Gyula Wanyerka Komjati, Sleeping shepherd, etching, 1926. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of Russel I. Kully.
When Gary Indiana’s personal library arrived at a house in Altadena on January 7, 2025, it was supposed to anchor an artists’ residency. Hours later, the Eaton Fire destroyed it. Christopher Isherwood’s personal library, held eight miles south at The Huntington, survived.
Claire Dederer will stand between those two fates on March 25 when she delivers the annual Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture at The Huntington. Her talk, “Libraries as Communities of Desire,” will examine what queer personal libraries preserve about their collectors’ inner lives — and what disappears when such collections are lost to fire, whether set by climate or politics.
Dederer is not a random choice for the subject. Her book “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” a national bestseller that grew out of a 2017 Paris Review essay, won the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose in 2024 — the very award named for the writer whose library she will now discuss. In accepting the prize, Dederer said it was “especially moving” because her late father had loved Isherwood’s work, according to a statement on her website.
The Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture series, launched in 2016 and endowed by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, brings writers and scholars to The Huntington to initiate discussion inspired by Isherwood and his life partner, portrait artist Don Bachardy. Past lecturers have included Tom Ford, Pico Iyer, and Edmund White. The lectures draw on The Huntington’s holdings, which include the largest collection of Isherwood’s papers in the world — manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and his personal book collection, entrusted to the institution by Bachardy in 1999.
Isherwood, who died in 1986, was among the first major novelists to write openly about homosexuality for general literary audiences. His Berlin Stories inspired the musical and film “Cabaret,” and his 1964 novel “A Single Man” was adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009. His archive at The Huntington includes more than 3,000 items, according to the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
The lecture’s event description frames Dederer’s inquiry through a line from the late art critic Dave Hickey: “Beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.” That community, Dederer will argue, can exist silently in the books a writer collects.
Indiana, a novelist, critic, and playwright, died in October 2024 in New York City. Friends packed hundreds of his books — some arrayed three rows deep on his shelves — and shipped them cross-country to Altadena, where they arrived on January 7. The Eaton Fire, which destroyed nearly 9,500 structures, consumed the house and its contents the next day, according to the Pasadena Star-News. Indiana’s formal papers, held separately at New York University, were not affected.
The lecture takes place Wednesday, March 25, at 6 p.m. in Rothenberg Hall at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Admission is free with reservation. For information or to reserve, visit huntington.org or call (626) 405-2100.
Isherwood’s library is secure behind climate-controlled walls. Indiana’s is ash. Dederer’s lecture asks what that difference means — and for whom.
LIBRARIES AS COMMUNITIES OF DESIRE Date & Time: Wednesday, March 25, 2026 (time per Huntington calendar). Venue: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 Phone Number: (626) 405-2100 Website: https://www.huntington.org/event/libraries-communities-desire
