Seven Wonders of Our World
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            Our guide is an adventurous detective. Whether he’s climbing the stone walls near the ruins of Baldwin’s home in the south of France or finding that Jack Smith’s apartment building is unrecognizable in the gentrified corridors of lower Manhattan, Hester is looking for LGBT ancestors and telling their stories, firm in his belief that place and space matter, that we are affected by our environs as much as we affect them: “Space is general, place is specific. … This book is thus part of a wider attempt to emphasize the significance of place. It tries to reorient our thinking by taking a situated approach to queer history. … Taking the locations that follow as our guiding thread, we can shift the emphasis from timelines to places and, in so doing, gain access to a new, broader, more diverse perspective.” Some scholars call this notion “reciprocal touch.” To indicate his theoretical take, Hester cites the queer sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino, whose book has the instructive title How Places Make Us. Hester is also concerned with how we make our places.

            Discussing Maurice, Forster’s “closet” novel first drafted in 1912 and finally published posthumously in 1971, Hester asserts: “Maurice imagined a place where [gay]relationships could be conducted without shame and without secrecy—a queer kind of utopia.” The “greenwood” is what Forster called it; Hester suspects that there are many greenwoods. There is a Whitmanesque quality to the book: it contains multitudes and travels far and wide, embracing all it finds.

            We meet a couple of suffragists in early 20th-century England who were in fact a couple: Edith Craig (daughter of the actress Ellen Terry, who knew Oscar Wilde) and Christopher St. John (born Christabel Marshall). These women were part of a circle that was contemporaneous with the Bloomsbury Group, with connections to Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Radclyffe Hall. Hester narrates their lives in compelling detail in the context of feminism and the right to vote. After describing the “untidiness” of their apartment, he imagines that it was “less like laziness and more like a political choice, if we consider the degree to which radicalism had permeated their space.” While the lives and work of Woolf and Hall are much better known, these women were the movers and shakers, fighting every day to make the world a better place for women. Whether we’re in Paris with Josephine Baker or on the island of Jersey with photographer Claude Cahun, we are more-or-less enthralled with the places these people made for themselves, on stage, in their homes, or in the arts and popular culture.

            Hester’s take on Baldwin juxtaposes the great author’s identities as a Black man and a gay man. In his view, Baldwin was more comfortable going public with his growing radicalism around race, while his sexuality remained more private and individual. He didn’t become a gay activist in any way that Hester can find. The fact that Baldwin left Harlem for Greenwich Village and then left America for France brings up the issue of exile, which “allowed Baldwin to flourish as an artist, permitting him to diagnose from afar the many ills of his country, and that of his adopted country. At home and abroad, he embodied the role of the ‘stranger.’ … He was, as he later admitted, ‘a stranger everywhere.’”

            The best part of this book comes last, when Hester tells the story of Kevin Killian in San Francisco. Killian is well known is some circles as a founder of the “New Narrative” writing movement and as half of a notorious queer marriage, to lesbian writer Dodie Bellamy. The two wrote a great deal about their unusual partnership, which began in 1986 and ended with Killian’s death in 2019. Their South of Market Street apartment “was also their office, their art gallery, their classroom. … The hallway, living room and toilet were all full of books: row upon row, some stacked two deep, many piles reaching above head height almost to the ceiling.” Their city, though, has become almost unrecognizable, “shaken by earthquakes and reshaped by relentless gentrification, but it was the AIDS crisis more than any other event that had the most tragic impact upon the San Francisco they knew and loved.”

            Hester’s final pilgrimage is to Killian’s resting place in a niche at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. This had been sacred ground for Killian as the gravesite of the “visionary queer poet” Jack Spicer, who was a hero to Killian. It’s a full-circle moment to have Killian interred “in the columbarium, two rows beneath Spicer.” As Hester describes it, “Kevin’s story is a story about community and where it is situated. His life and work were dedicated to using spaces—online, offline, literary—to bring people together and cultivate a sense of belonging among them. Among us.”

            Hester has given us a companionable book, one that retells some stories we already know but recontextualizes others in a way that is, finally, uplifting and inspiring. He got to his destination, which he defines at the end of the book’s introduction: “Underneath it all, I was looking for proof that queerness has a place in a world that has often seemed so inhospitable to it.” He found it and took his readers there with him.