Long out of print, his novel Nebraska is an enigmatic record of queer survival in midcentury America.
George Whitmore, 1987. (Robert Giard © Estate of Robert Giard)
Somewhere in the ether between Chicago and California, Nebraska endures, a grassy mirage that thwarts any attempt to define it. On a journey overland in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, still damp with Scottish air, discovered Nebraska to be “a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth.” Locals, too, admit there’s something shapeless about their state. “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska,” Willa Cather wrote in My Ántonia, a novel steeped in the lonesomeness of life on the prairie. More recently, the state’s tourism commission coined (and subsequently retired) a slogan—“Nebraska: Honestly, it’s not for everyone”—that suggests even those tasked with promoting the place can muster only a shrug. It’s as if something about the flat geometry and unremitting panoramas turns a person inward, toward psychic vistas that are less landlocked. Stevenson called this involution “a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.”
The writer George Whitmore grew up in Denver and spent his adult years in New York City, but he was fluent in the alienated poetry of regions like Nebraska. As a gay man who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, he likely empathized with such marginal territories and the searchers who staked a claim there. In the winter of 1987, he published his third (and final) novel, Nebraska. It was slim, at just over 150 pages, and diverged sharply from the two satires of queer urbanism that had preceded it. The cover—featuring an illustration of a drab outbuilding bisected by utility poles—promised a work of rural naturalism: a simpler Wright Morris, a gentler James Purdy. Instead, Nebraska plays out with the closeness of a family chamber drama, even as it doubles as an oblique allegory of AIDS.
In his introduction to a new edition of the novel, the scholar Michael Bronski situates Nebraska in a recent wavelet of queer reissues that includes The Dream Life, by Bo Huston, Facing It: A Novel of AIDS,by Paul Reed, and The Body and Its Dangers, by Allen Barnett, all first released in the 1980s and ’90s. To that list I would add Such Times, by Christopher Coe, as well as poetry collections by the late Charles Shively and Kevin Killian. Such synchronicity isn’t a fluke: These books reverberate out of the past like talismans or verdicts. They’re both documents of a romanticized queer culture not yet co-opted by opportunistic political or corporate stooges and documents of survival.
Nebraska’s depiction of small-town queerness before gay liberation is the kind of story always in danger of erasure. But unlike many contemporary gay narratives, Nebraska is ruthless and unsentimental, set in a period when gay sex was criminalized and had to remain underground lest it lead to arrest or forced institutionalization. (In the 1950s, psychiatrists classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”) There are no affirmations here, no pride, just a stoic resolve to continue living. It’s a work whose authenticity is inseparable from its ambivalence. Like the last testament of a ghost who didn’t quite die, Nebraska seems both dated and outside of time. To understand where it came from, we need to resurrect George Whitmore himself.
Whitmore arrived in New York City in 1968. He had studied theater at MacMurray College in Illinois and Bennington College in Vermont, a background evident in Nebraska’s colloquial dialogue and elliptical, three-act structure. As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Whitmore sidestepped the draft by taking a job at Planned Parenthood, where he oversaw the national abortion referral unit. Later, he worked at a local nonprofit advocating for low-income housing in the city. At the same time, he was making a name for himself as a freelance reporter and critic for the still-burgeoning gay press, covering art and design for outlets like Christopher Street and The Advocate. He also wrote scholarly studies of Edith Sitwell and Henry David Thoreau and released poetry under his own imprint, the Free Milk Fund Press, which he operated out of his apartment on the Upper West Side. Three of his plays were produced at little theaters in New York.
In 1979, he joined the Violet Quill, a cohort of seven gay male novelists—including Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, a former boyfriend of Whitmore’s—who met monthly in each other’s apartments to share work and high tea. Together, the books they wrote helped form a body of post-Stonewall literature that was unabashedly sexual and cosmopolitan. Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance (1978) became the quintessential portrait of New York and Fire Island nightlife, while White’s Nocturnes to the King of Naples (1978) sketched nearly rococo impressions of the city’s piers and cruising grounds. Whitmore’s debut novel, The Confessions of Danny Slocum (1980), offered a quirkier slice of gay hedonism: The protagonist suffers from a psychosexual hang-up that prevents him from ejaculating with a partner (hence the jokey surname). A sex therapist connects him with another man afflicted with the same ailment, and the two embark on a series of absurdist erotic capers. According to the literary scholar David Bergman, the book was a fictionalized account of Whitmore’s own plight as a “slow cummer.”
Although no one knew it yet, the days of such delirious, uninhibited queer literature were numbered. The emergence of HIV/AIDS in 1981 cast a sudden pall over Whitmore’s life and work. After his second novel, Deep Dish, was serialized in the New York Native, he turned his attention to a series of unflinching features for The New York Times Magazine and GQ that profiled AIDS patients and their caregivers. In 1986, after months spent documenting the virus’s toll on others, Whitmore learned that he, too, had tested positive for HIV. He published Nebraska a year later. It was a novel of quiet desperation and shame that spoke, however allusively, to his predicament. His final book, Someone Was Here, a nonfiction account of AIDS that grew out of his reporting, appeared in 1988. In the epilogue, Whitmore confesses the fool’s bargain he’d made with AIDS: “If I wrote about it, maybe I wouldn’t get it.” He died in New York in 1989, at the age of 43. It was springtime.
At first glance, Nebraska seems an unlikely project for Whitmore to undertake in the throes of the AIDS crisis. A rural, mid-century family drama far removed from urban queer dilemmas was not the kind of work his contemporaries expected of him. But it was perhaps his most personal book: a novel not about AIDS, but about the psychic terrain that AIDS made visible. Nebraska is anything but nostalgic: The Mullens, the family at the center of the novel, live in economic and emotional precarity in the city of Lincoln. Theirs is a world of tarpaper shacks and lives mortgaged to railroads and factories—a landscape of booze, sunk marriages, and botched dreams. It’s a vision of perverted Americana in which the traditional markers of respectability, such as family, church, job, and home, are all revealed to be hollow. The plot is driven by cruelties—some inadvertent, others deliberate. “Well, the worst had happened. Ha! The worst just kept on,” the narrator quips almost halfway through, in what could well be the book’s mantra.
That narrator is 12-year-old Craig Mullen. When the first and longest section of Nebraska opens, he has just lost his leg after being struck by a car in the feverish summer of 1956. Craig passes his days in bed, numbed by painkillers, tended to by his mother, a disenchanted waitress at “Monkey Ward’s” (as the department store Montgomery Ward is nicknamed), and his two sisters: Dolores, who dreams of being a wife, and Betty, who dreams of being a cheerleader. Their drunken father has abandoned them and disappeared to Denver, leaving the family to scrape by hand-to-mouth. Despite his amputation, Craig is a normal boy, as his mother avows—a word that both reassures and betrays her. In the murk of painkillers and small-town inertia, Craig begins to sense something unspoken in himself. He has confused feelings for his classmate Wesley, which have already surfaced in a few secretive, fumbling encounters. Theirs is not a story of sexual awakening but of bewilderment—desire born, as it so often is, of loneliness and uncertainty.
Into this mix appears Craig’s uncle Wayne, a sailor who has been at sea for years. He announces he’s headed to California to open an auto garage with an old Navy buddy he calls “the Chief.” That plan unravels. So does the family’s fragile equilibrium after Wayne is caught in a police sting for “lewd and lascivious behavior” in the bus depot men’s room. The family learns that he was also dishonorably discharged from the Navy because of sexual deviance. The section ends with a halting court transcript, a document that captures not just legal testimony but also the fog of a boy trying to make sense of just how deep his trouble goes. In his testimony, Craig admits to something he told Wesley:
JUDGE KRAMER: Did your uncle ever touch you on the genitals?
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WITNESS: I think he may have.
JUDGE KRAMER: Good. That’s right. That’s just what we—just answer my questions.
WITNESS: Is that what inter—interfere means?
JUDGE KRAMER: Well, it can mean that, son. Yes it can.
But another secret goes unconfessed: Craig said this only to convince Wesley to masturbate with him. After all, Craig reasons, if a grown man—a self-professed war hero—can touch him intimately, then surely what he and Wesley do during their sleepovers isn’t so shameful. In Nebraska, shame isn’t the cost of any particular transgression; it’s an inheritance that circulates freely and implicates all of the Mullens.
These opening chapters establish the novel’s themes—masculinity, queerness, class, family dysfunction—with an economy that matches Whitmore’s unshowy lyricism. His imagery can sometimes encapsulate the entire novel. “Wesley’s mama took her canary in a teeny cage in the glove compartment and it didn’t die,” Craig marvels at one point, seemingly unaware that concealing something vulnerable to keep it safe describes his and Wayne’s fates exactly.
In his introduction, Bronski traces the roots of Nebraska to the Southern Gothic parables of Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor. That lineage is apparent in the novel’s moral equivocations and the offhand grotesquerie of Craig’s amputated leg, his mother’s and grandfather’s fleshy bodies, and Wayne’s once-rotten teeth. But spiritually, the book hews closer to the deadpan miserablism of Nebraska poet and short-story writer Weldon Kees, who vanished—presumably a suicide—in 1955. His fiction, like Whitmore’s, subverts the regionalist tradition, trading archetypes for ambiguity and local color for modernist dislocation. Stylistically, the writers share a terseness that bristles into sudden beauty, as in this vignette of Craig and Wesley camping out:
We lay quiet at the end of the night I never wanted to end. The bed was like a raft afloat on the dark sea—the batteries in the flashlight were dead for good. It started raining outside our tent, breaking out like goose bumps, falling on the fallen leaves in the yard.
Kee’s fatalism also hovers over the novel’s final two sections, which trace the fallout of Wayne’s trial. In the second section, played out against the blizzards of 1957, Craig’s born-again father kidnaps him from school. He envisions raising his son—a “real boy”—in the wholesome foothills west of Denver, far from the corrupting reach of men like Wayne. As expected, the fantasy goes tragically sideways. The final section leaps ahead to Southern California in 1969, where the adult Craig has made a pilgrimage to reconnect with his uncle. Wayne now lives with the Chief in a “kind of no-man’s-land filled with junk yards and warehouses,” but he has changed in ways that are disturbing and initially hard to decipher. He has an electric train set in the basement, model airplanes festoon his bedroom, and he’s oddly eager to visit the zoo, where he “calls the animals by their Christian names.” He and the Chief are an out-and-out couple, but it’s unclear if they’re intimate. One afternoon, Wayne retrieves a box of pornography from the Chief’s closet and, flipping through images of men and boys, asks Craig, “Can you get yours hard like that?”
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Intellectually, Wayne is a child again, likely a victim of electroshock therapy or a lobotomy (the novel leaves it ambiguous); in mid-century America, such extreme treatments were intended to “cure” many gay men. The consequences of these procedures were plainly traumatic: memory loss, impaired cognitive function, blunted emotions. Perhaps unbeknownst to Whitmore, the Farrall Instrument Company, a leading manufacturer of the shock devices used to treat gay men, was based in Nebraska. The heartland, it seems, is rife with lurid hypocrisies: Hardworking Christians steward a savage compulsion toward normalcy. But Whitmore challenges the supposed virtuousness of both the Midwest and the idyll of childhood. Craig’s grandparents live next to a “stinking bayou” that once flooded and carried their shack off its foundations. It’s a metaphor for the family’s instability, but also a reminder that the land itself often turns traitorous—and, by extension, so do the people there. In Whitmore’s hands, even innocuous domestic rituals like laundry become fraught. Craig’s mother comes to him bearing a soiled handkerchief from the hamper. “I know boys have urges…that are mostly natural,” she says before admonishing him never to let her find such defilement again. It’s a brief but deft scene that highlights Whitmore’s superb control. He’s never explicit, never extraneous. He lets that stained hanky stand in for the agony of young lust and its torturous repression.
Wayne’s return to a childlike state—a sort of life-in-death—is the novel’s devastating denouement. He has been doctored back to a state of manufactured innocence. He insists, for instance, that his name is Skeezix, a term of endearment he once used for Craig. Skeezix, a character in the long-running comic Gasoline Alley, aged in real time—teenage in the 1930s, middle-age by the 1960s. For Whitmore, the name is an ironic evocation of lost youth. In Nebraska’s dissonant chronologies, Craig ages forward even as Wayne rewinds, not back to purity but to a sickening limbo. Craig—who would have been born in 1945, the same year as Whitmore—functions as an avatar for queer postwar childhood: confused, furtive, hormonal, inarticulate. Wayne, meanwhile, is a case study in the perils of inhibition. Because he couldn’t enact his desires openly, he was forced to become a felon, and now he’s stuck, forced to live as neither boy nor man but an uneasy alloy of both. Craig refers to him as a “Peter Pan”—eternally young, but deformed by the very guilelessness he’s been made to assume.
Nebraska is a relentlessly interior novel. Almost every scene takes place inside—in a house, a car, the mean rooms of factories and motels. Even the California section is airless: When Craig joins Wayne and the Chief on a boat ride, he gets nauseous and must retreat to the lower cabin. The novel’s spatiality mimics the closet and conjures the claustrophobic atmosphere of 1950s Middle America. Although the most paranoid witch hunts of McCarthyism had ended, its official bigotry found a sequel in the Lavender Scare, when the government fired or blacklisted scores of queer civil servants. Police routinely raided gay bars, and newspapers published the roll call of men who’d been rounded up—just as Wayne’s name appears in the local paper in Nebraska before he’s driven out of town. We can now see this state-sanctioned persecution as a rehearsal for the AIDS-era panic of the 1980s, when gay men like Whitmore became scapegoats in a new moral crusade.
By the novel’s third act, the AIDS allegory is unmistakable: Craig’s physical infirmity is the most obvious marker. “When I was in the hospital, I was like the lady in the magician’s box, who must smile and smile as the blades get slipped into her,” he says, echoing the bitter humor that characterizes many AIDS diaries. “After a while there wasn’t anything they could do to me that hurt anymore,” he adds later—a line that could’ve been wrenched right out of Whitmore’s own reporting on the serial maladies and brutal interventions that AIDS patients endured. After yet another stint in the county hospital, Craig observes, “Parts of me were now yellow.” He swallows his pills and sweats in bed. None of his friends except Wesley visit, just as, in the early days of AIDS, many people shunned the infected. “Get ready to die,” his sister chirps at him in a moment of sibling malice. The situation even begs for a parsing of blame, since Craig ran in front of the car that crushed his leg. Had he been more careful, more responsible, misfortune might have passed him by. Nebraska is a portrait of what it’s like to be a pariah among righteous people. The story of AIDS, in other words.
Nebraska’s interiority—indistinguishable from the lived experience of AIDS—extends to one of the novel’s most vivid set pieces. One summer, the Mullen family stops at Tiny Town, a miniature roadside suburbia likely inspired by its real-life counterpart in Morrison, Colorado, just 20 miles from where Whitmore grew up. They discover that vandals have struck: The windows of the little houses have been smashed, and what’s left of the place has fallen into disrepair. As they amble among the ruins, Craig’s mother delivers a kind of eulogy:
“It used to be so pretty,” Mama sighed, standing in the middle of town where the shrubs that once served as trees around the tiny bandstand had run rampant. “It was quite a tourist attraction. There used to be lots of cars parked up there on the highway all the time.”
She’s not mourning the loss of the site so much as the impermanence of all things. As long as those ticky-tacky structures existed—the child-size diner, the miniature ice-cream parlor, the dwarfed houses—then some version of the good life existed too. Out there along the highway, one could still follow it and find happiness. But the buildings have turned into de facto gravestones marking where the good times died. AIDS was another kind of vandal—rapacious, unrepentant—that took away the good times and the long nights and the necessary voices of people like Whitmore. As with so many others of his lost generation, he should have outlived his youth.
Jeremy Lybargeris the features editor at the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Chicago.