George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction
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Books & the Arts
/ January 26, 2026
George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction
Long out of print, his novel Nebraska is an enigmatic record of queer survival in midcentury America.
Jeremy Lybarger
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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.”
Books in review
Nebraska
by George Whitmore
Buy this book
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 …
George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
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George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction
Magazine
Newsletters
Subscribe
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Search
Subscribe
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Magazine
Latest
Archive
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Newsletters
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Politics
World
Economy
Culture
Books & the Arts
The Nation
About
Events
Contact Us
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ January 26, 2026
George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction
Long out of print, his novel Nebraska is an enigmatic record of queer survival in midcentury America.
Jeremy Lybarger
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
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.”
Books in review
Nebraska
by George Whitmore
Buy this book
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 …
