Gay of reckoning

PLAY IT AS IT STRAYS Hannaham's hero can't stick with the straight and narrow.

Photograph: Christopher Franko

The idea that a gay person can become straight is perhaps the most insidious of the Christian right's beliefs about homosexuality. Religious conservatives have created a cottage industry of programs specializing in "reparative therapy," catering to people confused about their sexuality. The results are dismal—even most "ex-gays" admit that they still experience same-sex desire. But to true believers, it's the effort that counts, winning the daily battle with homosexual sin. To everyone else, the gay cure is a farce.

The latter rings especially true for James Hannaham, author of the funny yet empathetic novel God Says No. "The joke about these places among ex-ex-gays is that the first night you choose a prayer partner and the second night your prayers are answered,"he laughs. That's essentially what happens to Hannaham's protagonist, Gary Gray, a religious young African-American man in the South who winds up at a place called Resurrection, where ex-gays lead their charges through a rigorous yearlong regimen that includes lots of group therapy, Bible study and sports (part of "masculinity repair").

Early in the novel, Gary fakes his death in the fiery aftermath of a train crash so that he can live as a gay man, free of his wife and parents. In his tormented mind, he believes God wants him to act fully on his attraction to men so that he can expunge those feelings once and for all. Needless to say, his desire doesn't diminish. He starts dating a guy he meets at an Atlanta gay bar within days of the crash, and when that doesn't work out, he starts having anonymous sex in a public park (a throwback to his bathroom exploits while a college student). Eventually his wife learns that he's alive, tracks him down and, with a Resurrection staffer, abducts him to the Memphis center. There, he's turned on by the other men in the program, including the former hustler he shares a room with.

"What ends up happening at these places is that people get comfortable talking about their feelings and with themselves," says Hannaham, a journalist (he was recently a staff writer at Salon) and onetime actor (he performed with the Downtown theater group Elevator Repair Service). The result is that many actually leave with a much greater conviction about their homosexuality. One such survivor, a man Hannaham found on a Listserv, read an early draft of God Says No to ensure the details of Gary's stay at Resurrection were spot on. (Hannaham was tempted to go undercover at a reparative-therapy center but says he knew he'd be kicked out.)

When he arrives, Gary is locked up in a cell-like room for several days of isolation (known as "safekeeping"), forbidden to masturbate or receive anything sexually stimulating in the mail ("like photographs of John Stamos, or sexy clothes," as one of his counselors says). Then he moves in with—and immediately falls for—a male roommate, a recovering heroin addict and prostitute. Residents are supposed to inform Resurrection's leadership of any "attraction problem" with other members of the program. But Gary doesn't tell, and the rest of the novel fairly hinges on that omission. Will Gary accept that he's gay? And will he find love?

The character came about in part because Hannaham's previous novel—about a man accused of a crime who goes to hide out with his mother and finds that she's losing her mind—didn't find a publisher. "The comments I got from editors were like, ‘We don't like the main character,'?" says Hannaham. So he took that feedback and twisted it, creating a protagonist "whose big flaw is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be a normal person in a world that's pretty much not made for people like him."

While the choice resulted in a beautifully written and convincing portrayal of one man's fight with his faith and his sexual feelings, God Says No almost didn't get published either. Twenty-five agents declined to sign Hannaham. So with the help of major booster and Fort Greene neighbor Jennifer Egan (author of The Keep), he submitted the book directly to three smallish presses. He signed with McSweeney's and now gets to see this unique novel in print.

Not having an agent turned out to be a plus. "Friends of mine are rewriting their novels in order to please their agents, surrendering completely their artistic merit in order to get published," Hannaham says. Though rewriting is hardly "reparative therapy," the author does think it's often repressive. "I don't think any novelist should have to do that."

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God Says No (McSweeney's, $22) is out now. Hannaham reads with other McSweeney's authors May 30 at Highline Ballroom.

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