Em’s expelling-of-God pantomime made the management of the Gallows Lounge draw the line on the issue of school prayer. Nora was more riled up about abortion. In 1986, President Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress in his State of the Union address. “We are a nation of idealists,” he said, “yet today there is a wound in our national conscience. America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn. For the rest of my time, I shall do what I can to see that this wound is one day healed.”

Nora observed that Reagan sounded so righteous on behalf of prayer in schools and the unborn, yet he kept quiet about the AIDS crisis. In the United States, AIDS began in 1981—the same year Reagan took office. By the time Reagan made his first extensive comments on the epidemic—six years into his presidency, in 1987—more than thirty-six thousand Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, and more than twenty thousand had died. It was Nora’s opinion that, in Reagan’s silence, Pat Buchanan was just one of the goons who spoke for him. Buchanan was Reagan’s White House communications director for a couple of years. It was Buchanan who said that AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.”

“More God-loves-AIDS business—Reagan is in bed with the Christian Right,” Em wrote me. “Nora says we’ll see how that goes over at the Gallows.”

At the Gallows, it was okay to put down Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” Falwell said. “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

Em was having her own issues with God’s wrath against homosexuals. Her father, the Catholic convert, had written to Pope John Paul II, asking him to baptize him. Em’s father was “renouncing” those things that John Paul II also found profane and sinful—such as contraception, abortion, remarriage after a divorce, and homosexual acts. Em had been copied on her dad’s plea to the Polish pope, who did not write back. Em didn’t blame John Paul II for not writing back. Em didn’t believe that her self-hating, homophobic dad deserved to be baptized by the pope.