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 He starts with EM Forster’s Maurice, unpublished in his lifetime: a story of homosexual love, and even cross-class love, complete with a (not always admired) happy ending.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?
