In historical accounts of queer lives and communities, a narrative arc of flight and self-fashioning dominates. Place, tradition, rootedness: these weigh heavily, sometimes lethally on the smalltown boy or girl with illicit or unruly desires. (Think Lou Reed, singing about Andy Warhol’s youth in Pittsburgh: “You hate it – and you know you’ll have to leave.”) Even in a bustling metropolis, things can feel provisional – new identities shakily built along an archipelago of clubs, bars and cruising grounds. And yet, as the Irish writer Diarmuid Hester argues, it all must transpire somewhere. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is a study of seven queer lives (plus a coda on Derek Jarman and Dungeness) that seem to have transformed abstract space into meaningful place. Hester adopts a group-biography form that’s become familiar,, but writes about dissimilar and mostly unconnected figures, promising “a new history of queer culture and identity over the past 125 years”.
It begins in Cambridge, where Hester has studied and taught, and co-runs an LGBTQ+ performance night, Club Urania, which takes its name from late-Victorian artists, poets and intellectuals who campaigned for homosexual rights. That lineage haunts Hester’s first case study. He starts with EM Forster’s Maurice, unpublished in his lifetime: a story of homosexual love, and even cross-class love, complete with a (not always admired) happy ending. In Cambridge, where Forster had dreamed of a sexual idyll he named the Greenwood, Hester visits the novelist’s room at King’s College and finds it is now a mundane space with a football table and Ikea sofa. It’s a letdown but leaves questions in his mind: how much of writing or art-making depends on place, how much on leaving it behind?
In diverse ways, his next three figures are performers. Vera Holme was an actor and suffragette, a specialist in “trouser roles” on stage in London, and a mischievous militant in the streets and lecture halls. Her story allows Hester to build a collective portrait of lesbian artists and activists mostly erased from popular histories of the suffragette movement. Likewise his second chapter, on the dancer, singer and actor Josephine Baker, in which a chorus of more or less celebrated lesbians – Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, the dissident surrealist artist Claude Cahun – is arrayed behind the central story of the bisexual Baker’s escape from American racism and subsequent stardom in France. Cahun cast herself in photographs as a gender-queering shape-shifter and later distributed anti-Nazi propaganda from her Jersey home.
How “hidden” are these histories? Much of what Hester reveals about his subjects is well-rehearsed biography, and he seems at times to be writing at some hampering remove from the places he dutifully visits. He fetches up at James Baldwin’s former home in the south of France, and outside Cahun’s house, but seemingly without prior efforts to gain access. At one point he notes that Jersey’s ice-cream shops are “overrun by septuagenarians” – does he know for sure they are not art-loving, queer seventysomethings? The more vexing issue is a tendency to overstate his own insights or discoveries, as when at the Cahun archive he delves into a box of prints and negatives, turns up her 1932 photograph Je Tends le Bras (I Extend my Arms), and proceeds to talk about one of her most famous and widely reproduced works as if it’s a wild new revelation.
Of course the urge to write about such comparatively well-known figures for a wider or younger audience is admirable, but don’t responsibilities remain? If you cannot find fresh information about life or art, then surely something new must be happening at the levels of thought, pattern or even language. Hester’s hunch about the special significance of place to LGBTQ+ artists and writers remains unproven here or simply self-evident – of course Paris was a better place to be than Harlem! Too often the places themselves are reduced to cliche. We are “hitting the hilly streets” of San Francisco, “spend[ing] some time in smoky Parisian cabarets” or straining alongside Hester to find meaning in the apartment complex that has replaced most of Baldwin’s house and looks (how awful) like a contemporary art gallery.
Hester is on much firmer ground, and his writing consequently more airborne and original, in the last two chapters. Writing about avant-garde film-maker Jack Smith – whose Flaming Creatures Susan Sontag hymned in Against Interpretation as a “treat for the senses” – he finds a subject truly and complexly embedded in New York, the only city where his lurid art could flourish. (Hester also asks, crucially: is unhiding Smith a tribute or betrayal?) And in the final chapter, there is at last a vivid sense of community and locale in Hester’s treatment of the late San Francisco-based writer Kevin Killian, a key figure in the New Narrative movement of the late 1970s. It’s here, in a milieu that many (he seems to think all) of his readers will not know, that you get a sense of how much Hester himself has invested in his queer histories, how much he can master and convey them.
• Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories by Diarmuid Hester is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
