Diarmuid Hester Distills Queer Longing
about 3 months ago (02/06/2024)
Diarmuid Hester Distills Queer Longing Skip to content James Baldwin in Saint-Paul-De-Vence (1985), in Diarmuid Hester, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories (2024) (photo by Ulf Anderson; all images courtesy Pegasus Press) It’s notable that only at the end of his book Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories does Diarmuid Hester acknowledge that the text and his journey to write it have been a pilgrimage all along. It brings to mind a quote attributed to John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), historically one of the most influential texts about spiritual wanderings: “It is always hard to see the purpose in wilderness wanderings until after they are over.” When the book starts, it claims an entirely different sense of its purpose — to understand “the elusive interconnections between queer sexuality and certain places.” In the introduction, Hester references the work of sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino and her fascinating book , How Place Makes Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities , which dives deeply into how her subjects’ queer identities shift when they move from one city to another, a provocative finding in US society in particular, where our attachments to identity can be quite fixed and queerness is often seen to be primarily shaped internally. Cover of Diarmuid Hester, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories (2024) Cover of Diarmuid Hester, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories (2024) Cover of Diarmuid Hester, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories (2024) That said, there are hints early on that some deeper longing is at play in the text.