Trying to Sound Sincere

Nebraska by George Whitmore. The Song Cave, 153 pages. 2025.

“On June 29, 1979, I let Danny Slocum die,” George Whitmore writes in the afterword to his first book, The Confessions of Danny Slocum. Whitmore’s bibliographies on Wikipedia and the Yale Archives describe Confessions as a novel, but the jacket copy is less convinced, calling it “part novel, part autobiography,” while its title page reads simply “biography,” which has the even more dislocating effect of positing Danny as a real person but one distinct from the author.

Confessions chronicles the experience of a thirtysomething white gay man with what the book calls “retarded ejaculation,” although the problem is more specific than that: Danny can cum, he just can’t do it in the presence of another person. The book runs through the usual suspects—the parents, child sexual abuse, the hypervigilance required to survive a homophobic society, the enervation of the drug- and sex-saturated gay milieu of the late 1970s—but its chief success lies in its refusal to succumb to the allegorical simplicity suggested by Danny’s surname. This feels messy and real to me, but for the same reason it doesn’t provide the kind of neatness readers generally want from a novel, particularly one in which the writer has gone to the trouble of fictionalizing aspects of their life for the sake of producing exactly that kind of clarity.

Danny exits the book more or less as puzzled about the causes of his condition as he was when he entered—and there’s Whitmore’s afterword, informing readers that Danny was his “alter ego” and reminding them that the book’s genesis was an “article” (not short story, not personal essay) in Christopher Street magazine. “What did I have to show for my acquaintance with [Danny]? Well, this book, of course,” but also “a purple hickey on my throat—perhaps the final indication that Danny had at last passed on to that great orgy room in the sky.”

So what’s died here? A fictional character? His link to the author? A part of the author’s psyche for which he no longer has a use or a pretense he no longer needs to maintain? None of it really adds up, and it’s hard to say whether the confusion is caused by diffidence or coyness—the ontological self-consciousness about language’s (in)ability to convey empirical truth that vexed so many of us at the height of the postmodern era or the cocktease’s tried-and-true strategy of affecting intrigue as a form of seduction. As eternal as these questions are (and Whitmore was hardly the first to ask them, nor the last to refuse to answer), they’re overshadowed by the history that swallowed the gay world a year after Danny Slocum appeared.

Just as World War I catalyzed the various cultural forces that came to be known as modernism, AIDS galvanized the far-flung strands of gay liberation into the modern LGBTQIA+ movement, which in the space of fifteen or twenty years reinvented gay life in the United States. Not just how people could be gay, but what it meant to be gay, which is another way of saying it reinvented what it meant to be straight; to be male or female or other; to be a body of flesh and blood subject to myriad and conflicting erotic and gender impulses; until all the reified dyads about identity that Western culture had hidden behind since time immemorial were exposed as flimsy storefronts in a sepia-toned oater, propped up by nothing more than the willed belief of a credulous audience. War, pandemic, environmental crisis, financial disruption, the revolution in our relationship to information that came with the digital age: as monumental as each of these phenomena is, they pale beside the existential unraveling of what it means to be a person that took shape in the 1980s. Indeed, we might say that our inability to confront these problems as a society is in large part due to our inability to confront the problem of ourselves. No more fat troops! No more beards and long hair! No more woke garbage! Release the Epstein files!

And there’s the thing with revisiting work from the schism: before you can even start talking about a little-known but much-loved 153-page novel (that novel being Whitmore’s Nebraska, which appeared seven years after The Confessions of Danny Slocum and two years before the author’s death in 1989), you have to acknowledge all the befores that preceded it, and each of these antecedents calls to mind a dozen different afters and a dozen more might-have-beens, until, without realizing how it happened, you find yourself trapped in a dense fog of nostalgia for what was lost and longing for what never happened. The quantifiable history of AIDS is monumental, but it’s dwarfed by the immaterial possibilities that were also, if imperceptibly, extinguished: not just forty-four million lives but all the things those people could have—should have—done. Time moves on, as they say, and the twenty-first century is a world of unpredictable, often astonishing delights, but as a gay man who lived through the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, I sometimes feel like I inhabit a world of shadows, of friends never met and things never made—a world of grief, in other words, but the multitudinous grief of the self made many and the many made one: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people . . . !”

The city is full again, but the people who used to live here exist only in the dwindling terrene of aging, unreliable memory. Except in art, that is, where each new interaction with a reader/viewer/listener elicits heretofore unknown aspects of their personality and extends their affect into a world that’s otherwise passed them by. The response to the AIDS epidemic manifested itself across disciplines, but to my (admittedly biased) mind it was most fully realized in literature, where the white cisgendered men who had co-opted the gay-rights movement in the 1970s looked beyond their middle-class myopia to try to imagine a world that could accommodate more than just themselves.

Those early novels, poems, plays, memoirs, and critical essays were empowering in the sense that they recognized and recorded gay history as it happened, but even the most optimistic of them—Angels in America, say, or Rebecca Brown’s The Gifts of the Body—are understandably somber, and many are full-on tragedies. The writing of that era was so groundbreaking, so powerful, and so engaged that it still dominates the way we make and read gay literature, and it can be easy to forget that the first spate of gay books, which appeared in the half-decade or so before the epidemic started, wasn’t stoic or defiant or celebratory, but jaded to the extreme, drowning in the kind of seen-it-all, done-it-all ennui that a century earlier had driven the world-weary poses of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huysmans, et al.

“I don’t even think people have souls anymore,” Andrew Holleran lamented in Dancer From the Dance in 1978. “And not having souls, they cannot be expected to have love affairs.” “Well, kid,” Larry Kramer kvetched in Faggots the same year, “I have seen the future and it shits. Georges and Dennises, Irvings and Lavernes, dog collars and cock cases, all, alas, are love gone wrong.” Or Whitmore himself, hiding behind his alter ego, who sees in the “gay utopia” of Fire Island a distillation of “all the ills of gay life: ingrown, artificial, hedonistic, uncharitable, moneyed.” The language is Wildean, mannered—what one imagines Wilde himself might have called arch—and all it’s holding up is hot air. Yet it’s hard to imagine another tone that could accomplish the opposing tasks these books had set themselves, namely, to celebrate their own birth (as one character says in Confessions: “I’ve never read any novel written for us”) while simultaneously bemoaning a hamster-wheel quest for sensation that had long since slipped into decadence, if not simply self-parody.

I remember reading these books at the tail end of the 1980s, freshly out of the closet but still trapped on my suburban college campus, and completely missing the point. All the things that Holleran, Kramer, and Whitmore found passé seemed unbearably exciting to me, whose sexual prospects were limited to three or four men and whose only experience of gay culture was of drearily earnest conversations in whatever we called our school’s gay student group, nearly all of whose members were, in the parlance, allies. But more to the point, I was reading these books five and ten years after they’d been published, a period that had seen AIDS grow from a vague menace to a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, and one that, despite my training in New Critical modes of objective textual engagement, I couldn’t simply shunt aside as I read.

So, though I found those early texts erotic, it was an eros tinged with, circumscribed by, death. I don’t simply mean the epidemic itself, but, rather, the fact that the promiscuity and orgies depicted with such wittily deprecating condescension and gleefully pornographic detail had, albeit unknowingly, led to the very crisis we were now in. Hence the spine-tingling frisson when I read lines like Larry Kramer’s snarky obloquy about changing your ways “before you fuck yourself to death,” or Whitmore’s rapturous version of same in Confessions: “On the right night, with the right drugs and the right music, a membership card to Flamingo can be a visa to a disembodied and transcendent state, beyond the Iron Curtain of individual identity, through a looking glass of ego, into the Land of Nod.” The Land of Nod: a quaint euphemism for sleep and dreams, yet its origin hints at the hell to come. Nod was the place of Cain’s exile, and to early Christians represented the state of those who had been forsaken by God. In the late 1980s, it was impossible to encounter a passage like that and not feel that one was retrospectively reading the writing on the wall, scrawled not by a disembodied hand but by innocent revelers who had no idea that their brief bacchanal, which was as much a reaction to the oppression and subterfuge that gay men had lived in for centuries as it was a Foucauldian reinvention of bodily pleasure, was killing them.

What makes Whitmore’s tiny oeuvre distinct from his contemporaries’ was the way he opted out of this paradigm. At the beginning of the epidemic many gay writers chose to look away from AIDS for a variety of aesthetically sound (and psychologically understandable) reasons. Edmund White turned from the mannered effulgence of Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Forgetting Elena to a cleaner diaristic mode in A Boy’s Own Story, set in the 1950s; and the decimated San Francisco of Matthew Stadler’s Landscape: Memory stems not from the AIDS epidemic but the 1906 earthquake that leveled the city. But these and dozens of other temporally displaced books were still gay stories, by which I mean they featured obviously gay protagonists whose conflict was wrapped up in the struggle to accept and express themselves in a way that would have been easily legible to contemporary gay readers.

But Nebraska didn’t just disprivilege the present: it decentered homosexuality as well. Not coyly, let alone cravenly; it was more like a hard reset. Going into the epidemic, the prevailing gay-rights discourse insisted that sexual orientation was an innate, almost banal, characteristic like eye or hair color, which assertion served as the foundation for a typically neoliberal program of civil rights concerned almost exclusively with personal freedom. It devoted little energy to the idea of what it means to be gay or how one might consciously or unconsciously construct a gay identity. (As I like to tell my students: I may or may not have been born gay, but I definitely wasn’t born with this gay voice.) Nebraska insists we ask those questions in a way that The Confessions of Danny Slocum does not. It queers the obsession with very recent history by shifting readers back a single decade before the Great Ennui, to 1969, which in gay terms feels as large as the gap between Europe before and after World War I, and then another decade to 1956, which yawns as wide as the chasm between the pre- and post-Enlightenment eras. That there was some kind of gay culture, even in Nebraska, even in the 1950s, is evinced by the fact that gay men knew where to congregate to find others of their kind, yet that gay culture remained a largely unnavigable archipelago in which isolated islands of queer sociality—bars and nightclubs, parks and public restrooms—rose out of the water for a few months or years before sinking back again.

Nebraska’s narrative is rigidly situated in time, its three untitled sections labeled “1956,” “1957,” and “1969,” but despite the signposting it feels timeless. Part of this stems from the heated nature of the storytelling, which opens with the twelve-year-old protagonist losing his leg and drifts in a convalescent haze toward the fever dream of his abduction by his mentally disturbed, God-obsessed father during a blizzard and from there to the soft-focus fairy tale of his uncle’s life in California, where something—a psychotic break maybe but more probably punitively applied electroshock therapy or even a lobotomy—has transformed a formerly active homosexual into a fortysomething eunuch living in a perpetual state of golly-gee-Wally! juvenility.

The details of Whitmore’s working-class milieu are well-observed and grittily rendered, but his plot elements are as purely symbolic as Faulkner’s in As I Lay Dying or Hurston’s in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nebraska is a fable, in other words, set not in the Midwest in the middle of the American century but in a parallel timeline that stretches over centuries rather than a single decade. This is the history of homosexuality: of homosexual desire, homosexual acts, and homosexual culture, which have waxed and waned over time, sometimes concurrently but often at divergent moments, but which in the postwar fifties and sixties was finally cohering into the relatively stable phenomenon that gay culture would become by the 1970s, when Whitmore came of age and began his writing career.

But Nebraska also shifts the reader’s window into this world, at least within the context of 1980s gay fiction. In the first place, twelve-year-old Craig McMullen (probably) isn’t gay. But more pertinently, his lost leg is less a sympathetic hook than a conceit on a par with the delayed-ejaculation theme in Confessions. Whitmore never bothers to specify how much of the leg was taken or even which leg it was: what he wants is a witness and a particularly passive one at that. Craig is confined to bed for much of the first half of the novel and afterwards lurches about “like some poor cartoon creature with his tail on fire.” In the absence of a life of his own, Craig’s attention is focused on his family, but particularly his beloved Uncle Wayne, who the family “worshipped . . . the way you worship movie stars” and who returns from a three-year stint in the Navy shortly after Craig’s accident. Whitmore deftly but also obviously teases out Wayne’s homosexuality, less to allow readers to discover it for themselves than to show the power of heteronormative assumptions a mere two decades before the efflorescence of gay culture exposed the so-called “invisibility” of homosexuality for the willful unknowing that it was. It’s almost laughably easy for Wayne to conceal his sexuality from his family even as he moons over letters from a man he refers to as “the Chief,” or at least it is as long as his desire remains confined to inclination rather than action.

Everything explodes when Wayne is caught in a sting at the bus depot and his name is published in the newspaper. Hauled before a judge who wants to know if his uncle ever touched him “down there,” Craig—who has been given sponge baths by Wayne as well as his mother during his convalescence and who’s also afraid of revealing the fact that he tried to get his friend Wesley to touch his penis during a sleepover—sells his uncle out. Wayne is institutionalized; when he emerges his sexuality is intact but his mind is not. As with Craig’s injury, Whitmore is less concerned with the specificity of causes and effects than with dream logic: a decade after his testimony destroyed his uncle’s life, Craig finds Wayne living in California in a preadolescent fantasy surrounded by model trains and planes and “Space Man wallpaper” and “picture books on Dinosaurs or Cells.” Sex is something to giggle about with “Skeezix”—Wayne’s nickname for Craig—like twelve-year-olds. It is not something that can get you arrested. It is not something that can kill you. And yet sex is the thing Craig believes he has to return to Wayne to atone for his false accusation. It is the sex act that makes you gay in this world, not an inclination of mind, and the only way Craig can restore his uncle to what he believes is his natural condition—and also absolve himself—is by making his false testimony true. He climbs into his sleeping uncle’s bed, where

Wayne’s body against the length of mine is sometimes heavy, sometimes I can’t feel it at all. If I let myself, I will get scared—because you see for long moments there is no line between us. Wayne’s hand on my belly rides like a ship on waves. On the other side of his head Wayne’s breath in little gasps falls like air puffs on my breast . . .

I lay as still as I possibly can. I lay there for the longest time listening. I try listening.

Then I lift Wayne’s hand up from off my belly and gently place it down there.

By displacing homosexuality from the protagonist to a secondary character whose psyche remains closed to us, Whitmore’s narrative imbues it with an aura of the Freudian unheimlich, unsettling the heteronormative values that an ascendant America embraced—enforced?—in the flush of its postwar global domination. Hence Craig’s “If you are a man and you do it are you one?” or the even more terrifying question: “What if this works but it turns out they don’t love each other anymore?” The effect is similar to that of the closeted writing of Wilde, Strachey, Firbank, Williams, Albee, et al., in earlier decades, but Nebraska is resolutely not closeted: readers are fully aware that Wayne is gay, even if the people around him can’t see it until it manifests itself as a criminal transgression. Whitmore’s epistemological slipperiness enlists homosexuality to critique the artifice of bourgeois society, whereas those earlier writers were confined to merely picking and poking at its limited grasp of human potential. As such, Nebraska is one of the few literary works to extend the queer legacy of those earlier writers into the post-Stonewall era, de-emphasizing neoliberal statements about rights and self-expression in favor of a broader, less teleological inquiry into the nature of identity and personality and the mutually warping mirrors of consciousness and culture.

Craig’s secondhand experience of Wayne’s isolation, arrest, and exile, first from his family and then from himself, immerses readers in the intense desire for someone else’s happiness, even if we know, as Craig does not, that Wayne is beyond help. By paring back the context to the most minimal of human interactions—two men in a bed in what feels like another universe—Whitmore’s daisy chain of empathy allowed the novel’s contemporary readers to set aside preformed opinions about the gay culture that had so vexed Holleran and Kramer (and an earlier version of Whitmore) and remind them how young and fragile that culture was even at its height, how urgently it was needed and how miraculously it flourished in so short a time.

Contrast this to the raft of epic-length gay novels that appeared a few years after Nebraska was published, in which AIDS was contextualized as a blip in the attenuated but steady growth of gay culture, gay history—Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, which concluded the trilogy of autofictions that began with A Boy’s Own Story, Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, Patrick Gale’s The Facts of Life, Felice Picano’s Like People in History, and Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has This Been Going On? among others. Nebraska offers no such big-picture solace. The opposite, in fact: its loneliness stretches from an unknowable past into an even darker future. Whitmore could hardly pretend his readers didn’t know about the brief period that had been so caustically chronicled in The Confessions of Danny Slocum—indeed, his story fairly pines for a Weimar interlude between oppression and tragedy—but the elision of even an indication of hope made his characters’ plight that much more poignant. Imagine a telescope in hell looking up at heaven, which turns out to be a mirror that shows nothing but hell’s reflection, and you have some idea of the layers of sadness that Nebraska evoked when it first appeared, like precognitive nostalgia for something that we didn’t appreciate when we had it and now long for because it’s been taken from us too soon.

Whitmore remained ignorant of a future that would ameliorate the suffering of the AIDS epidemic (and bring a whole new crop of plagues and woes in its wake), but does that mean Nebraska has to remain outside of it as well? Can a text like this, fablelike in its treatment of time yet circumscribed by the times in which it was published, do more than flip a few switches in readers’ minds, surfacing old memories in some, incepting a sort of Jungian collective unconscious in others? An answer might lie in the unsettled relationship between Nebraska and Whitmore’s first book—or perhaps I should say the lack of a relationship, because Nebraska reads like a rejection of The Confessions of Danny Slocum. But is that really the case? Where Confessions insists that the reader contemplate the bond between author and character, then chips away at the reader’s confidence about that assumption, Nebraska seems to deny it entirely, only to reveal tendrils of connection that cling to Whitmore’s life with the stubbornness of bindweed; the neatness of the reversal feels less like rejection than recto and verso of the same approach.

Then there’s the fact that both stories hinge on father narratives that show up more or less in the center of each book and both draw distinctions between what Danny calls “my real father” and “the Father of my childhood and adolescence, who hadn’t been able to love me.” But by all accounts the father of Confessions is an accurate portrait of Whitmore’s father, whereas the father of Nebraska is the ur-Father of myth, threatening to eat his son alive unless he finds a way to cut himself free. There is also the fact that one of the very few apparently fictionalized details in Confessions (according to Michael Canter, Whitmore’s lover at the time of his death, and Victor Bumbalo, Whitmore’s friend and collaborator, and the driving force behind the new edition of Nebraska, published in September by The Song Cave) is the recovered memory of sexual abuse at the hands of a theater teacher, whose totemic but narratively convenient power is transformed into the more profound castration symbolized by Craig’s lost leg; whereas one of the transparently fictionalized details in Confessions is the protagonist’s impoverished childhood in Nebraska. In reality, Whitmore was born and raised in Denver in a comfortably middle-class home; it was his parents who came from Nebraska and whose stories about the Depression would seem to have loomed large in Whitmore’s imagination.

But the biggest change in Nebraska is the language, which stands apart not just from Confessions but from all the examples of Whitmore’s work that I’ve been able to find. Gone is “the empty banter of the style queen,” as Whitmore labeled it in one story, replaced by a terse parataxis that one assumes is meant to make a working-class character sound more authentic but also feels like a nod to the dirty realism that was ascendant in both insider and outsider literary circles at the time. It feels like a pose, in other words, and I never quite found a reason for why Whitmore would so radically reinvent his style until I came across a throwaway line in a story called “The Black Widow,” anthologized in a collection of work from Christopher Street magazine. The story’s protagonist wants to tell the man with whom he’s just had a spontaneous and rather serial-killery fuck on the floor of a parking garage how hot it was, but all he can come up with is the vagueness of “What you did to me,” emphasizing how hard he was “trying to sound sincere” to his partner, though he could just as easily be addressing the reader.

It was only when I read this that I realized it was a mistake to think of Whitmore’s prose in Confessions as his authentic voice and the prose of Nebraska as an affectation. In fact they’re both artifices, the earlier, stilted voice a subconscious alignment with the ersatz sophistication of Hollywood’s mid-Atlantic accent adopted by so many gay men of his generation, the latter a more self-aware, writerly response to the thorny aesthetic dilemma that comes when you realize that honesty is only occasionally sufficient to the task, and you have to resort to rhetorical devices—poses, metaphors, out and out lies—to make true things sound true. If the first is one of those groping-in-the-dark steps that gay boys of an earlier era took on their journey toward an authentic but also coded self-presentation, the latter reflects the paradox of liberation, in which a generation of gay men who had expended so much energy convincing themselves that their closeted personas were true had to rediscover—reinvent really—honesty and openness, and themselves. “All these years in the closet—under the imperative of not slipping, not being found out—make their mark on you,” Whitmore writes in Confessions. “I used to have two modes only: not looking and cruising. I often confused the two.”

Trying to sound sincere: it’s not, as it might appear, an either/or proposition. What Whitmore is after in both Confessions and Nebraska is simultaneously truth and the ways people are forced to manipulate the presentation of truth to make it persuasive, and the uniquely gay manifestations of these phenomena from inside and outside of the closet. Between Craig and Wayne, between Wayne and Danny, between Danny and George Whitmore, between the hundreds of gay extras who flit through Confessions and the list of seven men arrested “for lewd and lascivious behavior” in the bus-station sting in Nebraska, between Whitman and Wilde (whose books flank Whitmore’s on my shelf) lie an infinite number of expressions of sexuality that the mainstream gay-rights movement of Whitmore’s coming out tried to shoehorn into a one-size-fits-all brand of heteronormative same-sex desire.

The LGBTQIA+ movement has been deconstructing this simplicity ever since, rejigsawing the puzzle, as it were, and what strikes me about this now, nearly forty years after Whitmore’s second book was published, is the level of almost precognitive resonance between Whitmore’s fragmented, truncated history of gay culture in these two queer little books and the evolution of the internet and its impact on the ways in which users construct what we might call a public-facing self. Both gay culture and the internet were made possible by developments in technology that altered the way people communicate and conglomerate. Novelty dazzled the participants, especially the early adopters, which fueled their enthusiasm—this is all so new! so exciting!—but it also blinded them to the unconscious habits and attitudes they brought to the supposedly new enterprise, which eventually coalesced into something that wasn’t original, or wholly original, but instead a warped reflection of what had been there before. And like anything made in a neoliberal context, both gay culture and the internet encouraged consumerist behavior by stressing feelings over facts, immediate gratification over development, distraction and fragmentation over holism and concentration.

It seems uncontentious to say that everybody makes their own internet but unnerving to think that the internet makes us all in its own image. Substitute “gay culture” for “internet” in that sentence and you have a proposition that seems just as obvious and just as frightening to a society built on the myth of the individual. Think of the chimera of eternal happiness that dooms so many people to misery because they’re looking not for relative experiences of pleasure but eternal bliss; and then again the quixotic social-justice quest for a universal mode of speech that’s so transparent it’s incapable of doing harm. But if we eschew the urge to label contingent modes of intimacy and communication as Edens and panaceas (the sex clubs that simultaneously fascinated and alienated Holleran, Kramer, and Whitmore, say, or the idea that omnipresent access to irrefutable truth will eliminate misunderstanding between human beings) and look instead for ways to lessen harm, to build community, to negotiate differences of opinion, might we be able to extract what we need from the same systems without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Can we find beauty in the rejection of monolithic, static notions of morality and identity? In the celebration of spontaneity, adaptability, fortuitousness? You don’t steer a boat by controlling the water, after all. You steer it by controlling the boat.