Elliot Barlow and I were at home with being first-timers in Wengen. We still felt like newcomers in New York. Whereas Nora tried to insert herself among the activists at ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Mr. Barlow and I weren’t cut out to be activists—no more than we were to be real New Yorkers. The snowshoer said she was “too small” and she spoke “too quietly” to be an activist. “I’m just an advocate of activists,” Elliot Barlow said; she always put herself down.

Some ACT UP members questioned Nora’s participation in the group, especially at the demonstrations. “We’re not a comedy club—we’re not in this for the laughs,” one of the ACT UP guys told Nora. The way Nora affected a crowd, including people who agreed with her, was a problem. For the most part, Em would keep her distance from the ACT UP demonstrations. What could a pantomimist do at a demonstration? Em was increasingly concerned about Nora’s effect on crowds, even at the Gallows.

To many ACT UP members, Nora would find it necessary to repeat herself. “I’m not always funny, you know—I’m not just funny,” Nora kept saying. In 1987, ACT UP was only getting started. I was just out of it; I didn’t notice the earliest ACT UP demonstrations, but Nora did. Nora was cut out to be a shit-disturber; for a New Hampshire girl, Nora seemed like a real New Yorker. I’ll always be a New Hampshire boy.

Nora was pissed that President Reagan was still badgering Congress to bring back God to America’s classrooms; the gay boys were dying in droves, but the president cared more about a moment of silence in public schools than he did about AIDS. In 1987, it was Reagan’s silence about AIDS that led ACT UP to join forces with those guys who thought up the SILENCE=DEATH poster—an all-black poster with a pink triangle, right side up. SILENCE=DEATH was in white caps, under the triangle. That poster became the image for ACT UP; there would be T-shirts later. Nora tried to persuade the Gallows to let their bartenders wear SILENCE=DEATH T-shirts, but the dickless management said the comedy club wasn’t into single-issue politics. The Gallows Lounge would allow Nora and Em to wear the T-shirts, but Em didn’t like the way Nora looked in a T-shirt—not in public. A T-shirt made Nora’s boobs appear to be protesting something all by themselves. In the SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt, the pink triangle was at a weird angle above Nora’s boobs, pointed at her throat. There would be more poster art from the people who created SILENCE=DEATH. You may remember their AIDSGATE poster—Reagan with a green face and the pink eyes of a laboratory rat. If that poster was a T-shirt, I never saw Nora wear it.