Libraries as Communities of Desire

Claire Dederer, essayist, critic, and author of “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” examines the worlds of treasured queer libraries, starting with Christopher Isherwood’s own collection.

Even after a writer is gone, their personal library reveals to us what the writer loved, what they found beautiful. As the critic Dave Hickey wrote, “Beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.” Such a community of desire can exist silently in the books a writer collects. Isherwood’s library, housed at The Huntington, is secure and precious, but queer libraries are all too often lost. This talk will look at Isherwood’s personal library and link it to the fate of Gary Indiana’s library, destroyed just last year in the Altadena fires. What is threatened when personal libraries are imperiled, whether by climate catastrophe or by political climate?

This is the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture and is part of The Huntington Research 2025-2026 "Active in the Archive" lecture series.