You couldn’t write more literary (or more obscure) short fiction than Em was writing, or so I’d thought. Boy, had she managed to reach the wrong audience. Like me—but in her small, well-crafted way—Em was imagining worst-case scenarios. Sure, her stories were based on the worst things that had happened to her, but Em had purposely made them unimaginably worse; she’d exaggerated her own family’s dysfunctional behavior to the worst extremes she could imagine, short of suicide or murder.

“I’m not sure suicide or murder would have been worse,” Nora later said. The syndrome of so-called ex-gay Christians undergoing conversion therapy struck Nora as good material for her and Em to take onstage at the Gallows. Em, understandably, was feeling a little snakebit from her experience of giving her parents the idea that they could be writers. Em had thought she was being funny; she’d tried to take the self-hatred that sometimes goes with being gay or lesbian to comic extremes, but her own parents didn’t get the joke.

Even Elliot Barlow had cautioned Nora not to make fun of gay and lesbian self-doubt or self-loathing in Two Dykes, One Who Talks. “The Gallows isn’t ready for political comedy or satire on that subject,” the snowshoer said. “I’m all for putting down ex-gay Christians in conversion therapy, or satirizing ex-gay converts to Roman Catholicism, but I’ll bet the Gallows won’t go for it—it’ll look like Catholic-bashing to the Gallows,” the little English teacher told Nora and Em.

Nora, naturally, was in favor of full-scale Catholic-bashing, but Em knew what it was like to be completely misunderstood by an audience. We were all in Nora and Em’s rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, over the bad restaurant that kept changing. It had once been a bad Greek place, and although the Greeks were gone, Nora still said the bad smell was probably octopus. Mr. Barlow and Nora and I were watching Em, who appeared to be performing hari-kari in slow motion on the couch. “For Christ’s sake, Em—you look like you’re trying to change a tampon with bread tongs,” Nora told her, but Em kept trying.

The snowshoer took a stab at what Em was pantomiming. “If Catholics and other Christians are sacred cows, even at the Gallows, it won’t be funny if we make fun of mothers and fathers—it’ll look like mother-and-father-bashing,” Elliot guessed. Em nodded, stopping her suicide in progress on the couch. Mr. Barlow believed the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s was the beginning of hard times for political comedy and satire.