Moon Over chapter: Dima heads West!

James Finn
2 min readNov 21, 2019

Dima, the Soviet fighter jock’s son, heads for West Berlin with his ‘commissar’ mentor. Will he make it past Checkpoint Charlie? Will he and Ian still click? And what’s all this about Sexy as F*CK and Nice as Hell?

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Author’s Notes:

Dima’s first glimpse of the western side of the Berlin wall may have left him as disconcerted as my own first experience. The Wall was really two walls with a no-man’s-land in the middle. The wall facing East Berlin was stark, grey, and featureless. Nobody was allowed to approach it.

The wall facing the West was a riot of color, covered with graffiti, some of it obscene. I have many chunks of graffiti-covered concrete from that part of the Wall, most of them chiseled away with my own hand. But that’s another story.

The museum on the western side of the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie was very popular in the 1980s. It documented the history of the wall and of all the people who had escaped under or over it. It also documented all the people who had been killed as they tried to escape. The museum is still there and is worth a visit.

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James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.