By Imani Perry

God Says No is a sensitive, heart-wrenching, and insightful novel about a protagonist, Gary Gray, who experiences the conflicting pressures of his sexual orientation, his responsibilities as a son, father, and husband, and his religious beliefs. The writing is seamless.

Hannaham gives Gary a clear and distinctive voice, so much so that you can easily forget that it is a work of fiction. Gary is engagingly chatty. He’s a black man without much race consciousness; for him blackness is simply a matter-of-fact truth. He’s endearing but frequently infuriating in his dealings with the people he loves. He is a character with a fragmented self with conflicting interests and tastes, who experiences multiple identity shifts over the course of the novel.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical when I first heard that the novel was about a “down- low” brother. I often dislike the down low conversation, for three reasons. One: It focuses our attention on same-sex relationships in the context of duplicity and infidelity. Instead, I frequently  think, it is more helpful for straight people to “see” healthy, honest, same-sex relationships.

Second, “down-low” talk frequently focuses on black men in particular, and feeds the stereotypes of them as hypersexual and “deviant”-(a term that is itself a problem when it comes to describing private consensual adult interactions.)

Finally, if we talk on and on about the down-low, we can too easily avoid talking about the very real challenges we face as a society that is presently in conflict about opening its doors to full equality for people in same-sex relationships.

But then I began reading. And I quickly realized how important this book is. The novel enters with Gary as a student at a small evangelical college. He is a devout Christian who has been taught, and believes, that homosexuality is a sin. And yet, he is attracted to men. Soon, however, Gary finds himself with a wife and child-a relationship that develops into marriage as a result of his intense loneliness, as well as his deep appreciation for the friendship of the woman who will become his wife.

Soon Gary is immersed in a cycle of indulgence, guilt, denial, shame, and compulsion-and regularly cheats on his wife with random men in public places. Hannaham’s descriptions of the encounters reveal Gary’s deep self-loathing. The men are often openly racist, insulting of his size (Gary is overweight) and simply hostile. It is sexuality devoid of any human kindness.

The world Hannaham depicts is a real one, but invisible to the general public. Occasionally scandals erupt over revelations of same-sex encounters in department store bathrooms, public parks, and truck stops. The greatest media sensation is reserved for public figures caught in the act-often ministers and elected officials. But here, Hannaham demonstrates how it happens and some of why it happens, particularly among members of very socially conservative communities.

Midway through the novel, a set of bizarre circumstances leads to two separate conversion experiences for Gary. Hannaham’s use of the conversion story-a classic form in African-American writing-is powerful and unexpected. Rather than spoil the story, I will simply say this: Hannaham forces us to consider how important intimacy is, and how difficult it is. Irrespective of sexual orientation, he demonstrates the destructive forces of silences and shame on our families and romantic partnerships.

In each of his three lives, Gary struggles with the legacy of an abusive father and an ever-present insecurity. These struggles set up nearly insurmountable obstacles to deep human connection. Although the novel ends in a hopeful place, the reader will ruminate on this difficult lesson for a long time.

In recent weeks, two 11-year-old boys of color, Carl-Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, both committed suicide as a result of constant bullying and accusations that they were gay. As far as I know, neither boy identified as gay. But what does it say about our society that children can be openly abused on a repeated basis to the point of not wanting to live anymore-for being perceived to be gay? (Or for any other reason.)

From 2006 to 2007 anti-gay hate crimes went up 6 percent. Recently, North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx referred to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill, which passed in the  House of Representatives on April 29, 2009, as a “hoax,” denying that Matthew Shepard’s brutal 1998 murder was a hate crime.

On CNN, when reporters covered the “Craigslist killer,” there was increased sensationalism when it was found that he also solicited sex from men, implying that somehow made him even more deplorable.

And so, although there are many openly gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people living, working, loving and (in some states) marrying, in our society, we cannot be surprised that many people stay in the closet and live isolated, fearful lives given that there are still violent, aggressively demeaning, and isolating responses to those who reveal or are suspected of same-sex attraction.

God Says No is a masterful piece of writing and a powerful human portrait, but for the present moment it is most important for shedding light on an issue that is at the center of much of our political conflict. Gary is a crossroads figure who we can all identify with in some way-gay and evangelical, a black man from the deep south with a Samoan wife who loves Disney World and flirts with cosmopolitanism. He is an everyman, and, through it all, universally human.

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Imani Perry is a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law- Camden, and the author of
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004).