The Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures
“Libraries as Communities of Desire”
The Isherwood-Bachardy 2025–2026 lecture will be delivered by Claire Dederer on March 25, 2026. Dederer is an essayist, critic, and author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
The lecture is free, but reservations are required. Click here to book.
Claire Dederer© Stanton J. Stephens
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?
The Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures at the Huntington Library allow distinguished academics, writers and artists to initiate new discussion inspired by the personal and artistic achievements of life companions Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.
Past Isherwood-Bachardy Lecturers include Edward Mendelson, Pico Iyer, Tom Ford, Edmund White, and Armistead Maupin.