Writing history or biography often feels like a journey – both a journey of discovery and a dogged pursuit of historical subjects who may or may not make it easy for you. This strange and entirely unreciprocated fascination has become something of a subject in itself, described in Richard Holmes’s tellingly entitled Footsteps, for instance; while in books such as Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring, in which Laing narrates her own travels around the US tracking some of America’s drunkest literary giants, the journey is made literal. Of course, research sometimes requires physical travel, but often it is instinct that sends researchers on pilgrimages to their subjects’ old haunts, seeking some intangible but significant information.

Diarmuid Hester’s Nothing Ever Just Disappears is structured around eight different locations, most visited by the author, and leads the reader through “the queer spaces of the 20th century, the homes and haunts that have been central to subcultural art, writing and performance over the past 125 years”. Each locale is an opportunity to explore the life and work of an artist, writer or activist – EM Forster in Cambridge; the dazzling Josephine Baker in her beloved Paris; film-maker Jack Smith in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, and so on – but it is place itself that is of prime significance. Hester sets out to “examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture… [to] explore their impact on queer identity… [to] reflect on the special relationship LGBTQ+ people have to space, and the ways in which places have been queered, their meanings distorted and appropriated”. It’s a project that seems particularly pressing as the number of queer spaces dwindles. Hester notes a 2017 study showing that 58% of London’s queer venues had closed down since 2006, and assumes that gentrification, plus the pressures of lockdowns, will have made things much worse. Why, he asks, do these places “seem to disappear so easily”?

In seeking an answer, he takes a fairly conventional, though by no means dry, approach to his subjects and their countercultural, category-resistant work. Most chapters provide an account of a visit, whether there is any meaningful trace of their previous inhabitant left in each location or not. EM Forster’s rooms in King’s College disappoint, for instance, though there’s also much about Forster’s work that fails to impress. The “mousy” author gets dismissed as conventional for failing to publish his queer love story, Maurice, during his lifetime, though some might find Forster’s claiming of a conventional happy-ever-after ending for the novel’s characters radical in itself. On the other hand, James Baldwin’s demolished final home in the south of France prompts reflections on the essayist and novelist’s itinerancy and outsider’s perspective: “Isolation and alienation – the artist’s isolation and the exile’s alienation – are what made Baldwin a great writer.”

Hester’s journeys, which do not take him beyond Europe and the US, sometimes segue into portraits of lost countercultural hubs. His chapter on the writer and editor Kevin Killian, for instance, evokes the artistically generative San Francisco scene devastated by the Aids epidemic of the 1980s. It’s a scene conjured almost as vividly in literature as it existed in reality. (“In this town… The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name almost never shuts up,” declares the protagonist of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City: a description first encountered by Hester, he evocatively reveals, “in an overstuffed leather armchair in a bungalow on the outskirts of a grey Irish village”.)

Hester is attentive to atmosphere, as influenced by both culture and community, and how it acts on individual lives, sometimes expanding horizons and sometimes restricting them. For all that Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was a revelation for the women who saw themselves represented in print for the first time, for instance, the trial of the book’s publisher for obscenity meant that the interwar public were “newly armed with a scientific vocabulary that could be used to describe and delimit female homosexuality. All of a sudden, parameters were imposed on queer desire between women.” Earlier, communities of queer activist women in Britain had demonstrated alternative modes of living. Vita Sackville-West described the shared home of suffragist and theatre director Edith Craig, her partner, the writer Christopher St John, and the artist Clare Atwood as “a world where values were different”. Taking up space was an important goal and a tactic of suffragettes, who made spirited “incursions” into the public (male) sphere of the street. Hester is interesting on their understanding of the need to “recode” spaces both domestic and public, and focuses on Vera Holmes, an actor who had made a name for herself in “trouser roles” and became Emmeline Pankhurst’s chauffeur. Holmes launched a “spectacular invasion of London’s streets”, not least as an eye-catching mounted escort for Women’s Social and Political Union marches.

Hester works hard at accessibility, occasionally summoning the figure of a young postgrad keen to ingratiate himself with an intimidating first batch of students. A sculpture of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square “looks like a zombie”; the writer Sam D’Allesandro is “drop dead gorgeous”; Maurice is introduced via the Merchant-Ivory adaptation because a student Hester, we’re told, watched the film in place of reading the book when running late for a class. Perhaps this works, as he’s able to draw in Foucault and Aristotle as seamlessly as he does Hugh Grant. He also unobtrusively deploys anecdotes and conclusions from his own life as a “cisgendered but queer” man who grew up in Catholic Ireland to illuminate his points without ever making himself the focus in a book peopled with intriguing characters.

Throughout, Nothing Ever Just Disappears celebrates the courage it took for these queer people merely to exist, and exist honestly, in a hostile world. Political activism could offer new outlets for that bravery, as could extraordinary circumstances such as war. Hester doesn’t get into Josephine Baker’s wartime service for the allied intelligence agencies, but he dedicates a chapter to the life shared by the French surrealist artist Claude Cahun and the illustrator Marcel Moore on Jersey in the 1930s, which was interrupted when the Germans invaded the Channel Islands in 1940. Cahun’s photographic self-portraits, largely unknown until the 1990s, play with gender, exposing it as performance – “a strange and uncanny spectacle”, as Hester puts it – and during the occupation, Moore and Cahun made the most of their disguise as eccentric, middle-aged women to distribute concealed anti-Nazi messages. They were arrested in July 1944 and originally sentenced to death. Saved by the intervention of a Jersey official, they spent 10 months in prison covering match boxes and envelopes with art.

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War (Vintage) by Sarah Watling is out now

• Nothing Ever Just Disappears by Diarmuid Hester is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply