would have come out in high school. I don’t know. Looking back, I wasn’t ready for any of that as a teen or even in my twenties. I needed space. A lot of space. It required me moving from Long Island to Los Angeles. But that was just me.

Which brings me back to October 11, National Coming Out Day. I’m not a fan of all these “days.” They are contrivances based on a moment in history that unintentionally put pressure on people to “get with the concept” on that date. No one should feel compelled to come out on anyone’s timetable but their own. It is a personal journey, and I can say with pride, that I came out when I was ready and because I had met someone who was kind, safe, and lit me up in a way I did not think I could be lit up.

It was glorious. Most gay men I know do not describe their first gay experience as glorious. I make no judgement on that. We all want and need different things. There is no one way to be gay. There is no one way to be. Period.

You cannot turn off being gay like a light switch. Yes, that is a reference to a song in the musical The Book of Mormon. (I said in my first blog there would be showtunes.) Reparative therapy is dangerous. Yet, the Supreme Court will probably rule in favor of the licensed therapist and many states across the country will find their bans on the practice disappear. I fear the damage to LGBTQ individuals subjected to the therapy will be longer lasting.

That saddens me as an elder gay man. But I remain hopeful that the human spirit is stronger than the legal profession and the vagaries of nine people in black robes.

Come out when you are ready. Things may not always get better, but things will always change. Laws change. Society changes. And how each of us deal with both changes. But who we innately are? That doesn’t change. And whatever it is that makes us whoever we are does not need repairing. It needs nurturing. And it needs – from time to time – celebrating.

So celebrate October 11, if that date works for you. If it does, shout it out. We will applaud you for your courage, strength, and most importantly, for your authenticity. But if not October 11, there are 364 other possibilities in the year.

For me, October 11 is a day to remember that I started coming out long before I knew I was gay. There’s a Judy Garland song lyric – I cannot help myself – “I was born in a trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.” For me, as a gay man, it was the balcony of the Royale Theater in New York City, New York.

Until next time, Alfred with a P

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.