George Whitmore’s Unsparing Queer Fiction

Somewhere in the ether between Chicago and California, Nebraska endures, a grassy mirage that thwarts any attempt to define it. On a journey overland in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, still damp with Scottish air, discovered Nebraska to be “a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth.” Locals, too, admit there’s something shapeless about their state. “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska,” Willa Cather wrote in My Ántonia, a novel steeped in the lonesomeness of life on the prairie. More recently, the state’s tourism commission coined (and subsequently retired) a slogan—“Nebraska: Honestly, it’s not for everyone”—that suggests even those tasked with promoting the place can muster only a shrug. It’s as if something about the flat geometry and unremitting panoramas turns a person inward, toward psychic vistas that are less landlocked. Stevenson called this involution “a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.”