Bambi: cute, lovable, vulnerable ... or a dark parable of antisemitic terror?

A new translation of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel reasserts its original message that warns of Jewish persecution

A still from the 1942 Disney film Bambi. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Donna Ferguson London Guardian

It’s a saccharine sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. But the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as an existential novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria.

Now, a new translation seeks to reassert the rightful place of Felix Salten’s 1923 masterpiece in adult literature and shine a light on how Salten was trying to warn the world that Jews would be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered in the years to come. Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show.

In 1935, the book was banned by the Nazis, who saw it as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it as Jewish propaganda. “The darker side of Bambi has always been there,” said Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and translator of the forthcoming book.

“But what happens to Bambi at the end of the novel has been concealed, to a certain extent, by the Disney corporation taking over the book and making it into a pathetic, almost stupid film about a prince and a bourgeois family.”

Salten’s novel, Bambi, a Life in the Woods, is completely different he said. “It is a book about survival in your own home.” From the moment he is born, Bambi is under constant threat from hunters who invade the forest and attack indiscriminately. “They kill whatever animal they want.”

Felix Salten’s handwritten dedication to his wife Ottilie on a page from the first English edition of Bambi. Photograph: Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

It soon becomes apparent that the forest animals are living out their lives in fear and that puts the reader constantly “on edge”: “All the animals have been persecuted. And I think what shakes the reader is that there are also some animals who are traitors, who help the hunters kill.”

After Bambi’s mother is murdered, so is his beloved cousin Gobo, who had been led to believe he was special and the hunters would be “kind” to him. Bambi is shot too, but survives thanks to the old prince, a majestic stag who treats him like a son (and may well be his father). But then, sadly, the old prince also dies, leaving Bambi utterly bereft. “Bambi does not survive well, at the end. He is alone, totally alone … It is a tragic story about the loneliness and solitude of Jews and other minority groups.”

There is a sense at the end that Bambi and all the other wild animals in the forest are merely “born to be killed”. They know they will be hunted – and they know they will die. “The major theme throughout is: you don’t have a choice.”

The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, by Felix Salten, in its new translation by Jack Zipes. Photograph: Alenka Sottler

Salten, who had changed his name from Siegmund Salzmann during his teens to “unmark” himself as a Jew in Austrian society, earned his main income as a journalist in Vienna. Zipes thinks he could see the direction in which the political winds were blowing. “I think he foresaw the Holocaust. He had suffered greatly as a young boy from antisemitism and at that time, in Austria and Germany, Jews were blamed for the loss of the first world war. This novel is an appeal to say: no, this shouldn’t happen.”

At one point in the novel, two leaves on a tree discuss why they must fall to the ground and wonder what will happen to them when they do. “These leaves talk very seriously about really dark questions humans have: we don’t know what is going to happen to us when we die. We don’t know why we must die.”

By writing a story about animals and wildlife, Salten could get past the negative preconceptions and prejudices many of his readers held about Jews and other minorities: “It enabled him to talk about the persecution of the Jews as freely as he wanted to.” Without being didactic, he could encourage the reader to feel more empathy towards oppressed groups – and Bambi could openly question the cruelty of their oppressors. “Many other writers, like George Orwell, chose animals too because you’re freer to tackle problems that might make your readers bristle. And you don’t want them to bristle, you want them to say, at the end: this is a tragedy.”

Importantly, the new translation, which will be published on 18 January by Princeton Press, attempts to convey in English for the first time the way that certain characters in Salten’s novel have a Viennese “flair” when they talk in German. “The animals have wonderful ways of talking, which makes you feel as though you are in a Viennese cafe. And you immediately recognise that they’re not talking how animals talk. These are human beings.”

By contrast, the original English translation, which was published in 1928, toned down Salten’s anthropomorphism and changed its focus so that it was more likely to be understood as a simple conservation story about animals living in a forest. This was the version read by Walt Disney, who loved animal stories.

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Salten managed to flee to Switzerland. By then, he had sold the film rights for a mere $1,000 to an American director, who then sold them on to Disney: Salten himself never earned a penny from the famous animation. Stripped of his Austrian citizenship by the Nazis, he spent his final years “lonely and in despair” in Zurich and died in 1945, like Bambi, with no safe place to call home.

He Bombed the Nazis, Outwitted the Soviets and Modernized Christmas

Si Spiegel, a bomber pilot, can claim a dual legacy: as a war hero and as a father of the artificial tree.

By Laurie Gwen Shapiro NY Times

The B-17 he was piloting had lost two of its engines to enemy fire, and as Si Spiegel surveyed the ruined landscape, he had one thought: We have to get behind the Russian front.

As part of the Allied raid on Berlin, his bomber had dropped its payload over the German capital, but he’d been hit with flak and would almost certainly not make it back to the base in England. No pilot wanted to get shot down over Nazi Germany, especially not a Jewish pilot.

Mr. Spiegel had essentially bluffed his way into the cockpit as a skinny teenager from Greenwich Village, trusting he’d figure it out as he went. This was no different. He told his crew they were headed for Poland; they could get their parachutes ready, but were not to bail out unless he gave the order. They would attempt an emergency landing.

Si Spiegel is one of the last bomber pilots of World War II still with us. I met him on a windy December morning in 2019. I happened to overhear him discussing Eleanor Roosevelt’s love of aviation in front of her sculpture on Riverside Drive. I couldn’t help butting in — I was writing a biography of Mrs. Roosevelt’s great friend Amelia Earhart. He seemed wary of my enthusiasm, but when he saw the Lower East Side address on my business card, he smiled. I had inherited my grandparents’ old apartment in one of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers' Union buildings, the same address where his union parents had lived.

He invited me over for coffee that week. What began as a way to do research for my book — there aren’t many living aviators from that era, after all — evolved into a series of conversations over weeks and then months. His considerable charm and sharp memory were matched by his stamina — he would happily talk for hours but only if they didn’t conflict with his regular gym workouts.

But he was 95 then (now 97), and he clearly had been needing an audience for his stories. In the first hour of our first meeting, I learned that he flew dozens of critical and dangerous missions during the war, had saved his crew by successfully crash-landing an enormous bomber in no-man’s land — and then helped orchestrate a daring escape back out.

Perhaps most remarkable: Mr. Spiegel is improbably best known as “the king of the artificial Christmas tree.”

Si Spiegel was born in New York City in 1924, the first year of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the last year that Ellis Island operated as an immigration station. It was the Jazz Age, and Si wore button-up knickers. He remembers his first zip-up fly and when his family got their first telephone. They would crowd around the radio, especially whenever the president gave an address. “Roosevelt,” he said, “was our hero.”

He was tuned to the radio the day Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. And when Pearl Harbor was attacked, Si was 17 years old and living near his father’s hand laundry in Greenwich Village.

After graduating from Textile High School, he went to work in a machine shop, but he wanted to fight the Nazis. So without telling his parents, Mr. Spiegel enlisted in the Army shortly after he turned 18. He was a reedy youth, 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds. In basic training, noting his machine-shop skills, they sent him to aircraft mechanic school at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He was crestfallen.

“How would I fight Hitler with a wrench?” he recalled thinking.

A sympathetic officer in the hangar with him suggested he go to Mitchel Field, just a couple of miles by bus. Maybe they’d take him as a pilot. Unlike the recruitment office at Times Square, the one at Mitchel Field was deserted. It set his life on a different path.

“I signed up in an unusual place already in uniform, and there were only two of us that day,” Mr. Spiegel recalled. “The other fellow was foiled by the eyesight tests. I had perfect vision.”

He was accepted into pilot training, which took him to Nashville, then California and then, as a cadet, to Hobbs, N.M., where he’d learn to pilot a B-17, the massive bomber known as the Flying Fortress.

Many military men were chain-smoking drinkers when not on duty, but Mr. Spiegel, still a teenager, never smoked or drank much or hit the brothels. “Maybe I had a lot of opportunities as a new pilot, but I was too shy to recognize them or take advantage.”

Hobbs had one thing of interest, a girl named Frankie Marie Smith. She was only 17 and a beauty. Back in high school, Si Spiegel would never have thought he had a chance with a girl like that. But now he was a dashing lieutenant who flew a B-17.

Within weeks, they were married in Lovington, N.M. “Her father insisted we get married in an Evangelical church, the Church of God,” Mr. Spiegel said. When they parted, Frankie Marie gave him a photo he would carry during missions. Then he left New Mexico and went to meet his crew, a motley collection of “leftovers.”

“We had five Catholics, two Jews,” he said. “Catholics weren’t treated too well, either. We had a Mormon, too.” Mr. Spiegel said the only WASP was a ball-turret gunner who had gotten into trouble with the law in Chicago. “And a judge said, ‘You have two choices,’” he recalled. “‘You can go to jail or join the Army.’”

Mr. Spiegel has outlived all of his crew members but still holds their stories. His bombardier and first real friend in the service, Danny Shapiro, was later shot down on another plane and held as a prisoner of war for a year. Dale Tyler was the Mormon tail gunner from Utah who came from a family of 13. “Harold Bennett was my top turret gunner, from Massachusetts. Killed in a training accident on another plane. His chute never opened.”

They were assigned to the U.S. Eighth Air Force, and their base of operations would be in an English town called Eye, near the coast about 100 miles northeast of London.

Mr. Spiegel’s first flight in formation, at the age of 20, was a short mission over Belgium when the Germans were retreating. “We were bombing them to prevent blowing up a bridge,” he said. It was what airmen would call a “milk run” — a mission with little danger. “I thought, oh, this is great!”

Over the next year, Mr. Spiegel would carry out 35 missions, all of them in daylight, which conferred a strategic advantage but often resulted in significant casualties.

Their odds of survival were terrible. Over 50,000 American airmen lost their lives in World War II, mostly on B-17s and B-24s. The Eighth Air Force suffered 40 percent of all casualties in the air war.

Mission 33 is what he often relives when reflecting on his war years.

It was an early-morning departure on Saturday, Feb. 3, 1945, a maximum-effort campaign now studied by military historians as the Berlin Mission. An overwhelming force of 1,437 bombers and 948 fighters took off from the English countryside to hit the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe headquarters.

“They said we were bombing Berlin headquarters,” Mr. Spiegel recalled. In his previous missions, he said, he had never given much thought to where the bombs fell. But as he approached Berlin, it suddenly dawned on him that this would not be a precision raid against a military installation. “With 2,000 planes, and it’s pattern bombing,” he said, “we’re bombing civilians. But our command wanted to get the war over with.”

He had thought about this a lot over the years. What he thought then, he agrees with now: “Whatever it takes to stop this evil. We went on a mission, we dropped bombs, we came back. As far as other bombers, I’ve gone to a lot of reunions, and I never heard any regret.” 

The plane had an engine malfunction early in the flight, not unusual on a B-17. But over the target in Berlin, he lost the second engine to flak, and fuel was leaking.

Mr. Spiegel said he could keep up with the formation with one engine gone. With two, it was impossible. To make it back to England, they would have to fly into a headwind and back through a flak area. “We would be losing altitude, which meant that they could shoot us from the ground.”

By this late stage of the war, the German forces had retreated to Germany, and the Soviets, American allies, were coming across Poland. Mr. Spiegel knew from radio broadcasts that the Soviets had taken Warsaw. He asked his navigator, Ray Patulski, to give him a heading for Warsaw. Mr. Spiegel thought they would be safe if they got past Russian lines. He told his crew to throw stuff out of the plane as they lost altitude: flak suits, extra ammunition, anything of any weight.

The radioman made contact with England and relayed their status: No one hurt, two engines out, attempting to land in Warsaw. The Brits said they would notify the Yank authorities. That was the last anyone heard from the plane for weeks.

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The nine men reached Warsaw at 1:30 p.m. The city was rubble. A bridge lay torn and twisted across the frozen Vistula River. Looking for a place to land, they headed downriver until they spotted a single-engine plane with the Soviet red star. It was barely 200 feet off the ground.

Mr. Spiegel partly lowered his wheels and fired flares — a friendly gesture. The Soviet pilot wiggled his wings to indicate, “Follow me” and led them over forests, a treacherous flight path for such a huge plane. Eventually, they belly-landed in a frozen potato field in the village of Reczyn. No one was injured, although the aircraft would never fly again.

The Nazis had held much of Poland at one point, and Mr. Spiegel didn’t know if any Germans were still there. He and his co-pilot, Bill Hole, left through the hatch to be met by villagers.

“Amerikansky!” Mr. Spiegel hollered. Some of the gathering villagers hollered too. “Benzine! Benzine!” They wanted the gasoline — the benzine — that was leaking out of the plane and ran toward them with buckets to collect the fuel. The crew let them have it.

The Americans were soon taken to Plock, a small city north on the Vistula, where they were billeted in apartments the Russians took over from locals — and treated as heroes by the Soviets after the successful raid on Berlin. Then they were moved again, to the Polish city of Torun, where the Red Army had taken over an abandoned German airfield. There they met another American crew whose plane had made a landing at Torun. They expected to stay until a rescue plane arrived — a week at most.

The Americans were not prisoners, but they were not allowed to leave until Moscow approved — and they had no means to leave anyhow. Mr. Spiegel met the other pilot, a fiery Illinois officer named George Ruckman, whose plane had lost one engine to flak and had blown a tire in its landing.

Despite confinement, the Americans largely did what they pleased. Over the coming weeks, the crews would go down to the Vistula and spend the day target shooting with rifles lent by the Russians. But life at Torun was mostly waiting. They gave up hoping for the C-47 transport plane. The official status of those flying on the B-17 43-38150 during the Berlin Mission: missing in action.

The other pilot soon devised a wild escape plan. They would send a team to Mr. Spiegel’s wrecked plane, 70 miles away, and have them collect an engine and a spare tire and return to Torun. It would require stealth, courage and bribery.

Both American crews bartered with the Soviet soldiers. Several revolvers and a $10 fountain pen paid for the gasoline for their secret flight; a $75 wristwatch given to a Russian officer secured a Ford tractor to haul the second engine back. According to war records, with the $30 Mr. Ruckman had in his own wallet, he bribed Russian MPs to overlook the cutting down of two telephone poles needed as hoists.

Using salvaged tools left by the Nazis, the crews worked in plain sight of the other Russians, who seemed more concerned with random artillery fire and the possibility that German snipers were still in the area. The Americans feared too much attention, though, and Mr. Spiegel made sure to drink with the Russian officers in Torun, toasting Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, the day Mr. Ruckman had villagers hoist the plane in the potato field.

Early on St. Patrick’s Day, 1945, the Americans jumped into the jury-rigged plane and began to taxi along the frozen ground. A single Soviet guard waved frantically to stop. But the Russians never chased them as they cleared the field and lifted off. “Maybe they were relieved they didn’t have to feed us,” Mr. Spiegel offered.

Determined to avoid German antiaircraft guns in their hobbled plane, the 19 men headed south, and eight hours later landed at an American air base in Foggia, Italy.

There the Red Cross had a party for the crew, giving them candy, cookies and much-needed toiletries — they hadn’t brushed their teeth since the bombing of Berlin. American Army staff checked the escape plane, and other than a few loose bolts, it was fine.

After months of fearing Mr. Spiegel had been killed in action, his family in New York received a telegram from Italy shortly before April 3, 1945, the shared birthday of Mr. Spiegel’s younger brother and his father: “Am safe and well. Letters following. Happy birthday. Love.”

Mr. Spiegel led two more missions after making it back to England, though since he had been presumed dead, his belongings had already been sent to New York.

He returned home on Aug. 31, 1945.

He was given a hero’s welcome in his home on West 11th Street. Times Square had become an all-night party where military men were gods. Yet despite his 35 missions and multiple awards for bravery and exemplary behavior, Mr. Spiegel went to war as a first lieutenant and returned as one. 

The Air Medal Mr. Spiegel was awarded after flying 35 missions during World War II.Credit...Carly Zavala for The New York Times

Looking back, having spoken to other Jewish GI’s, he believes now that many Jewish soldiers were denied promotions because of anti-Semitism. He has some thorny memories: Many heroes in the Army Air Corps joined the commercial airline industry after the war, which was then based in New York. But here too, Mr. Spiegel said he faced discrimination. “They weren’t taking Jews after World War II,” he recalled. “They were blatant.”

Frankie Marie Spiegel joined him in New York for several months before they moved back to New Mexico. Mr. Spiegel got a job there as a radio announcer on a country and western program. (He went by the name of Muddy Boots.) But the marriage soon soured. They had no children, and he made a clean break, returning East.

It was a vibrant time in Greenwich Village, and he joined Pete Seeger’s Good Neighbor Chorus after the war and made new friends. And in midsummer of 1949, he went to Camp Unity, a leftist camp in Wingdale, N.Y.

Within hours he met a young woman named Motoko Ikeda. She was an artsy girl in pigtails, and he was fascinated by her. She was frank about her time in an internment camp during the war. It was eye-opening.

Her parents were born in Japan, and her family of six, she told him, had been forcibly sent from Los Angeles to a camp in Wyoming. At 14, she was kept behind barbed wire and watched by armed guards. After the war, many Japanese Americans held in the camps went back to California. Ms. Ikeda chose a one-way ticket to New York.

“Motoko was mental refreshment after divorce,” Mr. Spiegel says now. “I liked her because she was pretty, bright, patient and a good person. I wanted to learn more about her.”

They married in the Municipal Building around Thanksgiving in 1950, and a daughter, Kazuko, the first of their three children, was born in 1951. His blended family was accepted without reservation by his parents. “Motoko was better at Jewish food than my mother. She could cook in any language.”

Still frozen out of aviation, Mr. Spiegel went to vocational school and found a job as a machinist at a brush manufacturer in Mount Vernon for $1.80 an hour.

It was at the Westchester factory that his luck turned.

A strange design fad hit the country in the late 1950s: Shop designers were using millions of small multicolored brushes, which when assembled in department store windows looked, in his words, like “miniature pastel waves.” American Brush Machinery, where Mr. Spiegel was employed, fabricated machines to make these brushes, which could sell for $12,000 each — sound money, but then the fad died.

His bosses decided to repurpose the machines: They could make Christmas trees. The first ones they produced, out of green polyvinyl chloride plastic, didn’t look much like Scotch pines. Business was slow. Midcentury America liked futuristic aluminum trees lit by color wheels, and few people owned fake trees at all. Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was sent to close the factory, but he reported back there was big money to be made. One boss thought he was out of his mind, but the other gave him his own division, called American Tree and Wreath.

Determined to improve on his product, Mr. Spiegel brought in real trees to study. He tinkered with his machines to speed up the process, and soon he was selling quickly made and perfectly shaped fakes.

By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spiegel’s company, American Tree and Wreath, was producing about 800,000 trees a year, one off the assembly line every four minutes.

After expanding and starting his own artificial tree company, he finally sold that business and retired in 1993 as a multimillionaire.

He had been a workaholic, and now he wanted to travel with Motoko and enjoy life. She had become an accomplished painter and was inspired by new places, from Paris to Japan. But after her sudden death in 2000, Mr. Spiegel found himself drawn powerfully to military reunions and the company of veterans.

He became involved in a couple of Army Air Corps historic associations, enjoying the camaraderie of the airmen, who understood his night terrors and late-diagnosed PTSD. These society gatherings continued in dwindling numbers until about 2012. Now, as far as he knows, he is the only member from World War II.

Eventually, his daughter Kazuko Spiegel introduced her father to the woman who would become his third wife, JoAnn Bastis, a real estate agent she had met in Westchester social circles. They would be married only for a few years before she died in 2018, though the couple traveled in Europe together twice, including a visit to Reczyn, the tiny village where he belly-landed in 1945.

Mr. Spiegel now lives in a large apartment building with a doorman and a magnificent view of Central Park. Although artificial trees descended from Mr. Spiegel’s designs are found in close to three-quarters of the American homes that put up Christmas trees, he doesn’t keep a tree himself.

He raised his children to take pride in their Jewish-Japanese heritage, and he still makes the Hanukkah latkes for his grandchildren. But when his children were young, they always had a tree, first a real one, and then the best of his fakes. “Do you think Christmas trees were really a religious symbol? They were pagan symbols. My kids liked them.”

When asked what he would like his legacy to be — artificial trees or military heroism — he closed his eyes.

The war, he admits, was probably the most exciting time in his life. Who’s left to talk about it with, though?

“I can tell you this,” he finally said. “We fought against fascism. We fought against Hitler’s desire for a master race.”

He is surrounded by pictures of his children and his grandchildren, and he worries about growing racism. “I never thought that fascism was a possible threat to our nation’s democracy until now,” Mr. Spiegel said. “Right now, however, all I’m trying to do is stay alive.”

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is the author of “The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica.” She is currently writing about Amelia Earhart’s marriage.

 

The return of the 10-minute eviction

The return of the 10-minute eviction

As the pandemic’s moratoriums come to an end, the man some call ‘Lock-’em-out Lennie’ is once again knocking on doors in Arizona

 

Maricopa County Constable Lennie McCloskey enters an apartment in Glendale, Ariz., on Dec. 9 to serve eviction papers. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The Washington Post)

By Eli Saslow Washington Post

PHOENIX — The city’s last eviction moratorium of the pandemic had expired and the rent forgiveness program was running out of money, so Lennie McCloskey changed into his bulletproof vest and headed out to work. He climbed into his truck and counted through his daily stack of eviction orders. “Fifteen, sixteen — jeez Louise,” he said as he stacked them on the passenger seat. He strapped an extra magazine of ammunition to his belt and picked up his radio to call dispatch.

“Constable 33, heading out,” he said. “Looks like a busy day.”

“Okay,” the dispatcher said. “Guess it’s back to business as usual.”

Nobody in Phoenix was better or more practiced at the business of eviction than Lennie, who had personally removed more than 20,000 Arizonans from their homes during the past two decades as the area’s longest-serving elected constable. “Lock-’em-out Lennie,” colleagues occasionally called him, because the 65-year-old former judo champion was capable of coaxing tenants out of their homes with subtle intimidation or with grandfatherly kindness. He arrived at each apartment with treats to pacify dogs and stickers to give children. The tenants he ushered outside each day into their first moments of homelessness were often inconsolable, or defiant, or suicidal, or mentally ill, or violent and aggressive, but Lennie was calm. “You have to take your own emotions out of it,” he’d told colleagues during one national training. “It’s our job to carry out the court order.”

Now he looked at the first address in his pile and navigated by memory toward a low-income apartment complex on the outskirts of Phoenix. There were 25 other constables across Maricopa County who spent their days carrying out evictions, but few areas were as busy as Lennie’s district, a six-by-six-mile grid of discount shopping centers and faded stucco apartments that catered to working-class families. The average rent had gone up by 40 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, and now some of the apartment complexes had wait lists and new names like Canyon Oasis, Chateau Gardens, Desert Lakes and Paradise Palms. Lennie pulled up to the leasing office of a 300-unit building and carried his stack of eviction orders inside to the property manager.

“Looks like you’re getting rid of four here today?” he said.

“Should be five,” the property manager told him. “Moratorium’s over, but nobody wants to pay.”

“Well, some might want to,” Lennie said.

She shrugged. “They didn't, and I got a list of new people ready to write checks.”

“Understood,” Lennie said, and she pointed him toward the first apartment on his list, a basement unit next to an empty swimming pool. He put on his heavy-duty gloves, felt for his holstered firearm and knocked on the door. “Hello! Maricopa County constable,” he said. Inside he could hear whispering, a dog barking, and then silence.

He leaned against the door and listened to the sound of footsteps shuffling across the floor. For much of the past 20 months, Lennie had been working to keep people in their homes during the pandemic, brokering deals between landlords and tenants and connecting both sides with federal assistance programs during the moratorium, but lately he was back to doing several dozen evictions each week. It wasn’t yet the post-pandemic tsunami of evictions that some had predicted but rather a return to normal — except normal seemed different to Lennie now, more relentless and unpredictable. Landlords acted increasingly impatient after months of falling behind on their collections. Tenants were more resistant to leaving their homes after months of government assistance. And Lennie could feel his own behavior shifting, too, in ways he was still trying to understand. “It’s not like I’ve gone soft, but maybe a little bit more lenient,” he said. “More compassionate or understanding.”

He waited at the entryway for a few more seconds, took out his baton, and started banging on the door.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Maricopa County peace officer! Open up now!”

Constable Chris Muller speaks with an evictee as he and an apartment maintenance employee, left, secure an apartment in Glendale. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The Washington Post)

Lennie had done more than 300 evictions since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal moratorium expired in early August, and during that time he’d given up on predicting who might come to the door. In the past several months, he’d evicted a 93-year-old from a retirement facility, a group of drug addicts living in an apartment cluttered with bowls of counterfeit cash, a man claiming to be a “sovereign citizen” above the law who barricaded himself inside the apartment, a laid-off restaurant worker, a schizophrenic, a hoarder, a recent Somali refugee, a man with a pet reindeer, a woman who tried hiding inside her dresser cabinet, and six families living in a two-bedroom apartment subdivided by drapes and shower curtains.

But no matter who he found waiting inside, Lennie’s job remained the same: to search the home, force everyone out and change the locks — all within a government-recommended time of about 10 minutes.

Now the apartment door swung open in front of him, and this time what Lennie saw was a shirtless, middle-aged man holding a half-eaten bowl of cereal. The dark apartment behind him was cluttered with cardboard boxes, broken furniture and open piles of trash. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

“Good morning,” Lennie said. “I’m here because I have a court order that says by law I need to evict you out of here.”

The man glanced at Lennie’s badge and then down at his gun. “Uh-huh. Okay,” he said. He took a few bites of cereal while Lennie waited.

“Sorry, but we don’t have much time,” Lennie said.

“Oh, you mean I’m getting evicted today?” the man said. “Right now?”

Lennie nodded. “You can make an appointment with the landlord to come get your things later, but we only have a few minutes before we change the locks. Grab any essentials you can’t live without.”

The tenant stepped into the living room, and Lennie followed him inside to search the apartment. The ceiling was covered with graffiti. The plaster walls were pockmarked with large dents and holes. A woman was hiding behind the bathroom door, and she came out as Lennie walked by. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, and she scowled back at him.

“Just the essentials,” Lennie repeated. “Medications. Pets. Walking shoes. Photo albums. Car keys. A change of clothes.”

The tenants began stuffing T-shirts into a backpack. Lennie checked his watch as the building’s maintenance worker started to change the locks. “We about ready?” Lennie asked the tenants a few moments later, and when nobody answered he tried again. “Time to wrap up,” he said, and eventually the tenants walked out of the apartment with the backpack, a Chihuahua, a small TV and a box fan.

“Good luck,” Lennie said as he closed the door behind them. He locked the deadbolt. He shook the door handle to test the new lock. He looked down at his watch: nine minutes.

“Okay. One down,” he told the maintenance worker. “Who’s next?”

It was a teenage couple, seated side by side on a mattress in their living room and playing video games. “Sorry. Only the essentials,” Lennie said, and six minutes later they walked out with nothing but cellphone chargers and their PlayStation.

Next was an empty apartment, where Lennie walked inside and found a child’s bedroom still intact: a plastic basketball hoop, a dozen withered balloons, a wall poster of Kobe Bryant, a fish tank with three goldfish circling against the glass. “All clear,” Lennie told the maintenance worker. “Lock it up.”

Next it was a mother and her two children, ages 6 and 13, gathered in front of their dryer. “I need to finish this load,” the mother told Lennie, and he nodded and reached into his pocket for a referral card to a local shelter. “Maybe they can help,” Lennie said.

“I tried that,” she said. “I tried everything.”

“Do you have anywhere to go?” he asked.

“Does it matter?”

“The law says I have to carry out this order,” Lennie said. “But yeah. It matters to me.”

She grabbed the load of laundry and pointed her kids to a Toyota in the parking lot. “We’ll be in the car for a few days,” she said.

Eight minutes. Eleven minutes. Four minutes. Six minutes. “They’re over fast but sometimes you keep thinking about them,” Lennie said as he climbed back into his truck and headed toward his ninth eviction of the morning, at a newer apartment complex. He pulled into the parking lot and ate a power bar. He sat in the car for an extra moment with his mask off, taking deep breaths, but then the property manager came up to his window and waved.

“Here for the eviction?” she asked, and Lennie nodded, handed her the court order, and pointed to the apartment number.

“Tell me they moved out already,” he said. “Tell me it’s an easy one.”

McCloskey serves eviction papers to Kathleen Sumter, 32, with her 3-year-old son, the youngest of her five children, in Phoenix on Dec. 10. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for the Washington Post)

Sumter and her son with their dog, Brownie. Evictees get only about 10 minutes to grab essentials and leave before the locks are changed. They can return later to collect their other things. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The Washington Post)

An upset Sumter leaves her apartment. She said she and her partner lost jobs during the pandemic. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for the Washington Post)

He followed the property manager through the courtyard to a two-bedroom apartment with an entry mat that read: “Welcome! Friends Gather Here.” On the porch Lennie noticed a small collection of toy trucks and a child’s fairy garden built from straw dolls and succulent plants. “Oh no,” he said, and he shut his eyes for a moment and then knocked, until a man wearing a collared shirt and a carrying briefcase answered the door.

“Hi,” Lennie said. “Ricardo Hernandez?”

“Yes, sir. Can I help you? I’m just leaving for work.”

“I’m sorry to say I’ve got a court order for eviction. I’m here to ask you to leave.”

A little girl came up from behind Ricardo and grabbed onto his leg. Lennie waved to her. She looked up at his bulletproof vest and then hid behind her father and started to cry. “Oh no. It’s okay, sweetheart,” Lennie said. He reached into his pocket and felt beyond the handcuff keys and the flashlight and the absorbent medical gauze for his collection of sheriff-badge stickers, and then he held one out toward her.

“Come on, really?” Ricardo said, glaring first at the sticker and then at Lennie.

Lennie shrugged. “Kids love stickers,” he said, and the girl took it and put it on her dress. Lennie gave her a thumbs-up and turned back to Ricardo.

“I know this is hard,” he said. “We’ll give you a few minutes to get your personal items.”

“We’ve got three kids,” Ricardo said. “We’ve been here three years and never caused any trouble. Our rent was getting paid, but I’ve been late because of this whole pandemic.”

“And I believe you,” Lennie said. “But, unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the eviction.”

“I have the money,” Ricardo said.

Lennie looked down at the eviction paperwork. “Says here the judgment is for $2,300.”

“I’m telling you, I have the money,” Ricardo said, and Lennie nodded and looked at him for a long moment.

For his entire career he’d been listening to tenants offer excuses and beg for more time, and usually Lennie’s answer had been the same. Rent had to be paid on schedule. The eviction order had already been filed. The law was the law. His job was to execute the order. “Sorry, Charlie,” he had sometimes told tenants, but now he looked beyond Ricardo into the home and saw a baby rolling around in a pack-and-play in the living room and a framed photograph on the wall of a family of five sitting on a tree branch in matching flannel shirts. The locksmith stood next to Lennie on the porch, twirling a drill in his hands. Lennie stepped back from the doorway and then smiled.

“Okay,” he said. “If the property manager lets you pay up now, I’m good with that. That would be good for everybody.”

“Thanks,” Ricardo said, and he peeled his daughter off his leg and walked toward the rental office as he told Lennie about everything that had happened to his family during the pandemic. He’d lost his job as a general manager at a restaurant and scrambled to find work at Costco, but then the new baby arrived, and then the property company had sent a letter saying their rent was going up by $200 per month because of “increased demand.” Ricardo had tried to make up the gap by starting a commercial cleaning company, but some of his clients had been slow to pay as his October rent went into default and his November bill came due.

“Believe it or not, I’ve been there,” Lennie said, and he told Ricardo about how his side business as an electrician had suffered during the economic collapse in 2008, just as he and his wife were preparing to adopt a son. He’d fallen so far behind on his mortgage that one afternoon he’d returned home from a day of doing evictions to find a foreclosure notice taped to his own front door, and then he’d barely scrambled together enough money in savings and loans to keep his home.

“We’re all a few bad breaks away,” Lennie told the property manager as they sat down in her office. “If Ricardo here is able to pay up in full, can he stay?”

The manager looked at Ricardo and sighed. “We’ve been trying to contact you since October. Emails. Knocking on your door. Letters. Offers of payment plans. We’ve been more than fair.”

“I’m always working,” Ricardo said.

“Okay, so there’s been some bad communication,” Lennie said. “But, if he’s still able to take care of it?”

“At this point he’d have to pay late fees and also all of December,” the property manager said. She started to punch numbers into a calculator while Ricardo took out his phone and sent messages to clients who owed him money. Lennie smoothed the creases out of his pants and glanced up at the clock. Eighteen minutes already. Twenty. “All right, here’s the total,” the property manager finally said, and she wrote it down on a sticky note and held it up so Ricardo could see: $6,130.78. “It needs to be a cashier’s check,” she said.

“Whoa. Come on. It’s, it’s just —” Ricardo said, trying to gather himself. “It’s just very challenging to get that much money right now.”

“How about 24 hours?” Lennie suggested, looking at the property manager. “I don’t need to be the bad guy here. If you want to give him a day, I can be flexible. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“It’ll be the same situation,” she said.

“Sure. Could be,” Lennie said. “But who knows? Maybe you get more with honey than with vinegar.”

She drummed a pen against her desk and looked at Ricardo for a moment. “Fine. Twenty-four hours,” she said, and Ricardo clapped his hands together and went outside to make phone calls. Lennie gathered up his eviction papers and stood to leave.

“Thanks for working with him,” he said.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “I don’t know how you do this every day.”

McCloskey examines evidence of a drug operation at an apartment in Glendale. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The Washington Post)

He was used to people assuming his job was unbearable, but the truth was that despite its heartaches, dangers and starting salary of $48,000, Lennie mostly enjoyed being a constable. It had introduced him to hidden corners of the city and to all kinds of people, including a community of local constables who had become some of his closest friends. They got together each week for breakfast, so one morning Lennie pulled into a diner to join a group of his colleagues before they all started their shifts.

The constables at the table were elected to office by their own local districts, which made for a diverse group. Most of them were Republican, like Lennie, but some were Democrats. One was a landlord who had lost rental income during the pandemic; another had a background in social work and tenants’ rights. Many were former police officers who carried handguns; a few preferred to dress like civilians and carry only clipboards, for their paperwork. But lately all of them came to commiserate about a job that had become more fraught and unpredictable during the past few months.

“So, I walk into this apartment the other day, and the guy’s loading an AK-47,” one constable said. “I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. Just gibberish.”

“I swear the pandemic’s made everyone mental,” another constable said. “They think their world is ending.”

“In some ways it is,” Lennie said. “If we’re there, it’s probably the worst day of their lives.”

“You have to help them see a tomorrow.”

“You have to get them out of the house.”

It was a familiar debate among the constables — empathy vs. enforcement — and more and more Lennie found himself stuck somewhere in between. Some constables thought tenants had taken advantage of the moratorium, and it was true that Lennie had gone to apartments during the pandemic where tenants acted as if they were above the law, damaging property and spending their rental assistance on flat-screen TVs and new cars while their landlords suffered. But, much more often, he had encountered renters who were newly jobless, working from home, grieving, terrified of the virus, or already sick as they exhausted their savings to pay what little they could.

“A lot of people are still playing catch-up,” he said. “They have good intentions.”

“It’s about treating them with kindness and respect,” another constable said.

“But, as a taxpayer, there’s a part of me that says: Why are we wasting my money to help deadbeats?” a retired constable said. “Maybe it’s their own fault they can’t pay.”

“They don’t have two brain cells to rub together,” another said. “Some of these people can’t be helped.”

“But maybe some can,” Lennie said, and a few minutes later he paid the bill and left for his shift.

The manager of a Glendale condominium complex enters a unit as an eviction order is served. The unit was empty, with an air mattress blocking the entrance. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for the Washington Post)

Amother and her autistic child in a ransacked one-bedroom. A vacant apartment with 49 empty bottles of Corona scattered across the floor. A woman who offered to pay with fake money and then lunged at Lennie, until he tackled and restrained her. “You’re a tool of capitalistic corruption!” she shouted at him as he pinned her to the floor. “You dogging the American people. You’re killing us. You’re a monster. How do you people sleep?” But within 10 minutes Lennie had gotten her calmed down and out the front door, and then he navigated back toward Ricardo’s apartment complex to see whether he had paid.

“Did we get a happy ending?” he asked the property manager.

“Depends,” she said, and then she explained that she’d received no payment and no more information from Ricardo, so she’d already rented out his unit, increasing the price from $1,700 to $2,200, and a new tenant had snapped it up within 15 minutes. “Demand right now is off the chain,” she said. “We need him out. We need to proceed.” Lennie sighed, nodded and followed the locksmith back down the gravel pathways to Ricardo’s porch.

“They’re ready to go ahead with the order,” he said once Ricardo came to the door.

“I tried to call them,” Ricardo said, and his wife joined him in the doorway. Her eyes were red, and the baby was fussing in her arms. “We’re good for the money,” she said. “We actually got it, but then somebody hacked into the bank account, so now it’s frozen, and they changed the account number, and I’m waiting for the new one, and—”

Ricardo cut in: “Six-thousand is a lot. We just need a little more time.”

Lennie winced and shook his head. “Management already rented it out, but we’ll give you 10 minutes to grab some essentials,” he said.

Ricardo crossed his arms, stared at Lennie for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay. Ten minutes,” he said, and then he began hurrying through the house to find all the essentials necessary for a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 1-year-old and a dog.

He went to the bedroom to pack diapers, wipes, shoes and toiletries. His wife went to the refrigerator for milk, snacks and baby food. “What if the whole damn kitchen is essential?” she asked as she threw open cabinets and slammed them shut. The 4-year-old came into the kitchen carrying her leftover Halloween candy, two stuffed animals and her roller skates. “What about my TV?” she asked Ricardo, and he leaned down to squeeze her shoulder and shook his head. “It’s too big. We’ll get it later,” he said, and she started to cry. Ricardo offered her his cellphone to distract her. Lennie held out another sticker, and the girl took it and looked up at him. “Don’t watch my TV,” she told him. “Don’t change the channel. Don’t sleep in my bed.”

Five minutes. Six. “We need more time,” Ricardo said, cursing to himself, but to Lennie the final 10 minutes inside someone else’s home usually felt interminable. There was little for him to do and nothing helpful he could say, so he stood in a corner and tried to make polite conversation as he encouraged things along.

“I like this lamp,” he told Ricardo.

“Huh?” Ricardo said, as he came out of the bathroom carrying five toothbrushes and then followed Lennie’s gaze to a floor lamp in the living room. “Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Costco,” Ricardo said as he packed the toothbrushes into a travel case.

“No kidding?” Lennie said. “I should go get one of those.”

“I’ll sell it to you,” Ricardo said. “How about $6,200?”

Nine minutes. Ten. Ricardo grabbed car seats, dog food and his gun safe and carried them outside to the porch. Twelve minutes. Fifteen. “I’m trying not to rush you, but unfortunately we don’t have a whole lot more time,” Lennie said.

“Shoes!” Ricardo reminded his wife. “Pajamas! Pack-and-play!” She started to fold up the crib and then saw a pile of crackers left behind on the floor. She grabbed a broom and started to sweep it up.

“That’s okay,” Lennie said. “You don’t need to do that.”

“I can’t help myself,” she said, and she started to cry. Lennie stood against the wall, watching her, trying to think of something to say. “You ever hear about those robot vacuums?” he asked, finally. “They just go around and keep the dust out and everything.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She finished sweeping, folded the crib and tossed it onto the porch with the rest of the essentials. Ricardo carried the children outside, and Lennie locked the door and walked with them toward their truck.

“This is just wrong,” Ricardo told him as he started the engine. “It’s ridiculous. It’s cruel. It’s barbaric.”

“I’m sorry,” Lennie said, but the moratorium was over and that meant it was also routine. He watched them drive away, double-checked the locks, and then continued to the next address on his list.

In Chicago, a New Approach to Gay and Bisexual Men With Prostate Cancer

A new clinic focuses on patients left grappling with the aftermath of treatment in ways that are rarely appreciated by doctors.

When Matthew Curtin had to have his prostate removed because of cancer, he began a “psychological and emotional adventure” that he felt his doctors were not prepared to treat. 

By Steve Kenny NY Times

CHICAGO — Matthew Curtin learned he had prostate cancer after a routine physical examination in October 2019, when test results indicated there was a problem. A biopsy confirmed the news, and doctors told him that surgery to remove his prostate was the best option.

The surgery went well, and, two years later, there is no indication that the cancer has returned. But for Mr. Curtin, 66, diagnosis and surgery were only the beginning of a “clinical and psychological and emotional adventure” — one he felt that many urologists were not equipped to handle, because he was gay and the majority of doctors and their patients were not.

Post-treatment symptoms are similar for all prostate cancer patients, including urinary incontinence, erectile dysfunction, diminished libido and loss of ejaculate. But researchers are finding that those changes may echo through the lives of gay and bisexual men in unexpected, and sometimes more difficult, ways.

The obstacles can be physical and emotional, and may be reflected in patients’ relationships with their partners. And they may present a challenge to medical professionals more attuned to the relationship needs of straight men.

Mr. Curtin said he was about three months into treatment when he was struck that “there is a lot going on here — the emotional and psychological effect — that is not being treated.”

His doctor’s first response, Mr. Curtin said, was, “My office isn’t prepared for this.”

Mr. Curtin’s search for a different approach led him to Dr. Channa Amarasekera, director of the Gay and Bisexual Men’s Urology Program at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. The program, which began taking patients only in August, is the first of its kind in the United States, and Dr. Amarasekera, who has focused his career on urologic care for gay and bisexual men and other sexual minorities, is the program’s first leader.

It is an emerging field of study driven in part by the increasing number of prostate cancer patients who identify as gay or bisexual. “Historically, the medical system has sort of operated in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell environment, and that’s been problematic,” Dr. Amarasekera said. “Fortunately, that’s changing. Patients are increasingly open about who they are.”

The gay and bisexual men in their 50s and 60s who are now entering the prime demographic for prostate cancer also lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic. That experience has left many of them more experienced in dealing with the medical establishment and more distrustful of it.

A colored magnetic resonance imaging scan of a patient with prostate cancer. The enlarged prostate is visible in pink, and the cancerous tumor is the dark green patch on the prostate.Credit...Science Picture Library/Science Source

“It’s important now to reassure patients who came of age through that time that things are different, and they can expect better care,” Dr. Amarasekera said.

The problem, experts in the field say, is that the research about gay and bisexual men and prostate cancer is still woefully inadequate.

“Historically, most of the research on gay health was focused on H.I.V., and in young gay men, because that was the biggest killer,” said Simon Rosser, a professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota, who led a study in 2017 of gay and bisexual men with prostate cancer.

“It’s only now that as the AIDS generation grew older, and aged into health problems like prostate cancer, that specialists are starting to see gay patients. But they have not trained in sexual minorities and health care,” Dr. Rosser said.

Dr. Edward Schaeffer, chair of the urology department at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and chief of urology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said he sensed the importance of a new approach about three years ago.

“I felt it was a big unmet need,” said Dr. Schaeffer, whose work has focused mostly on the disparities among men with prostate cancer, particularly between Black men and others. So he created the program with Dr. Amarasekera.

Dr. Amarasekera studied urologists’ training and found that many reported receiving less than five hours of instruction on the treatment of gay and bisexual patients. He also surveyed gay patients, who overall said their sexual satisfaction was not adequately taken under consideration during treatment for prostate cancer.

“It’s important to collect data on how treatment affects sexual function differently for gay and bisexual men, who have different sexual repertoires than straight men,” he said. “If you lack the tools to measure aspects of sexual function that are specific to gay and bisexual men, you lose an opportunity to track their progress.”

Many of the men Dr. Amarasekera sees at the program’s two clinics — one in downtown Chicago and the other in the historically gay Northalsted neighborhood — are unprepared to face yet another health crisis. One of them is a 59-year-old lawyer in Chicago who is H.I.V.-positive, and who said he was not fully warned about how the removal of his prostate would affect his body.

“There is a wasting,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be quoted by name because not all of his family members were aware of his H.I.V. status. “There’s a feminization of the body, shrinking of the genitals.”

The health care system, he said, “marginalizes gay men, particularly when it comes to sexual health, and the prostate is so linked to sexual health in gay men. It’s a sexual organ, and it’s been removed.”

“A previous urologist simply said, ‘Go forward and enjoy your life, and bye,’” the lawyer said.

Gary Dowsett, emeritus professor at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, said such treatment, while not meant to be callous, is not uncommon. It’s just that many urologists don’t realize that the prostate is “kind of a male ‘G spot,’” and gay men more often are aware of it.

“If they do not understand the role of the prostate in sexual pleasure, it’s rarely a priority discussion,” said Dr. Dowsett, a prostate cancer survivor himself, said of urologists. “The focus is usually on continence and erections, as if sex starts and ends there.”

Jane Ussher, a professor at the Western Sydney University School of Medicine in Australia, has been studying the effects of cancer in gay men for 20 years.

“Partial erectile dysfunction has a particular impact” on gay patients, she said, and they “report significantly greater concern about loss of ejaculate than heterosexual men. Visible ejaculate is eroticized in sex between men, and also signifies partner satisfaction — a sign of good sex.”

Dr. Schaeffer and Dr. Amarasekera said the information gathered through the Northwestern program would benefit urology as a whole. After all, straight men, too, often are distressed by the sexual consequences of treatment and feel that they were not adequately warned.

“When you don’t ask the right questions or counsel patients about the potential impacts of treatment relevant to them, you are essentially not allowing them to make an informed decision,” Dr. Amarasekera said.

“This can lead to resentment, and understandably so, if they experience side effects from treatment,” he said.

Dr. Schaeffer said he hoped the program’s approach to gay men’s urologic health would “take off in big cities and then spread.”

“One of my asks of Dr. Amarasekera is to focus on building the blueprint, to have it duplicated across the country,” he said.

Dr. Amarasekera said he wanted to create a space that was free of judgment.

“Prostate cancer can transform men in nonphysical ways, eroding their spirit,” he said. Sometimes doctors must veer from the standard script in the treatment of straight men, he added: “You have to meet your patients where they need to be.”

Prostate cancer patients are not the program’s sole focus. “I see it expanding and being a place for gay men to seek urologic care in general,” Dr. Amarasekera said.

Tom Samolinski, 63, does not have prostate cancer, but he sought out the program after suffering for years with urinary problems that had never been resolved. With Dr. Amarasekera, he said, “I felt heard on issues that I haven’t been able to verbalize.”

Dr. Amarasekera “considered my whole person, and my whole personhood encompassed my being gay,” he added.

That idea also inspired Perry McKay, a Chicago philanthropist whose donation helped get the Northwestern program off the ground. “My belief is that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got,” he said.

“This is an opportunity to communicate, train and educate urologists on how to provide better care tailored to the specific needs of gay and bisexual men,” he added.

Dr. Rosser agreed. “In the gay community, we don’t talk about prostate cancer,” he said.

“We need specialists to ask about sexual orientation and to talk to gay men about the effects of treatment,” Dr. Rosser said. “And we need to tell every gay patient that it’s important to come out to your specialist. Your future sex life depends on it.”

Gene Otto, who is the co-host of a support group in Palm Springs, Calif., for gay and bisexual men with prostate cancer, sees a growing need as well. One gay patient in his group, he said, was given literature geared toward women whose husbands had prostate cancer.

“Their whole concept — they’re dealing with heterosexual men and their wives more than homosexual men,” Mr. Otto said.

The Chicago lawyer who is being treated by Dr. Amarasekera said his experience with the program “goes a long way to address the mistrust that many gay men feel toward medical institutions.”

He is still together with the man he began dating right before his diagnosis, and they are planning a wedding. Sex remains a “tremendous pleasure,” he said.

That’s the outcome Dr. Amarasekera wants for all his patients.

“After treatment, many men with prostate cancer focus on the warmth in their relationships rather than the heat,” he said. “We’re here to say: ‘Yes, it’s important to pay attention to the warmth. But the heat isn’t over. We can still get you back.’”