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 -- Sarah Watling - 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 -- Neil Hegarty - 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 -- Michael Donkor - 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 -- Peter Parker - 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



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

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.