Danny wasn’t sure he even liked Casper, but he got the feeling he was someone you could depend on, and he hadn’t known anyone like that in a really long time. Besides, he provided the perfect excuse to get back home: Casper had just bought a decent used car, and was headed east.

They knew nothing about each other, really, and neither imagined the American road might have anything to teach them. But they saw things they’d never seen before, including what trust actually looked like. By the time they were back where they belonged, their journey had morphed into an expedition, across the land of the permanently broken-hearted, to the wilderness of secrets waiting in Casper’s past. Still, they were home, in the silent and sturdy town of Lumberville, and wrapped in the safety of a bond that had grown as vast as the Great Plains.

* * * * *

Lumberville is a 21st Century story, a story very few of us are ever asked to hear. As much about feeling lost as being found, Lumberville is a folk tale reminding us that the gay American dilemma is part of a larger human dilemma, one that masks the messy fantasias at the core of the entire American project, and how, when freedom is a thing uncaged in the wilderness, it comes out the other side as something else.