The second night, the poor girl wakes from her penis dream to find her father stripped to his boxer shorts, on all fours in her bedroom, where he is whipping himself with his belt—loud smacks, his back and shoulders reddened in the faint light.

“I’m a terrible father, an unconscionable husband, but your mother is worse!” the poor girl’s dad assures her, between lashes. “If we’ve made you like us, I’m so sorry!” her father wails, still whipping himself. The self-flagellation continues while the father confesses his homosexuality; he denounces his wife as a repeatedly unfaithful lesbian. The daughter silently listens and observes. The teenage girl is justly angry that her own coming out has been dimmed by the self-centered coming out of her parents. (Only then did I realize that Emily MacPherson was Em.)

The clear-headed teenage girl also makes an astounding aesthetic judgment. Her oafish father should castigate himself either verbally or physically—not both, not at the same time.

“Either act it out or put it in words, Daddy—not the two together,” the daughter tells her deplorable dad, who has barely managed to draw blood with his belt. If I hadn’t already figured it out, her artistic doctrine gave Emily MacPherson away; she’d put in writing a pantomimic aesthetic. Pantomime is the art of conveying a story by bodily movements only. Clearly this was what Em was doing—either pantomiming or writing, “not the two together.”

“A Family Comes Out” was the title of the first Emily MacPherson story I read. I asked my Iowa students to read it in our fiction workshop; some students, veteran readers of Century Review, had already done so. They duly noted Em’s sardonic humor. The better writers cited the unusual focus of the story’s physical details: how the bodily movements of the characters capture their haplessness, their sexual tension, their conflicted feelings of desire and regret. I did not point out the pantomimic rendering of the characters’ inner lives: how their bodies betray their sexual turmoil. Only three of my fiction workshop students were New Yorkers, and only one of them had been to (or even heard of) the Gallows Lounge—a kid who’d been an undergrad at NYU, and he’d never seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks onstage at the Gallows. I didn’t tell my Iowa students that Emily MacPherson had a parallel creative life as a pantomimist, or that Em (as a fiction writer) had virtually pantomimed the way her characters moved.