George Whitmore
(1945-1989)
Whitmore was an American playwright, journalist, poet, and novelist whose work portrayed the complexities of queer life in twentieth century America with compassion and a sharply comic edge. Alongside contemporaries such as Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, he belonged to a generation of writers who channelled their own experiences into fiction, creating works that spoke unapologetically to an emerging gay readership.
Photo courtesy: Victor Bumbalo
Born in Denver, Colorado, Whitmore earned a BA in English and Theatre from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1967. He was awarded a fellowship to study theatre at Bennington College but was drafted after his first year of graduate study. As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he completed alternative service with Planned Parenthood in New York City, where he remained for four years. He then spent a decade working at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York City while writing journalism for both straight and gay periodicals.
During this period, he published two collections of poetry—Tricking and Other Poems (1974) and Getting Gay In New York (1976)—under his own imprint, the Free Milk Fund Press, which he operated from his Upper West Side apartment. Both volumes are now out of print. He regularly presented his poems at public readings during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Whitmore had three plays staged in his lifetime. The Caseworker (1976), produced by Playwrights Horizons, depicts an uneasy flatshare between a 50-year-old welfare caseworker, a gay Wall Street employee, and a drifting 20-year-old student, exploring themes of homelessness, depression, and homophobia. He also wrote Two Plays for Three Women: The Flight/The Legacy (1979), a poetic rumination on the life and work of Gertrude Stein, which premiered at the 18th Street Playhouse. None of Whitmore’s plays have ever been published.
The Rights premiered in 1980, directed by Victor Bumbalo and produced by the Glines, New York’s pioneering gay theatre company that championed early queer plays by Harvey Fierstein, Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, and Jane Chambers. Set on Fire Island, the production received largely negative reviews after a mishap on press night, when the actors accidentally skipped twenty pages of the first act, omitting any mention of the ‘rights’ of the title. Loosely inspired by Whitmore’s relationship with playwright Jack Heifner, the play follows the reunion of a former couple when one seeks to buy the rights to a musical they co-conceived decades earlier in order to adapt it into a straight TV show.
Whitmore was a member of The Violet Quill, a short-lived but influential literary group consisting of seven gay male writers who sought to define post-Stonewall gay literature: Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White. They met in 1979 and 1980 to read works in progress and holidayed together at Fire Island Pines.
Whitmore’s contribution to the group was The Confessions of Danny Slocum, a strange, comic fever dream of a novel about a man unable to orgasm, published in 1980. Set amid tea dances on Fire Island and nights out in the gay bars of West Village, the novel began as life as an article Whitmore wrote for Christopher Street magazine about his own experience of sex therapy. His second novel, Deep Dish, was serialised between 1980 and 1982.
In 1986, after disclosing that he had AIDS, Whitmore was refused treatment by his local dentist in Greenwich Village. He successfully sued the Northern Dispensary, and the city’s Human Rights Commission fined the clinic $47,000, eventually bankrupting it and securing its closure. The building was purchased in 1990 with the intention of turning it into a nursing home for AIDS patients, but the plan was abandoned following protests from local residents.
His final novel, Nebraska, was published in 1987. Written during residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, it chronicles working-class queer Midwestern life in the 1950s through the coming-of-age of a boy and his uncle, loosely based on Whitmore’s own childhood. Composed in a distinctly Southern Gothic style, it has been compared to the novels of Carson McCullers and James Purdy, as well as to Dennis Cooper and William S Burroughs for its pared-down prose and startling power to shock. Recently reissued by The Song Cave, Nebraska has found new acclaim, with critics hailing it as “the Great American Novel.”
Whitmore drew on his journalistic experience for Someone Was Here (1988), a series of portraits of people living with AIDS and those who care for them. The book grew out of his earlier New York Times Magazine feature, “Reaching Out To Someone with AIDS,” which profiled the daily life of a man with AIDS and his volunteer counsellor. Someone Was Here stands as perhaps Whitmore’s most enduring and profound achievement: an extraordinarily moving portrait of the epidemic’s impact on patients, their families, caregivers and medical professionals, both heterosexual and homosexual, with the power to challenge stigma and change minds.
He died of AIDS-related complications on April 19, 1989, aged forty-three.
Plays
The Caseworker, 1976
Two Plays for Three Women: The Flight/The Legacy, 1979
The Rights, 1980
Photo: Robert Giard