Dr Diarmuid Hester is a radical cultural historian, activist and author of the critically acclaimed Wrong- A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. He has held research fellowships at Cambridge University, the University of Oxford, New York University, the Library of Congress, and the British Library. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 3. Diarmuid teaches at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and is a research associate of Emmanuel College.
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
*Colm Toibin*
Fascinating journeys into LGBTQ+ courage… 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… Throughout, Nothing Ever Just
Disappears celebrates the courage it took for these queer people
merely to exist, and exist honestly, in a hostile world
*Observer*
Remarkable and expansive… Intrinsic to the power and beauty of this
book are Hester’s own voice, story and powers of imagination…
tremendously absorbing… The great gift of this book is to offer
access to optimism, in these late and shadowed days. It provides a
glimpse, a possibility for transformation, and an escape from the
closed and shuttered spaces of late capitalism; and it suggests
that we may be able to save ourselves by rethinking our lives and
imaginations, our societies and systems – by queering our world
*The Irish Times*
A revelatory look at queer culture… imaginative and engrossing…
fresh, spry… a resolutely unpretentious prose style – sometimes
animatedly conversational, sometimes wonderfully camp – goes hand
in hand with scholarliness
*i News*
Intriguing and idiosyncratic… a very lively and readable book that
shows the ways in which outsiders have created interfaces, of
variable permeability, with the society in which they lived
*Spectator*
Riveting and evocative… Written with infectious drive, Nothing Ever
Just Disappears is considered, fascinating and sparkles with
insight
*Attitude Magazine*
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
*Robert Macfarlane*
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
*Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide*
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
*Chris Kraus*
A charming, playfully challenging companion on a dreamy quest
through lost landscapes of defiance, imagination and desire
*Jeremy Atherton Lin*
Hester's book takes the reader on a beguiling journey from country
to country. Full of extraordinary details, it delves deep into
queer creative minds from the past, offering up a refreshingly
original perspective on the human connection to sense of place
*Luke Edward Hall*
From Dungeness to San Francisco, the motley wildness of these gay
pioneers is told with fitting zest by Hester. I loved it
*Martin Latham*
Hester's book is insightful, delightful, and enlightening: an
essential entrant into the queer canon
*Isabel Waidner*
Lightly, yet seriously, Hester's immersive prose takes us on a
journey that colourfully loops together the transgressive with the
political. Heady descriptions of varied queer lives are rooted in
the materiality of vividly conjured places. A ‘flummox of friends’
comes to life as their stories mix, mingle and collide. Stirring,
thoughtful and gorgeously fun to read
*Kiare Ladner*
Nothing Ever Just Disappears is a book I have longed for without
knowing I was missing, much like the vanished or vanishing queer
spaces Hester evokes so vividly in its pages. Deftly, beautifully,
it performs an enchanting queering of literary tourism and artists'
house studies, from failures of epiphany we all experience in
places that we expect to move us, to awkwardness about how best to
honour our creative forebears in all their human complexity. It is
both a much needed and engaging history of queer creative lives and
their places, complicating notions of sites of production and
dwelling as ’secular shrines’, and a moving memoir of Hester’s own
creative geographies: the places and people that matter to him and
have informed his own thinking. This book, as Hester writes, ‘is
ritual’ - both pilgrimage in its writing and its reading. Once you
have gazed into the convex mirror, you can’t unsee the resplendent
queer world you encounter there
*Polly Atkin*
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