NOTHING EVER JUST DISAPPEARS

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.