“Mr Gay Plus Plus”
Article published by The AIDS Plays Project in December 2025.
Photo: James Steakley
Victor, you directed the premiere of ‘The Rights’ in New York in 1980, but you knew George long before that. Could you tell me how the two of you met?
In the late 60s, I had a scholarship to Bennington College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont which offered scholarships in theatre and dance. I did the graduate programme in directing, and George came into the position after me. We’d heard of each other, but we only met when he was stranded in New York one time and called to ask if he could sleep on my couch. Only, when he arrived and saw how uncomfortable the couch was, he asked if he could sleep in bed with me. I thought: who is this guy?! But it wasn’t about sex—he just wanted to be comfortable. We became good friends after that. He never finished his degree because he was drafted and became a conscientious objector, then did his three-year stint at Planned Parenthood in New York. So we lost touch for a while. A couple of years later, when he was in twenties, I met him again in line at the post office, where he told me—as if it were a great revelation—that he was gay. Then he became Mr Activist, gay plus plus: “Hello I’m gay, how’s the weather? Did I tell you I’m gay?”
I read that George had a very conservative upbringing in Denver before coming to New York.
Here’s a story. I met his father and mother once, when they came to New York to visit him soon after he came out. George begged my partner Tom and me to make dinner for them. I think he wanted to show them how ‘normal’ gay people were. At dinner, his father Lowell didn’t say a word, which really pissed me off. So I started interviewing him. He’d been a cowboy in Nebraska. I was so desperate, I actually used this line: “Can you tell me, Mr Whitmore, what do cowboys really do?” He looked at me for a moment and said, “They take care of cows.” And then he said, “Irene, it’s time for us to go.” Apparently Lowell later said to George, “They are nice guys. But what a life!”
His first play was produced in 1976. How did he begin writing for the stage?
The Caseworker (1976) was his first successful play. I was proud that I helped him with that one. I was brought in to redirect the actors on George’s request. I remember really liking that play. And then, when he wrote The Rights, he asked me to direct it.
What do you remember about The Rights?
God, it was the most horrible opening night I’ve seen in my life!
Oh really! How so?
George and I got the worst reviews. On press night, the actors had dropped twenty some pages in the first act, never mentioning the rights in the play’s title. Nobody on stage recovered it, so it looked like people were sitting around talking about nothing! During intermission, George and I got the actors together and tried to find a place in the second act to reintroduce the lost pages. The audience must have thought it was the worst-constructed play they’d ever seen. We told people what had happened and asked them to come back—but as one critic, a prissy queen, said: “I review what I see.”
Were you pleased with the production at least?
The casting took forever. It was hard to get actors to appear in a so-called ‘gay play.’ Often the people we wanted would audition and then say no once they’d been offered the role. Some people weren’t happy about doing a gay play. We were grateful we eventually got some good actors and were happy with the production. It ran for three or four weeks, mostly for a gay audience. But the reviews killed the possibility of it being done again.
The play hasn’t been revived since 1980. Do you think that’s why?
George went on to other things. If he had lived, he probably would have gone back to writing plays. It wasn’t like “I’m never going to write a play again,” but he didn’t push it after The Rights. He started earning a living writing for magazines and short stories.
Do you remember how the idea for the play first came about?
George wasn’t exactly in Larry's situation, but his partner at the time, Jack Heifner, had written Vanities (1976), an off-Broadway play that got great reviews and really took off. George and Jack had been together for a couple of years and were sharing an apartment. But then Hollywood called and Jack broke up with George, who found himself feeling like Larry. The play grew out of that experience. There was no fight over rights or anything like that—it was more about watching someone you love have this huge success, and suddenly you’re left out.
It was produced at the Network Theatre by The Glines, an important hub for queer theatre in New York at the time. Could you talk about what it was, and its mission?
The Glines was New York’s first gay theatre company. John Glines started it in 1976. They not only produced plays, but lots of stuff, including art. It was very active. Barry Laine, one of the first people I knew to die of AIDS, was another of the founders. They produced really great plays. You were free to do exactly what you wanted. It was a happy time. It was actually George who told Glines to go see Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982)—and he ended up producing it on Broadway! We supported each other’s works.
The tea parties, the meat rack, the beach… Fire Island is so vividly captured in the play. I don’t know of many other plays set there. Did Whitmore spend much time there? What it was like in the late 70s?
Your whole body would relax the moment you got off the ferry. It was very free—a lot of sex was going on! And the beach was breathtakingly beautiful. George was good friends with Felice Picano and Edmund White, two of the Violet Quill writers, who’d often invite him to stay in the Pines. I preferred the more working-class Cherry Grove. George loved being around gay people, going out to the dances and being on the beach. But he wasn’t someone who’d go out and get sex every night. He had a kind of conservative streak. I mean, he appreciated it all—but he wasn’t partaking in a lot of it. He never did drugs and rarely went into the bushes. I was in a relationship at the time and we were into threesomes, which George sometimes objected to. George was always looking for a relationship.
I just finished Someone Was Here (1988), Whitmore’s book of profiles of people—patients, volunteers, doctors, families— during the AIDS crisis. I found it extraordinarily compassionate and intimate. It feels very characteristic of his writing.
For that book he interviewed people from Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), where I was running a team that was taking care of people with AIDS. We were the first people to go into hospitals when nurses wouldn’t, and clean these men, and feed them. That’s what we were doing every day. George was a very compassionate person, and he wrote about it beautifully.
Could you speak about George’s final months?
When he was in hospital, George scheduled interviews with all of us to say goodbye. That’s something only he would do! He was methodical about it. It was the journalist in him. He told me he wanted to get tested, as I wasn’t going to. That was his big thing: test. Then he told me he loved me. I wasn’t there when he died. My friend Eric Martinsen begged me to go on a trip with him to Pennsylvania. I told Tom there was a payphone outside the motel where we were staying, and he promised he would call me if anything happened to George. I hoped George would hold on for the three days we were away. But I got the call he had died, and I told Eric we had to drive back. On the drive back, Eric got really sick. Soon after that, Eric took a turn too.
You’d known George all his adult life.
I saw him grow up. His final novel Nebraska (1987) is dedicated to me, which I’m really proud of. I remember, at the launch party, I had to go to the bathroom because I couldn’t stop crying. All I could think was: this wonderful writer is going to die. George followed me and said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?!” He could read me very well. He was often demanding like that, but he had a great sense of humour. Our friendship was extremely important to us. It came before family. Three of my closest friends were diagnosed around the same time: Eric, Robert Chesley, and George Whitmore. Their deaths followed one after another. It was an avalanche of grief.
Victor Bumbalo is a playwright, television writer and novelist. He is a recipient of an Ingram Merrill Fellowship Award for playwriting and two-time finalist for the Lambda Playwriting Award. The New York Times said of his play Adam and the Experts: “...it may be the most important play to deal with AIDS... since Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart.” His plays have been produced all over the world. Among his other plays are: What Are Tuesdays Like?, Niagara Falls, Questa, Kitchen Duty, Show, Tell, and East Utica. Many of them are published by Broadway Play Publishing.