Lone Stars

November 9, 2020
In Deabler’s bighearted debut, a gay man looks back on his family’s history to understand how his heritage and identity are woven by his home state of Texas. Julian Warner begins his story with Eisenhower’s anti-immigration border raids in the 1950s, as seen through the eyes of his mother, impressionable, young Lacy Adams. In 1969 Lacy meets Aaron Warner, a soldier serving in Vietnam, whom she later marries. They have a son, the precocious Julian, and Aaron, unable to keep a job for more than six months at a time, takes a succession of lovers. Julian comes out to Lacy after a gay high school classmate is assaulted, motivating Lacy to become a gay rights activist. Julian goes off to Harvard and later moves to Brooklyn, embarking on a legal career and a marriage, before a final reckoning with his Texas roots involves surprises from both his parents’ sides of the family. Deabler’s layered if at times chockablock story of gay rights, immigrants’ rights, and the financial crisis of 2008—Julian’s husband quits his finance job over a crisis of conscience—makes good use of the general messiness of family ties and the longing to extend one’s line into an uncertain future. In the end, this novel proudly and emotionally defines what it means to be from the Lone Star State.