the gay best friend book review

Book Review: The Gay Best Friend by Nicolas DiDomizio

By rebecca mills | may 30, 2023.

June is almost here and with that comes some new LGBT+ releases. One new and exciting release is The Gay Best Friend by Nicolas DiDomizio.

You might recognize the author from his previous book: Burn It All Down which was a young adult LGBT story. However, this time, DiDomizio is trying his hand at an adult story. While Sourcebooks Casablanca mostly publishes romance, this one isn’t a traditional romance.

While the story does get a happy-for-now ending, The Gay Best Friend is more of a contemporary read with some romantic elements. Honestly, it ended up being a massive surprise for me as this was a book I immediately fell head-over-heels with and couldn’t put down.

If you don’t have The Gay Best Friend on your radar for Pride Month or even as a summer read, I’m here to convince you why it’s worth adding to your TBR. I’d like to thank the publisher for sending me an ARC so I can share all my thoughts with you.

The Gay Best Friend explores friendship, romance, and getting it together.

We’re introduced to Domenic who is best friends with both the bride and the groom. Patrick, the groom is Dom’s long-time best friend and his best man. While the two had a falling out at some point, they ended up reconnecting and becoming friends. It’s in large part, thanks to Patrick’s fiance, Kate.

We first begin with Dom at Patrick’s bachelor party where drinking, golfing, and eventually, stripping ensues. It’s about as rowdy as a traditional bachelor party gets but Dom feels torn because he wants Patrick to have fun but doesn’t want to betray Kate. From that point on, things start to spiral especially after Dom hooks up with one of the groomsmen, Bucky.

Eventually, we fast-forward to Kate’s bachelorette party where things implode. Everything goes up in flames including the wedding, their friendship, and even, the budding romance with Bucky. It’s especially tough for Dom who is straddling the lines of friendships and trying to be different versions of himself for his two best friends.

In the end, Dom decides that he needs to get his life together and figure out what he wants which isn’t easy. The Gay Best Friend broaches those difficult conversations with nuance and even a bit of humor. Even though things do get mucked up, we get to see Dom realize his worth along with him, and Kate and Patrick realize how they can be better friends with each other.

As for Bucky, I’ll leave that up to you as it’s such an integral part of the ending. Either way, I feel like The Gay Best Friend is such a fun story that most of us can relate to even if you’re not part of the LGBT+ community. There is something so universal about figuring out your sh** with your friends by your side and realizing your worth isn’t tied to just one thing.

Next. The Book Proposal by KJ Micciche is a wildly unique romance. dark

The Gay Best Friend by Nicolas DiDomizio is out now wherever books are sold. 

Will you be picking up The Gay Best Friend for Pride Month? Let us know in the comments.

The Gay Best Friend is a fun story about coming into your own and stepping into your own light. It features some infidelity though, as well as two accidental outings, which may discomfit some readers.

Kate Wallace, Domenic Marino, and Patrick Cooper have been best friends for ages, and they’re always there to help one another with whatever life throws at them. In Domenic’s case, that currently involves a break-up with Ted, his former fiancé. In Kate and Patrick’s cases, it’s choosing between marrying or staying single. Kate and Patrick choose the former, and Domenic soon finds himself dealing with Patrick and Kate’s manic energy as they get engaged and start putting together their wedding. Dom finds himself playing co-best man, which means twice the duties and twice the wedding chaos. Even worse, Dom has learned to split his personality when with his friends – with Kate he plays into gay best friend stereotypes, and with Patrick he tends to behave in more traditionally masculine ways.

When Dom throws Patrick a bachelor party at a beach house,he’s under strict orders from Kate to keep an eye on things. Unfortunately, strippers, alcohol and whipped cream conspire to make a bleary night, as does Patrick’s choice to use his bachelor weekend as an excuse to cheat on Kate, leaving Dom with a whopper of a secret. Patrick also connects with an old college friend of Patrick’s, Bucky Graham, an ace golfer with the PGA. During the bachelor party Dom offers up some romantic advice to Bucky which results in him shattering his engagement, leaving his ex-fiancée enraged at Kate. Bucky also confides in Dom that he's been suspended by the PGA, and before the end of the weekend Dom has seen Bucky naked. Soon he and Bucky are falling in love, which may be hazardous to Bucky’s career. Can Dom learn to be his true self, get Bucky to come out – and get Patrick and Kate to actually talk to each other like adults?

This is a quick read that’s charming in places and keeps you turning the pages. Kate and Patrick can be a little annoying, and poor, long-suffering Dom gets the brunt of it for a while, but they do manage to emerge as their best selves before the novel concludes. A lot of the story does get swallowed up by straight people drama though – Dom eventually realizes this and makes space for himself but it takes a while, and some readers may find his behavior trying.

There’s a lot of complicated stuff going on when it comes to Dom’s desire for Bucky to be out and Bucky’s desire to stay closeted. On one hand, Bucky’s got his career to think of, and on the other, denying repeatedly to others that he and Dom know one another is a little trying, to say the least. But Dom does out Bucky, so it’s not exactly the best situation for anyone. I did like Bucky’s southern charm, and the way it soothed Dom’s frazzled edges.

I’ve been to Mystic, Connecticut a million times and I was delighted when landmarks popped up in the book; the topography was quite familiar to me and DiDomizio handled it beautifully.

However, I found Kate and Patrick to be exhausting in their childish drama and resistance toward talking to each other like adults about their expectations. It absorbed so much of the book and I just wanted to stay in Dom’s headspace and get to know him better. They’re the reason why this book landed in the C zone. The Gay Best Friend is a lovely read when it’s focusing on Dom, Bucky, their relationship or Mystic itself – but how much you enjoy it will likely depend on how far you can stomach Kate and Patrick’s antics.

Sensuality:  Warm

Publication Date:  05/2023

Review Tags:  Male/Male romance Queer romance

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The Gay Best Friend

Nicolas didomizio. sourcebooks casablanca, $16.99 trade paper (352p) isbn 978-1-72827-029-6.

Reviewed on: 03/15/2023

Genre: Romance/Erotica

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He's always been the token gay best friend. Now, stuck between a warring bride and groom hurtling toward their one perfect day, he's finally ready to focus on something new: himself.

Domenic Marino has become an expert at code-switching between the hypermasculine and ultrafeminine worlds of his two soon-to-be-wed best friends. But this summer—reeling from his own failed engagement and tasked with attending their bachelor and bachelorette parties—he's anxious over having to play both sides.

The pressure is on. The bride wants Dom to keep things clean. The groom wants Dom to "let loose" with the guys. And Dom just wants to get out of this whole mess with his friendships intact.

But once the rowdy groomsmen show up at the beach house—including a surprise visit from the groom's old frat brother, handsome and charming PGA star Bucky Graham—chaos (and unexpected romance) quickly ensues. By the time Dom returns for the bachelorette party, he's accumulated a laundry list of secrets that threaten to destroy everything—from the wedding, to Bucky's career, to the one thing Dom hasn't been paying nearly enough attention to lately: his own life.

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Gay best friend: a history of Hollywood’s favourite queer character

What’s often been a patronising and reductive archetype is given depth in a new season of films in time for Pride month

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Before the gay best friend could be phased out, he had to come out. Today, those three short words tend to denote the most confining limitations to queer characters in film, a trope and archetype designed to keep homosexuality on the sidelines, adjacent to the more palatable lives and loves of straight people. For a time, however, sassy support was about the best representation queer people could hope for on screen, even if it required some code-reading on the viewer’s part. In Code-era Hollywood, ascribing a sexuality at all to the waspish single man commenting on, or even assisting in, the protagonists’ own entanglement would have been a detail too far. He had a name, a role, a handful of good lines. What more could he want – an identity?

Curated by the critic Michael Koresky, a mini-season of films on the Criterion Channel in June affords some depth and dignity to a character often demeaned as a patronising relic of now-outdated prejudices – even as it persists in film and TV today. Koresky’s selection delves beyond the romantic comedy realm where the trope made its most enduring impression, and into the realist dramas, psycho-thrillers and unclassifiable art films (Irma Vep, most unexpectedly) through which the gay best friend has evolved from a type to a human being.

But a type was enough, in the 1930s and 1940s, to keep character actors like the superbly named Franklin Pangborn busy in romps like Stage Door and the Preston Sturges-written Easy Living, playing one variation after another of the same man: fastidious, fast-talking, archly knowing but otherwise sexless. Edward Everett Horton and Grady Sutton, Pangborn’s contemporaries in the bracket of gay actors dubbed “Hollywood sissies”, extended the stereotype into bumbling or hayseed comic territory. (Once in a while they even got to play ostensibly straight characters, albeit never manly ones.)

By 1949’s spritz Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romcom Adam’s Rib, the gay sidekick could be not just a brittle functionary – a butler, a manager, a milliner – but an actual pal, even a foil of sorts. Played by the straight, wiry character actor David Wayne, the singer and pianist Kip is a fun-loving neighbour to Hepburn’s married New York lawyer Amanda, though there’s enough of a seductive edge to his carousing with her to aggravate her husband. There’s joy away from heteronormativity, Kip seems to suggest; the film, directed by the famously gay George Cukor, feels cheerfully complicit in that truth even as it obeys the rules of straight romance.

It’s certainly a sunnier presentation of queer masculinity than the suavely coded gossip columnist and gadfly Addison DeWitt in All About Eve: played to Oscar-winning effect by George Sanders, he’s a best friend to everyone and no one, his sexuality implied not so much through his mannerisms (as Sanders steers clear of flouncy parody) as through his proudly owned otherness, his sinuous traversing of social sects: “We are the original displaced personalities,” he says at one point, referring to theatre folk. The secondary implication is clear enough.

But things would get more complicated; the gay best friend’s self-assurance would wobble. In the generation-marking teen-ennui drama Rebel Without a Cause, the bisexual actor Sal Mineo took the archetype into tragic (albeit still nominally veiled) territory, his shy social outcast Plato ultimately too besotted with James Dean’s smouldering hero to make it to the end of the film. In the 1960s, a new wave of social-realist films finally outed their gay best friend characters in a sympathetic light.

Britain gave us The L-Shaped Room, in which a Black gay musician helpfully mirrors the outsider status of Leslie Caron’s single, pregnant heroine, and A Taste of Honey, where the likewise knocked-up Rita Tushingham’s gentle gay housemate even offers to marry her, with a line that practically distils the archetype’s role across film history: “You need somebody to love you while you’re looking for somebody to love.” Over in the US, Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel offered a female version in the character actor Estelle Parson’s Calla, a lesbian confidante to Joanne Woodward’s eponymous protagonist, a repressed, virginal schoolmarm; Calla attempts to answer Rachel’s loneliness with a kiss, briskly rebuffed, hinting at a story Hollywood wasn’t yet ready to tell. By 1983’s Silkwood, the lesbian best friend – played with gruff wit by a surprisingly cast Cher – could be granted a lover of her own.

So, eventually, could her male counterpart, even if the sexual revolution of the 1970s, countered by the Aids panic and Reaganite homophobia of the 1980s, hadn’t done much to promote him from the margins in mainstream cinema. In 1991’s Frankie and Johnny, the gay best friend could take the form of a couple – Nathan Lane and Sean O’Bryan – providing healthy romantic counsel to an improbably lovelorn Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, the one couple that can’t get legally married gives ballast to the film’s heterosexual frolics: John Hannah’s Auden-borrowed elegy for Simon Callow is the scene everyone remembers.

Rupert Everett, devoted gay right-hand man to Julia Roberts’s romantic schemer in My Best Friend’s Wedding, doesn’t get a partner but does get to advocate the acceptability of singled – for him and the straight heroine alike – by the film’s end. He was sufficiently popular to prompt a rash of relationship movies where the gay best friend is promoted to leading man: in The Object of My Affection, Paul Rudd is the ideal partner that Jennifer Aniston wants but fundamentally cannot have; in the wretched The Next Best Thing, Everett fathers a child with Madonna, only for her subsequent heterosexual romance to drive them apart. In both films, the gay man got an upgrade in billing if not in agency, remaining a mere facilitator to a woman’s wellbeing.

And what now, with gay romance no longer the red line it was in the movies, with queerness no longer strictly a fringe concern? Well, the gay best friend endures, though sometimes he has company in the protagonist: Richard E Grant’s tart drinking buddy to Melissa McCarthy’s down-at-heel writer Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me? is in all respects a classic of the type, save for the fact that Lee herself is queer, protagonist and sidekick bonded in otherness. In Todd Haynes’s Carol, Cate Blanchett’s closeted title character is supported in her homosexuality by a best friend (Sarah Paulson) who’s been through it all before. And at the contemporary end of the spectrum, the gay protagonists of Heartstopper may struggle with age-old identity crises, but a diverse social group – including transgender best friend Elle – assists with their self-realisation. The gay best friend may not be an obsolete archetype anymore, but it’s no longer an isolated one.

Queersighted: The Gay Best Friend is now available on the Criterion Channel

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The Evolution Of The “Gay Best Friend,” From Harmful Trope To TV Gold

Being the GBF isn’t such a bad thing anymore.

You’ve seen them gossiping about guys, going shopping, and gassing up their gal pals. They’re the Gay Best Friends, and they don’t really exist. They live only in dated TV shows, where they pop in and out of existence depending on when their besties need them.

For so long, gay men existed in television only as a hanger-on, a wisecracking accessory to a female lead. But as times have changed, so has the Gay Best Friend trope. In recent years, the Gay Best Friend has evolved from his problematic past and now exists in the form of full, nuanced characters.

The Gay Best Friend has had a tricky history. Initially, the trope was viewed as a positive representation, since proudly out LGBTQ+ characters were so rare in the shows and films of the ’80s and ’90s. But as more of these supportive best friend characters appeared on the screen, the harmful aspect of the trope showed itself. These characters were not viewed as real people but as silly pets to amuse their female friends, with no interior lives of their own. From George in My Best Friend’s Wedding to Damian in Mean Girls , these may have been beloved roles for audiences, but they also contributed to a dehumanizing outlook on how gay men should exist. As several personal essays and thinkpieces have pointed out, these giddy lackeys only served to further “other” the queer community, rather than give LGBTQ+ people any real representation.

That’s changed in modern television, though. Now, the Gay Best Friend isn’t a sexless sidekick but a main character of his own. These TV besties illustrate how the trope was turned on its head over the years.

Rickie Vasquez, My So-Called Life (1994-1995)

Rickie Vasquez threw the first brick at the Gay Best Friend trope. For one of the first times ever, a network show featured a gay male lead who did technically fill the best friend role to his two female friends but also had a complex personal life of his own. Yes, Rickie was a sounding board for Angela’s and Rayanne’s boy problems, but he also had crushes of his own and a depressing home life that added so much more depth to his character.

Jack McFarland, Will & Grace (1998-2006)

Shortly after My So-Called Life ended, in 1996, another seminal character within the Gay Best Friend trope stormed TV screens. What made Jack special was his unapologetic fabulosity. Unlike the many tortured gay TV characters before him, Jack never felt the need to tone down his expressive reactions or dramatic outbursts. Plus, he actually got to date and have relationship problems of his own, not just sit on the sidelines and advise his friends Will and Grace on their issues.

Stanford Blatch, Sex and the City (1998-2004)

Unfortunately, Stanford was a bit of a step backward after the progress Rickie and Jack had made in busting the Gay Best Friend trope. Carrie’s gossip-loving bestie only existed when she summoned him to go on shopping trips or dish out relationship advice over cocktails. The movies eventually did give him a husband — Charlotte’s personal GBF Anthony — but it wasn’t enough to sever the designer leash Carrie had on him.

Marc St. James, Ugly Betty (2006-2010)

Another lackey to a powerful fashionista, Marc had a lot more delicious material to work with than Stanford did by aligning himself with the aggressively cruel magazine editor Wilhelmina. As the GBF to the show’s antagonist, Marc got to upend a bit of the trope by tearing down the main girlie rather than constantly supporting her, but he still mainly existed as Wilhelmina’s puppet for the whole series.

Max Blum, Happy Endings (2011-2013)

It felt like Happy Endings created Max for the sole purpose of subverting the Gay Best Friend trope. He’s uninterested in fashion, has absolutely no good relationship advice for his bestie Penny, and has tons of messy dates of his own. Max marked a moment in TV history where the Gay Best Friend trope had become a well-known trend and was finally being knowingly taken to task.

Elijah Krantz, Girls (2012-2017)

Girls ushered in an evolved form of the Gay Best Friend with Elijah, Hannah’s fun-loving confidant who wasn’t afraid to call her out when necessary. At first, it seemed like Elijah was just going to be another funny sidekick with no life outside of Hannah’s, but that quickly changed. As Girls got messier, Elijah got his own spotlight, and most importantly of all, he refused to blindly support Hannah all of the (many) times she was in the wrong . He was a GBF with a backbone — nobody’s accessory.

Titus Andromedon, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-2019)

Titus isn’t Kimmy’s Gay Best Friend; she’s his Straight Best Friend. At least, that’s how the self-involved aspiring actor would spin it. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was a triumph in highlighting just how far LGBTQ+ representation has come in TV. Though his name isn’t in the title, Titus is just as central to the comedy series as Kimmy, with his own independent zany misadventures and rollercoaster of a love life. No longer does the GBF live in his bestie’s shadow because Titus would never give up his spotlight.

Joel, Somebody Somewhere (2022-Present)

Somebody Somewhere as a whole feels like a warm, meaningful embrace of all the wronged Gay Best Friends over the years. Sam’s newfound queer family quickly becomes just as important as her real family once she moves back home, and a lot more uplifting, too. Especially Joel, the sweet soul who refuses to let Sam dim her light. Yes, he’s always there to support Sam when she needs it, but it’s a genuine friendship that goes both ways, with Joel as an equal partner. He’s not just a Gay Best Friend; he’s a real best friend.

Quentin, The White Lotus (2022)

Leave it to The White Lotus to pull off the biggest twist of the Gay Best Friend trope. Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya is the quintessential GBF collector, so it wasn’t a shock when she gravitated toward a group of fun-loving gay men to fawn over her while feeling down in Italy. But these were no Gay Best Friends; they were Gay Worst Enemies. After being trapped on a boat with her would-be assassins, Tanya came to the realization that would finally put the last stake in the GBF coffin: “ These gays are trying to murder me! ” That’s right, Tanya — they’re done being your best friend.

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The Gay Best Friend (Paperback)

Description

He's always been the token gay best friend. Now, stuck between a warring bride and groom hurtling toward their one perfect day, he's finally ready to focus on something new: himself.

Domenic Marino has become an expert at code-switching between the hypermasculine and ultrafeminine worlds of his two soon-to-be-wed best friends. But this summer—reeling from his own failed engagement and tasked with attending their bachelor and bachelorette parties—he's anxious over having to play both sides.

The pressure is on. The bride wants Dom to keep things clean. The groom wants Dom to "let loose" with the guys. And Dom just wants to get out of this whole mess with his friendships intact.

But once the rowdy groomsmen show up at the beach house—including a surprise visit from the groom's old frat brother, handsome and charming PGA star Bucky Graham—chaos (and unexpected romance) quickly ensues. By the time Dom returns for the bachelorette party, he's accumulated a laundry list of secrets that threaten to destroy everything—from the wedding, to Bucky's career, to the one thing Dom hasn't been paying nearly enough attention to lately: his own life.

THE GAY BEST FRIEND IS:

"Filled with charm, hilarity, sweetness and swoon, The Gay Best Friend is an absolute MUST-READ." — Lynn Painter, bestselling author

"Outrageously witty and incisive! The Gay Best Friend captures all the kinetic energy of a 90s Julia Roberts film and queers it. A perfect summer read that reminds us: putting yourself first should never be a second thought." — Timothy Janovsky , author of Never Been Kissed

About the Author

Nicolas DiDomizio holds a bachelor’s degree from Western Connecticut State University and a master’s degree from NYU. His debut novel, Burn It All Down, was published in 2021 and praised as “unforgettable” by James Patterson. He lives in upstate New York with his partner Graig and their shmooshy bulldog Rocco.

Praise For…

• Fiction / Friendship
• Fiction / LGBTQ+
• Fiction / Humorous
• Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy
• Fiction / Romance / Contemporary
• Fiction / Romance / LGBTQ+ / Gay
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These Gay Novels Offer a ‘More Interesting Conversation’ About Faith

Recent books by Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts and Garrard Conley depict gay Christian characters not usually seen in queer literature.

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By Joshua Barone

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. The novelist Colm Toibin writes from a distinctly Catholic perspective, and Garth Greenwell’s books have been described as imbuing sex with spiritual transcendence. Robert Glück’s experimental novel “Margery Kempe” (1994) intertwines a historical nun’s pornographic ecstasy and modern gay desire — an adoption of Christianity similar to the lasting image of St. Sebastian, his nearly naked body penetrated by arrows, in gay culture.

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 novels’ authors say, may be truer to life today.

“I know a lot of people who are both queer and religious: queer Catholics, queer Protestants, queer Mormons.” Bratton said. “With queer Catholics, it’s usually a situation where they’ve grown up Catholic and their culture is broadly Catholic — just a way of life, and a fact of life.”

In writing “Henry Henry,” Bratton didn’t want to fall into the trope of irreconcilable sexuality and Catholicism — “the narrative of ‘never the twain shall meet,’ because I think the twain has met a lot.” For decades, though, there has been a popular conception of gayness and religion as oppositional forces, a cliché perpetuated both by rebellious atheists and by severely homophobic institutions like the Westboro Baptist Church.

But both religion and queer culture are too nimble to remain at odds. Although the Catholic Church hasn’t entirely embraced queerness — this month the Vatican issued a document saying that gender confirmation surgery threatened “the unique dignity” of life — it has made relative strides in recent years.

As religious institutions navigate their relationship with queer people, so too have queer people — often unconventional by nature — and the authors of these recent novels approached faith differently.

In “All the World Beside,” set in the 18th century, gay characters (and others) lack the vocabulary to describe their desires. Nathaniel and Arthur, the couple at the heart of the story, barely consummate their love and seem unable even 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,” Conley said. “I thought it was important to imagine a conversation where people were free enough to say, ‘This connection between my love and my heart is drawing me closer to God,’ which is what I felt the first time I hooked up with a guy. I felt an embodiment of love, and all the things you’re supposed to feel during communion.”

Hal, of “Henry Henry,” comes from an aristocratic English family whose Catholicism goes back centuries, to when it “was the law of the land,” Bratton said. They never converted to Anglicanism, even as Catholics were persecuted. It is a crucial part of Hal’s identity, though it is challenged by his boyfriend, who, in one argument, says that he finds Hal’s devotion to the church weird, unnecessary and even harmful.

“I felt that it was inevitable that there will be people who say, ‘I just don’t get it, and I don’t respect it,’” Bratton said. But Hal doesn’t have a subsequent crisis of faith or undergo the kind of soul-searching that brings him a fresh sense of self. He chooses to live the way he wants while being religious, with no concern about whether or how those will be reconciled.

Lefferts, who set “Ways and Means” during the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, doesn’t bring faith into the story until its final chapters. By that point, he said, “I already packed the car, thematically. One more suitcase and you wouldn’t be able to close the door.”

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,” Lefferts 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, but not much, resemblance to those of their authors. Conley, 38, grew up in a fundamentalist Christian 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; he didn’t want to establish an “us versus them” opposition in “Boy Erased,” he said, because “there’s a lot of ‘us’ in the group of ‘them.’”

Bratton, 30, didn’t 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 Lefferts, 34, who grew up Catholic, started attending church again in his 20s. “When I go, 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.”

That is one reason Conley suspected there might be a hunger for more novels like his. Lefferts, who splits his time between Hudson, N.Y., and Brooklyn, said that, for example, it’s not unusual for his gaydar to go off during Mass.

“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,” he said. “I think people are ready for a more interesting conversation about it.”

Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic. More about Joshua Barone

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