In her short stories, Em would exaggerate how many times her homo-hating father wrote John Paul II—she mostly made up what the fictional dad tells the Polish pope. “My being gay, and my having a lesbian wife—not to mention our having a lesbian daughter—made me think of those three big vehicles that injured you when you were a younger man,” the repentant gay father writes to John Paul II. In 1940, the future pope was hit by a tram, fracturing his skull; that same year, he was hit by a truck in a quarry, leaving him with one shoulder higher than the other and a lifelong stoop. Four years later, he was hospitalized with a concussion and another shoulder injury, having been hit by a German truck. To anyone reading Em’s short stories, the future pope’s injuries sound a lot worse than the plight of the gay father with the lesbian wife and daughter, but Em doesn’t stop there.

In Em’s short stories, the fictional father’s last letter to Pope John Paul II likens the “outbreak” of homosexuality in his family to a “disease.” As for the “ongoing and unspeakable sin”—namely, the lives led by his lesbian daughter and her lesbian mom—the demented dad likens his pain to the pope’s survival of two assassination attempts. In 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, John Paul II was shot in the abdomen by a Turkish gunman—a member of a militant fascist group. A year later, in Portugal, a Spanish priest tried to stab the pope with a knife.

Emily MacPherson’s first collection of short stories would be published in April 1987, right after Reagan said: “After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

“It sounds like Reagan is saying that people with AIDS deserve it,” Nora said.

I liked the title Em originally gave to her collection of short stories—Letters to the Pope. All the stories were about the family that comes out together; the last stories were the ones about the renunciations of the gay father, the Catholic convert who begs John Paul II to baptize him. This was Emily MacPherson’s first book, and her publishers knew they could push her around; they rejected Letters to the Pope as a title, and insisted on something less inflammatory. The book would be called The Coming Out Stories—not a bad title, and the stories themselves were no less inflammatory; Em’s publishers didn’t censor her stories, just her title. For a collection of literary short stories by a first-time author, the book did pretty well.