These Gay Novels Offer a ‘More Interesting Conversation’ About Faith
Near the end of Daniel Lefferts’s recent novel, “Ways and Means,” the protagonist — a gay and ambitious but disastrously wayward college student — takes an unexpected turn for a queer character: He finds salvation in God.
And in the closing pages, as he reunites with the man he loves, he warns that he’s “still doing the religion stuff.” It’s the kind of moment you would rarely come across in mainstream gay fiction until this year, when suddenly it isn’t so out of place.
After “Ways and Means” came Garrard Conley’s novel “All the World Beside,” a revisionist history of gay Puritans, and, this month, Allen Bratton’s “Henry Henry,” a tragicomic, modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad whose main character is an uncompromising Catholic. “This isn’t something that I’ve seen a lot of,” Lefferts said in an interview. “But it’s exciting and just kind of strange that it’s happening now.” Faith has never been too far from gay literature.
There is a rich history of queer theology that seeks to reconcile sexuality and religion, like the theologian John J. McNeil’s “The Church and the Homosexual,” from 1976.
