In the prologue to his 1988 book of profiles of people living with AIDS in New York City, Someone Was Here, George Whitmore describes a photograph he saw in a magazine in a waiting room, a picture of a monk at a monastery in Mt. Athos, Greece. The black-bearded monk is holding a box of bones and skulls, which are the remains of other monks. Whitmore wonders at the monk’s pose, turned slightly away from the camera, at the deference the monk must have for these bones. Are they sacred? What’s clear is they are meant to be remembered. They’re even labeled with the names of those they belonged to.
Someone, I thought, has to tend to the bones … Someone has to take the box down to show you, he writes.
It’s difficult not to think of these relics of former monks, and this brief anecdote in Whitmore’s one published book of non-fiction, when I hold my used first edition of his final novel, Nebraska, which was published two years before he died of complications from AIDS at age forty-three. Before that, he published one other novel, The Confessions of Danny Slocum, a very different book from Nebraska, focused on a gay man in New York City dealing with sexual dysfunction. It feels like a book written by another writer.
Nebraska, which has been out of print for many years, except in an eBook edition, is now being lovingly reissued by The Song Cave, a small press based out of New York. Anyone who has read and loved Whitmore’s novel will rejoice, as I did. The novel deserves more readers. It has felt, for so many years, like a special secret many of us share. When I bring it up to another queer writer, I’m always met with excitement and awe. Yes, that novel. That dark, beautiful thing.
Someone had to tell me about it. I was a little kid on Long Island when George Whitmore died, and I didn’t hear about his book until I was in my thirties. It hasn’t received the attention and reverence many other gay classics have. It’s a difficult, bleak but funny, quirky child of gay literature of the AIDS era.
I first heard about Nebraska from the writer and critic, Dale Peck’s, Facebook page, where he posted the arresting opening of the novel, a first page that would hook anyone. It begins with a three-sentence paragraph ending with the distressing sentence: The next thing I knew, I woke up with my leg gone. I went immediately to a used books website and found a copy of the hardcover first edition and bought it. The cover illustration depicts a strange, dusty landscape, a house that seems to be sinking into the dust. On the back flap is George Whitmore, mustachioed, his eyes soulful and kind. Nebraska, which was very loosely based on Whitmore’s childhood, is not kind, at least not immediately.
Nebraska is the story of Craig McMullen, who at twelve is hit by a truck and loses his leg. Craig describes himself as “twelve years old but more a baby.” After his accident, he’s as helpless as a toddler. He wets the bed and can’t get up on his own. He spends the early chapters bedridden, addicted to pain pills, cared for by his overworked mother, witness to his sisters’ awkward adolescence, and struggling with new desires. When his Uncle Wayne arrives home from serving in the Navy, he brings with him a scrappy, masculine bravado, as well as silliness. He calls Craig “Skeezix.” He has no plans to stay, but rather intends to flee to the West coast to set up a mechanic shop with his mysterious friend, the Chief. Wayne is an alluring presence, especially for Craig, but he’s also a mess, often drunk from nights out with his friends. The two share brief moments of intimacy and care. One of these moments, when Wayne is very drunk, leads to a confused lie from Craig, which sets off a chain of events that haunts the rest of the novel and its characters.
Before Wayne arrives, there is a brief exchange between Craig and his mother, in which his mother has discovered a hanky Craig has masturbated into. An embarrassing scenario, but what makes it important is that though his mother understands why he’s done this, she makes clear he should never do it again. This is the first expression of one of the novel’s themes: shame. The long echoes, the jail, of shame. Craig and Wayne both become victims of shame, which follows them into their final moment together, where Craig, I think, is trying to close a circle.
The novel is a breakthrough. It reads like something inevitable and unhinged. The prose is odd. It’s taken me many readings to understand why it feels so unusual. It has a chatty kind of poetry. At times it’s clipped, at others rambling, eschewing commas. It possesses the minimal, sharp, darkness of some of James Purdy’s brutal novels, like Narrow Rooms or In a Shallow Grave, but unlike Purdy, whose characters don’t really live in a recognizable gay reality, and who often can’t accept themselves or the love in front of them, Whitmore tries to set Craig and Wayne on a better path, though imperfect. Nebraska is not a fantasy. The damage to the characters has been done. All they can do is try to move on while carrying it.
At the center of the book is a terrifying journey, one which I will not spoil for new readers. Craig’s absent father returns for him, and what follows disrupts Craig’s growth even further, because, at its heart, Nebraska is an anti-coming-of-age. It’s about the events that stall its characters in these pivotal moments, which will hold them back from living the lives they could be living. Craig’s father’s voice reappears, even in the last moments of the novel. Craig compares him to God’s voice, but never specifies what his father is saying, what he might be asking his son.That Nebraska feels like a breakthrough novel makes Whitmore’s death even more painful. The grief was pronounced when the novel seemed utterly forgotten except for a small group of queer writers and readers. The Song Cave is not only reissuing a novel, but honoring the writer, one of the many artists lost to AIDS. This reissue will do for this book what it has always deserved: put it into the hands of new readers and cement its position as a classic of gay literature, and American literature in general. The Song Cave put the man himself on the cover of the new edition. George looks out at us, his hand on the side of his handsome face, not turning away from the camera like the monk with the bones of his brothers. Here it is, the box of bones, filled with what Whitmore wanted to show us. A novel about the echoes of shame and the possibility of disrupting them, because it is possible. George Whitmore gave us that gift before his leave-taking.
FICTION
Nebraska
By George Whitmore
Song Cave
Published September 30, 2025
