I knew Nora had been putting herself down a lot lately. She’d agreed with the ACT UP members who questioned her participation in the group, especially at the demonstrations. Nora loved ACT UP, but now she saw her presence as a distraction or a disruption. What Nora loved about ACT UP was the specificity of the group’s cause and purpose. Nora was always hard on herself, but now she put down her kind of “protest comedy,” as she called it. She was “too broad, too all over the place,” she said. Nora wasn’t a nihilist or an anarchist, but in the world outside the Gallows Lounge, Nora was perceived as nothing but a rabble-rouser, and she knew it. On the night of the Santas, Nora also knew she wasn’t funny—not even at the Gallows. If you were no more than a rabble-rouser, you were just plain boring at the Gallows.

I knew it was not Nora’s best subject for comedy: those men who feel entitled to have women put out for them. Nora had known boys like that, at Exeter. On weekends or on holidays, when she’d come home to the academy campus—both when she was in boarding school at Northfield and when she was a college student at Mount Holyoke—Nora had been hit on by those cocksure boys who presumed she would be grateful for the attention (for any attention). Nora was never pretty; to many men, she was too big, or too masculine. Yet there were certain younger boys who were attracted to her. I suppose they saw an undeniable voluptuousness in the way Nora was too heavy, and you know the kind of arrogant young men I mean—the ones who knew they were good-looking, and that Nora wasn’t.

I understood what Nora looked like to good-looking young men who’d been successful with less-than-attractive women. She looked like she would be a wild ride, as one of my wrestling teammates told me, not knowing Nora was my cousin.

The presumption that she would be easy got to Nora. “Are you kidding me?” she would ask the pretty boys who hit on her at Exeter. Or, if Nora was not in the mood to be nice: “Keep your pecker in your pants, pretty boy, or you could lose it.”

Those good-looking boys weren’t used to being rejected. Nora was well acquainted with the dyke word—it was invariably what those arrogant young men called Nora when she turned them down. Instead of paying attention to Two Dykes, One Who Talks, I was thinking about where the dyke word came from in my cousin Nora’s life. I was proud of Nora for standing up for herself, and for the good use she’d made of the dyke word. Wouldn’t Nora have the last laugh on those hateful boys? I was hoping.