Nothing Ever Just Disappears

December 4, 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.

February 1, 2024
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. The seven artists and writers he profiles are E. M. Forster in Cambridge, Josephine Baker in Paris, James Baldwin in America and France, French photographer Claude Cahun on the Channel island of Jersey, underground filmmaker Jack Smith in Lower Manhattan, poet and novelist Kevin Killian in San Francisco, and a trio of gay suffragettes (Vera Holme, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Craig) in Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury. Hester laments the disappearance of queer spaces, noting that nearly 60 percent of London's queer venues have closed over a ten-year span. The biggest factor for the shutdowns is gentrification and urban redevelopment. In other words, they have been priced out of the market. That fact haunts the narrative as Hester persuasively suggests that the traces of where a person once lived mean something, whether physical, spiritual, or metaphorical. This lovely literary and artistic pilgrimage is bookended by stops to avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman's cottage in rural Kent.

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October 15, 2023
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.

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