“The ‘whale-ship’ is from Moby-Dick—it’s the last line of Chapter Twenty-four, ‘The Advocate’ chapter,” Mr. Barlow gently explained to our marine. “I just meant that the Marine Corps must have been of special importance to you,” the pretty snowshoer said. “Maybe more of a learning experience than any college could have been?”

“Yes… ma’am,” the marine managed to say. He was struggling to be nice, to the degree that it was painful to look at him.

When we were on our way back to New York together, Elliot and I speculated on what sexual horrors a whale-ship might have conjured up for our restrained but homophobic marine. I liked the little English teacher’s theory the best of all our speculations.

“Our guy is a right-wing homophobe who goes to the Gallows expressly to see performers he despises, and to look with loathing at most of the audience, who are enjoying the shows,” Mr. Barlow began. At first, I didn’t see where the snowshoer was going with this. I thought I understood the homo-hating guys Elliot was thinking of—those sexually intolerant types who haunted gay bars or lesbian hangouts, just to make trouble—but those guys were usually in groups. When they laughed at the drag queens, they laughed like a gang. Our angry marine was a loner. The Marine Corps may have been his home, but he wasn’t a man who made many friends.

Mr. Barlow agreed. Our marine was a solitary type, and he tried to hold his hatred back. In his heart, our marine was a gay basher, but he wouldn’t have gone out with a bunch of guys for the express purpose of abusing gays or lesbians. “Our marine might have thought the ‘Whale Ship’ was a more clandestine club than the Gallows,” the snowshoer said. “Not the kind of gay bar or lesbian hangout that advertises itself, or a place like the Gallows, which is known to be politically subversive. Our marine was imagining much worse for the Whale Ship—a secret society, an openly perverse place,” the little English teacher told me.

“Like what? What happens at the Whale Ship?” I asked Elliot. I was a little frustrated with her. I thought what she was saying was full of generalizations; she’d said nothing specific.

“At the Whale Ship, you have to show your penis or your vagina just to get in the door. And you better have a good one, or you won’t get in!” the pretty snowshoer cried. We laughed and laughed. It was just a joke, I thought. At the Whale Ship, the price of admission was an aesthetic exam—you had to pass a weird kind of perfection test, just to be admitted. Our marine, little Mr. Barlow speculated, may have imagined that the Whale Ship wouldn’t admit him, because the undersize heavyweight wasn’t perfect enough.

As Em pointed out in her first letter to me, there was “something improbable” about the Whale Ship—“even as an imaginary sex club,” Em wrote.