George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I’m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they’ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS in 1989, George Whitmore—a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—published his third and final novel, Nebraska, on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we’ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: “There came a singing in my head.” Desire is an earworm.

Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig’s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas.

I laughed, then, in a hysterical, disgusted, admiring way, at Whitmore’s audacity. Craig’s matter-of-fact recollections of post-amputation torment got me, too. “The County sent me back to the hospital to break my arm again,” Whitmore writes. “Parts of me were now yellow.” Elsewhere, less evil species of comedy warm the prose. When Craig’s sister learns of an affair, she declares, “And all this time I didn’t know!” He thinks, “Betty sounded like someone discovering a floorwax on TV.”

Whitmore’s twangy, understated style occasionally erupts into fevered lyricism: here is possibility, here are dreams, both of which, for Craig, involve violence, danger, and the specter of a mercurial father obsessed by a desire to fix his offspring. More often, the sentences lend to a kind of dramatic irony in which the narrator, his guard up, manifests a persona in language that knows less, that feels less, than Craig must. Early in the novel, Whitmore unloads a threat stranger and more pernicious than the age-old proclamations handed down from fathers to sons. “You are not ever going to be robbed of your precious childhood,” his mama says to him in the hospital, after he’s been “chawed up” by the car that costs him a leg. The only fate worse than becoming a man is getting stranded in adolescence.

Paul McAdory is a writer from Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn.