CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/17/2025

In George Whitmore’s stunning ‘Nebraska,’ “a book ahead of its time brought back to life”

Like so many who died of AIDS-related complications in the 1980s, the powerful and economical work of writer and activist George Whitmore has largely been forgotten. Now, with The Song Cave’s prescient reissue of the Velvet Quill member’s 1987 underground masterpiece, some small aspect of justice has been restored. Set in rural 1950s America, the novel tracks a young boy from childhood accident through the loneliness of amputation, addiction, and then coming of age as a gay man. “Vacillating between Denis Johnson’s deadpan realism and Joe Brainard’s acerbic longing, Nebraska is a rare achievement in American letters,” acclaimed novelist Ocean Vuong writes, “wherein Queer rurality is not a site of deprivation or estrangement—but power, capacity, and collective reckoning. Nearly lost to history, the novel—and its author—is now mercifully salvaged, a book ahead of its time brought back to life.”