Trowbridge’s hatred of Mr. Barlow began before the little English teacher’s transition to a woman. Elliot Barlow had been among the first on the faculty to advocate for coeducation at Exeter. The backup heavyweight with the long arms stopped attending the home wrestling matches after girls were admitted to the academy. Trowbridge wrote in a notebook that he couldn’t concentrate on the wrestling—“not with all the girls around.” Yet this unwelcome distraction, purportedly caused by coeducation at Exeter, didn’t stop Trowbridge from attending the girls’ soccer or field-hockey games in the fall; the girls’ basketball games, or their swimming and diving, in the winter; the girls’ softball games, or their track meets, in the spring. Wrestling was a winter sport, but Trowbridge became a steadfast spectator in all three seasons of athletics at Exeter; his hatred of seeing all the girls at his old school somehow compelled him to scrutinize them. Emory Trowbridge wrote derogatory things in his diaries about the girls he watched playing sports. Had Trowbridge been stalking the girl students at the academy, in the obsessive way he’d watched Nora and Em at the Gallows? What was written about Emory Trowbridge was largely speculative; his motives remained murky. Yet, in the media coverage of the Gallows Lounge shooting, there was more about Trowbridge than there was about Nora.

The New York Times was not Nora’s friend. The paper condemned the Gallows Lounge shooting and duly noted the “exceptional valor” of Elliot Barlow, but there was more than a whiff of reproach in the way the writer for the Times characterized Nora and Em’s “incendiary antics”—their “purposeful vulgarity.”

Elsewhere in New York, there was some love expressed for the Gallows; there was notably more love for Two Dykes, One Who Talks. Nora had been interviewed in Rolling Stone, where the Two Dykes were praised for their “political prescience.”

The Village Voice pointed out the noticeable lack of a security presence on that Friday night at the Gallows Lounge. When the shooting started, the bouncer went out on the sidewalk—ostensibly, to inform the security guard of the trouble inside. One of the bartenders had already called the cops. It was unexplained why the security guard stayed on the sidewalk. To prevent people from entering the club until the police arrived or the shooting stopped? That Friday night, a spokesperson for the Gallows couldn’t confirm if the guard had been armed. All the idiot management would say was that sometimes the security guard had a gun, sometimes not. “We know,” the writer for the Voice would write. Of the New York media covering popular culture, the Voice and Rolling Stone had been alone in paying tribute to Damaged Don when he was gunned down in a parking lot in Montana for singing “Goin’ Back to Great Falls” to a Reaganite.