Rooms with little left to view: the queer spaces of E.M. Forster and others

In this intriguing and idiosyncratic book, which aims to present ‘a new history of queer culture and identity over the past 125 years’, Diarmuid Hester recalls how he went to look at E.M. Forster’s former sitting room in King’s College, Cambridge. This once ‘intimate space’, filled with possessions accumulated over a long life, in which Forster wrote and entertained many notable guests from 1946 to his death in 1970, had been repurposed as the college’s ‘grad suite’, filled with battered furniture from Ikea, a football table and a television set. The only remnant of Forster’s residency was a large mantelpiece designed by the writer’s father.

In his search for queer places and what they meant to individuals and the wider community, Hester experiences other disappointments. Someone who now occupies the former house in Jersey of the surrealist photographer Claude Cahun ‘seems affronted’ by Hester’s interest in the property, while the remaining walls of James Baldwin’s 300-year-old farmhouse at Saint-Paul-de-Vence have been absorbed into a modern housing complex that can only be viewed through an imposing steel gate.