God Says No

Gary Gray marries his first girlfriend, a fellow student from Central Florida Christian College who loves Disney World as much as he does. They are nineteen, God-fearing, and eager to start a family, but a week before their wedding Gary goes into a rest-stop bathroom and lets something happen. God Says No is his testimony—the story of a young black Christian struggling with desire and belief, with his love for his wife and his appetite for other men, told in a singular, emotional voice. Driven by desperation and religious visions, the path that Gary Gray takes—from revival meetings to out life in Atlanta to a pray-away-the-gay ministry in Memphis, Tennessee—gives a riveting picture of how a life like his can be lived, and how it can't.

"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."
—Imani Perry, The Defenders Online (to read the entire review, click here)

“A tender, funny tour of a mind struggling to do the right thing. A revelatory and sympathetic guide to a misunderstood world.”
—Steve Martin, author of Shopgirl and Born Standing Up

"James Hannaham's GOD SAYS NO introduces a groundbreaking new American voice: a writer of spectacular sentences who has trained his sights on a world that has hardly been touched by literary fiction. Topical and ambitious, disturbing and hilarious, GOD SAYS NO is everything a person could ask of a first novel — and twice that much. "
—Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me and The Keep


"This novel is an absolute original. Gary Gray's search for wholeness and acceptance is a heartfelt (and often very funny) plea for all men (and women) to be embraced just as they are. A wonderful debut."
—Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl From The Left


“GOD SAYS NO is a book that was desperate to be written but well out of reach. And then James Hannaham came along and wrote it, with the kind of care, wit, sympathy and fury that the book deserved. Imagine Candide…—okay, imagine Candide as a black man, a southerner, a Christian
fundamentalist, middle-class, obese, married, a father, and utterly, even profoundly gay.  If a comedy, in the classical sense, is a story then ends in a marriage, and a tragedy is a story that ends with a death, then what do you call a book that ends with a split and a resurrection? A truly daring first novel, and something to read.”
—Jim Lewis, author of Why the Tree Loves the Ax

Here are some interviews with James Hannaham from the New York Times, The Advocate, Salon.com, and Out magazine.