The Devil Wears Clergy Robes: Sapphic Stories Soaked in Guilt, Grace, and Gay Panic
By Jenni Waddell-Hillberry
There’s a very specific kind of damage that comes from being raised religious and realizing, quietly and much too early, that you’re not the kind of person they’re praying for—you’re the kind they’re praying about. I didn’t stop feeling guilty about being queer until I was twenty. Not because I felt free, but because the religious environment I grew up in made denial feel safer than shame.
This list is for the ones who sat through youth groups with a secret, who learned guilt before they understood desire, who still flinch at certain words—but also for those who eventually stopped giving a damn about the clergy robe and started dancing with the gay “devil” instead.
The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
Being the new kid is one thing. Being the closeted queer kid at a hyper-religious Catholic school where your very existence feels like a disciplinary offense? That’s survival mode. Yamilet Flores is trying to fly under the radar and keep her head down after being outed at her last school, but staying quiet doesn’t stop the feelings from showing up. This book doesn’t sugarcoat the cost of pretending. It’s sharp, smart, funny, and painfully honest about what it takes to get through the day as a gay teen girl when every part of you feels like a threat.
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin
Gilda’s not okay. She’s queer, spiraling, and just trying to make it through each day without having another panic attack—so naturally, she ends up working at a Catholic church, on accident of course. This novel is darkly funny and packed with a kind of numb grief that creeps in slowly until it eats everything. Gilda just wants to feel like a real person again without having the fear of dying hanging over her cute gay little head.
Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth
In Sunburn, everything feels close enough to touch and just far enough to ruin you. Set in 1990s rural Ireland, the novel follows two girls whose friendship veers into something dangerous, not because of who they are, but because of where they are. The church looms. The silence cuts deep. It’s slow-burning, claustrophobic, and soaked in that early kind of queer desire that doesn’t have a name yet, only consequences.
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
This book isn’t interested in clean lines or easy identities. It’s about what happens when you grow up queer, Palestinian American, and completely unmoored. Told in nonlinear fragments, it follows a woman haunted by the past, stuck in patterns, chasing love through self-destruction and detachment. Religion doesn’t dominate the story, but it stains everything.
For the Queer Girls Who Got Out, But Still Feel the Echo
Some of us never got the luxury of clarity—just silence, shame, and a shifting sense of self. This list is recognition of that. For the girls who lit candles with one hand and crossed their fingers with the other. For the ones who whispered their wants like prayers, then buried them like sins. These stories tell the truth about queerness, about girlhood, about the quiet violence of being told who you’re allowed to be.
Some characters want to believe, some don’t, and some are just trying to get through the day without falling apart. This list is for Pride month, sure. But mostly, it’s for the people who never got to figure any of this out in real time.
If that still lives somewhere in your body, if the residue still clings—these books will recognize you. Some stories will sashay you stay, wrapping you in grace and glitter. Others will shantay away, taking your shame with them. Either way, you’ll be seen. And maybe, for a moment, a little more whole.
