GLR September-October 2024

Moon and the current Ibsen’s Ghost —costar commercially suc cessful actors like B. D. Wong and Thomas Gibson, suggesting the extent to which Busch is no longer in limbo, but has moved on to more mainstream success. Elliott’s history of the Theatre-in-Limbo is less a study of the company’s contributions to the development of gay the ater than an eyewitness account of Off-Off-Broadway’s last hurrah. Let it serve an an antidote to Busch’s fictionalized ac count of the company in Whores of Lost Atlantis (1993), which tried so hard to capture the screwball antics of those early per formances that it fell horribly flat. Nevertheless, taken together the books might help explain why, like the legendary Camelot, the Theatre-in-Limbo burned so brightly but for such a short period of time.

enough, AIDS helped make gay theater commercially viable. Playwrights like Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally, William Finn, and Tony Kushner scored Off-Broadway and Broadway triumphs with plays that a decade earlier might have been consigned to Off-Off Broadway. But Busch’s form of satire did not seem able to make the leap to address a bona fide health care crisis. (Imagine him as Rosalind Russell’s Sister Kenny resolving to find a treatment, not for polio, but for AIDS.) Instead, Busch went on to write a successful but more con ventional comedy, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000), which became an excellent vehicle for Linda Lavin, rather than Busch himself, as a self-indulgent, upper-middle-class woman under going a midlife crisis. His more recent efforts—like Shanghai

Seven Wonders of Our World

T HE ORIGIN STORY for Diar muid Hester’s Nothing Ever Just Disappears begins in Cambridge, England, when the author had a realization that the queer history of that place was disappearing. With his friend David Bramwell, he created an hour-long podcast, “The Great Recorded History,” a nod to Wendy Moffat’s excellent biography

ent our thinking by taking a situated ap proach to queer history. ... Taking the loca tions 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

C HRIS F REEMAN

NOTHING EVER JUST DISAPPEARS: Seven Hidden Queer Histories by Diarmuid Hester Pegasus Books. 358 pages, $29.95

of E. M. Forster, A Great Unrecorded History —which is, in turn, Forster’s reference to the many LGBT lives that have been obfuscated or lost. According to Hester’s website, the podcast “explores Cambridge’s queer past through its literature and politics. Featuring interviews with older members of the city’s LGBTQ + community and excerpts from literature produced in the city, it gives listeners a chance to understand the history of the place—and become part of it.” You can hear in that de scription that Hester wants to take us places, real and imagi nary, and to share stories. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is part pilgrimage, part hom age, and part lament. But it is primarily an exercise in locating communities and teasing out the various meanings of networks and private and public spaces. Some of Hester’s portraits are of well-known figures, like Forster, Josephine Baker, and James Baldwin, but others are more obscure, such as photographer Claude Cahun and performance artist and filmmaker Jack Smith. Our guide is an adventurous detective. Whether he’s climb ing 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 Manhat tan, Hester is looking for LGBT ancestors and telling their sto ries, 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 reori Chris Freeman, a longtime G&LR contributor, teaches English at the University of Southern California. September–October 2024

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 as serts: “ 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 Eng landwho 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 com pelling detail in the context of feminism and the right to vote. After describing the “untidiness” of their apartment, he imag ines that it was “less like laziness and more like a political choice, if we consider the degree to which radicalism had per meated 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.

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