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.
