Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories

by Diarmuid Hester

Overview

An exploration of artistic freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination, including James Baldwin in Provence, Josephine Baker in Paris, Kevin Killian in San Francisco, and E. M. Forster in Cambridge, among other groundbreaking queer artists of the twentieth century.

Nothing Ever Just Disappears is radical new history of seven queer lives and the places that shaped these groundbreaking artists.

At the turn of the century, in the shade of Cambridge's cloisters, a young E. M. Forster conceals his passion for other men, even as he daydreams about the sun-warmed bodies of ancient Greece. Under the dazzling lights of interwar Paris, Josephine Baker dances her way to fame and fortune and discovers sexual freedom backstage at the Folies Bergère.

And on Jersey Island, in the darkest days of Nazi occupation, the transgressive surrealist Claude Cahun mounts an extraordinary resistance to save the island she loves, scattering hundreds of dissident artworks along its streets and shorelines.

Nothing Ever Just Disappears brings to life the stories of seven remarkable figures and illuminates the connections between where they lived, who they loved, and the art they created. It shows that a queer sense of place is central to the history of the twentieth century and powerfully evokes how much is lost when queer spaces are forgotten.

From the suffragettes in London and James Baldwin's home in Provence, to Kevin Killian's San Francisco and Derek Jarman’s cottage in Kent, this is both a thrilling new literary history and a celebration of freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639365562
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	749,702
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Dr. Diarmuid Hester is a writer and academic based at the University of Cambridge. He is a radical cultural historian and an authority on sexually dissident literature, art, film, and performance. Diarmuid is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge, and a research associate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, the Irish Times, gorse, n+1, The New Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper (University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Editorial Reviews

12/04/2023

This incisive chronicle from Cambridge University historian Hester (Wrong) examines the “significance of place” in the lives of queer artists. Exploring the Cambridge grounds once trod by E.M. Forster as a student there in the early 20th century, Hester suggests that the vogue for Hellenic ideals in British academia at the time brought renewed attention to ancient Greeks’ approval of love between men, influencing Forster’s depiction of “a place where relationships could be conducted without shame and without secrecy” in his novel Maurice, first published in 1971. Elsewhere, Hester suggests that the permissive culture in 1920s Paris allowed singer Josephine Baker to explore her bisexuality and that San Francisco’s Small Press Traffic book store served as a hub for the New Narrative movement of the 1970s and ’80s, which included such poets as Kevin Killian and Robert Glück. Hester’s evocative prose brings the locales to vivid life (he describes 1909 London, which served as the backdrop for producer Edith Craig and playwright Cicely Hamilton’s “radical feminist theatre” work, as marked by traffic “moving arrhythmically forward in spurts” and the “thick, pervasive aroma of sour horsedung”), and he offers keen insight into works by some of the 20th century’s most notable queer artists. The result is a scintillating investigation of the intersection between environment, creativity, and identity. Photos. Agent: Matthew Marland, RCW Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"In Nothing Ever Just Disappears, Hester wanders in search of kinship with queer bohemians such as James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and Kevin Killian. Making my way through the book, it felt like a literary walking tour across carefully selected corners of queer history."

Hyperallergic

"Hester takes us on an investigation that spans the last two centuries and different cities all over world. The book is thoughtfully researched and strikes a wonderful balance between biographical information and Hester’s own assumptions and assertions about these people’s lives. As he mentions many times in the book, much of the history of some of the queer activists and artists is unwritten or poorly documented, so we must use what we know in conjunction with our imaginations to fill in some gaps. Hester gracefully manages to accomplish this throughout the entire book."

Autostraddle

Nothing Ever Just Disappears is about what happens to a house or a room, or a whole town or city, when it is transformed by a powerful sensibility. With originality and subtlety, Diarmuid Hester examines how the gay imagination deals with place and with displacement, allowing for mystery and a kind of magic.

Colm Tóibín

"Fascinating journeys into LGBTQ+ courage. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is structured around eight different locations, most visited by the author, and leads the reader through 'the queer spaces of the 20th century.' Hester is attentive to atmosphere, as influenced by both culture and community, and how it acts on individual lives, sometimes expanding horizons and sometimes restricting them. Nothing Ever Just Disappears celebrates the courage it took for these queer people merely to exist, and exist honestly, in a hostile world."

The Guardian

Writing from the perspective of a queer Irishman who has made Cambridge his adopted home, Hester explores ‘the queer spaces of the twentieth century,’ homes and haunts. A lovely literary and artistic pilgrimage.

Booklist

The famous and the unfamous, a world we didn’t know and a world we thought we did, all these appear and are remade under the regard of Hester’s scholarship and storytelling. And the questions that appear—how are we made by the spaces in which we live, how do we in turn shape them, this dance of place and self, that in turn allows us a glimpse of our lives, and we in turn are remade as well."

Alexander Chee

A charming, playfully challenging companion on a dreamy quest through lost landscapes of defiance, imagination and desire.

Jeremy Atherton Lin

Hester’s book is insightful, delightful, and enlightening: an essential entrant into the queer canon.

Isabel Waidner

Diarmuid Hester's beautifully written psycho-biography explores obscure corners of places as sites of hidden queer histories. His portraits of writers and activists from E.M. Forster to Josephine Baker, London's queer suffragettes and Kevin Killian are haunted and haunting. Totally riveting.

Chris Kraus

Diarmuid Hester has written a book I have always wanted to read. An exploration, celebration and reclamation of queer lives within their spaces and landscapes, it roams from the cloisters and locked gates of Cambridge to the hilly streets of San Francisco, the apartments of New York City and the nuclear desert of Dungeness's shingle-shore, where Derek Jarman created a world on the margins and of the margins. Hester is a fizzingly brilliant writer, and with its fusion of personal testimony, reportage, cultural history and literary criticism, this book will surely find a wide readership.

Robert Macfarlane

A moving, erudite book. Writing against the tide of erasure, Hester takes us on a journey through time, over land and sea, and casts an empathetic and sharply humorous eye on this pantheon of queer figures. A hymn to the importance of community and place, this is a vital public history of queer life that is both intimate and wondrously radical.

Seán Hewitt

Praise for Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper:

From the Publisher

The time has certainly come for a large-scale study of Dennis Cooper, and Wrong is a major achievement that satisfies in every respect. Hester’s ferocious sleuthing conveys us to whole new areas of understanding about Cooper, and makes the definitive case for Cooper as both modern day Rimbaud and Sade.

Kaplan Harris

Nothing Ever Just Disappears is about what happens to a house or a room, or a whole town or city, when it is transformed by a powerful sensibility. With originality and subtlety, Diarmuid Hester examines how the gay imagination deals with place and with displacement, allowing for mystery and a kind of magic.

Colm Tóblín

2023-09-20
A personal and historical engagement with the places where queer art and culture have thrived.

Hester, a radical cultural historian and author of Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, is intent on showing that “queerness has a place in a world that has often seemed so inhospitable to it.” To reveal these possibilities, he explores how the lives of queer artists, performers, writers, and activists have depended on and contributed to the places that they inhabited. The multitalented performer Josephine Baker’s bisexual identity flourished in the theaters of Paris. Novelist E.M. Forster found refuge in his rooms at Cambridge University where platonic love was celebrated. The artist Edith Craig and the novelist Christabel Marshall—both queer suffragettes—thrived in London. Novelist, filmmaker, and photographer Kevin Killian (“a quiet giant of contemporary queer culture”) and writer Dodie Bellamy made their homes in San Francisco, a center of queer culture. The south of France and England’s Jersey coast, respectively, enabled the writer James Baldwin and the “gender-bending surrealist” Claude Cahun to live queer lives—although Hester describes Baldwin as “always out of place.” Of filmmaker and AIDS activist Derek Jarman’s cottage on the English coast, Hester writes that “the house and its setting had a huge influence on his story.” Large cities have been particularly important, as New York was for Baldwin and the filmmaker, photographer, and performer Jack Smith. Of course, Hester is not the first to point to the value that non-normative individuals derive from living with like-minded others or the allure of isolated cottages—think Thoreau—for escaping the pressures of an oppressive society. However, he delivers a consistently engaging book, rich in interest for cultural history buffs and warm and poetic in personal observations.

An evocative reminder that it matters where we live—and where art is made.

Kirkus Reviews