Nothing Ever Just Disappears

"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."

"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."

"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."

“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.”

"A personal and historical engagement with the places where queer art and culture have thrived. 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."

“Evocative. This incisive chronicle from Cambridge University historian Hester examines the 'significance of place' in the lives of queer artists. A scintillating investigation of the intersection between environment, creativity, and identity.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

Praise for Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper:

“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.”

“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."