Gay Novels That Offer Fresh Views of 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.

As he reunites with the man he loves, he warns that he is “still doing the religion stuff.” It is the kind of moment you would rarely come across in mainstream gay fiction until this year, when suddenly it is not so out of place.

After “Ways and Means” came Garrard Conley’s novel “All the World Beside,” a revisionist history of gay Puritans, and last month, Allen Bratton’s “Henry Henry,” a tragicomic, modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad whose main character is an uncompromising Catholic.

Faith has never been too far from gay literature. There is a rich history of queer theology that seeks to reconcile sexuality and religion. Less common, however, is the kind of gay Christianity represented in “Ways and Means,” “All the World Beside” and “Henry Henry,” books that feature characters whose faith is rooted less in spirituality than in the institution of religion. And that, these authors say, may be truer to life today.

As religious institutions navigate their relationship with queer people, so too have the authors of these novels approached faith differently.

In “All the World Beside,” set in the 18th century, gay characters lack the vocabulary to describe their desires. The couple, Nathaniel and Arthur, barely consummate their love and seem unable to fathom a life together. But they know what their feelings mean: that while they may be antithetical to religious life, they are akin to religious experience.

“Arthur feels that he’s closer to God when he’s truthful about himself with Nathaniel,”

Mr. Conley said.

Hal, of “Henry Henry,” comes from an aristocratic English family whose Catholicism goes back centuries, to when it “was the law of the land,” Mr. Bratton said. It is a crucial part of Hal’s identity, though it is challenged by his boyfriend, who finds Hal’s devotion to the church weird and harmful.

Hal chooses to live the way he wants while being religious, with no concern about whether or how those will be reconciled.

Mr. Lefferts does not bring faith into “Ways and Means” until its final chapters. By that point, he said, “I already packed the car, thematically.”

Still, the only resolution that made sense for Alistair, his young protagonist, was religious salvation. “I was thinking about the ways in which we have these objects that we overidealize and overinvest with meaning,” he said. “I started to wonder if the original longing that humans have is always God. In a secularized and neoliberal world, we have substitutes for that. But what would it mean to return to God and reject those things, for Alistair to renounce his ambitions and find this Christian corrective?”

The religious choices of these characters bear some resemblance to those of their authors. Mr. Conley, 38, grew up in a fundamentalist household, then lost his faith during the conversion therapy he chronicled in his memoir, “Boy Erased.” Today, though, he feels a belief in God, and he has resisted villainizing the church.

Mr. Bratton, 30, did not want to say much about his religious beliefs, for fear that readers might project his biography onto “Henry Henry,” but he said, “I don’t know what if anything I should be having faith in, or if there is some terrible consequence for me in the afterlife. But I’m not discounting it all, either.”

And Mr. Lefferts, 34, who grew up Catholic, started attending church again in his 20s. “I’m in a community that does not officially believe I should be there unless I radically change my life,” he said. “You are constantly asking yourself, ‘If I’m not welcome here, then why am I here?’ Then you have to get down to the essentials of faith. As a gay Catholic, I have a more deliberate and intentional relationship with it.”

Mr. Conley said: “It doesn’t feel like we’re in a place anymore where it would feel like a betrayal of the gay community to be speaking approvingly of religion. I think people are ready for a more interesting conversation about it.”

‘If I’m not welcome here, then why am I here?’