The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Popular Culture (1955 - 1979)

Massive. Informative. Fascinating. A huge undertaking, but worth the time.

It took me nearly seven weeks to finish Jon Savage’s massive The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) — which, for a compulsive reader like me, qualifies as a major time commitment. But it was worth every dense, fascinating, and occasionally maddening page.

I suspected I’d love it before I cracked the open. Savage wrote England’s Dreaming, still the gold standard on punk (it’s my favorite book about punk, and believe me, I’ve read plenty), as well as an excellent Kinks biography.

The book is divided into five chronological sections, each covering five or six years. Some chapters zero in on individuals — Little Richard, James Dean, Dusty Springfield, David Bowie, Lou Reed. Others explore the machinery behind the scenes: Brian Epstein shaping the Beatles’ image, Hollywood managers crafting safe personas for dangerously attractive leading men, gossip magazines policing Hollywood scandals. Savage weaves in political and legal milestones — the Wolfenden Report, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Stonewall, Harvey Milk — showing how pop culture and queer life evolved in uneasy parallel. I’d like to say it was two steps forward, one step back most of the time, but it was much more erratic (and depressing) most of the time, at least for a while. Onstage, glam flourished; offstage, many gay men kept their hair short and their lives discreet to avoid prison, ostracism, or worse. That gap between pop’s utopian promise and lived reality is one of the book’s most sobering throughlines. Although he’s a British author and most of his books lean heavily toward the English viewpoint, I thoroughly appreciated that he spent equal time on people and events in the US, and it was interesting to compare the attitudes, laws, and cultural progress between the two countries.

There are so many great sections. A fascinating chapter on the 1961 film Victim sent me to YouTube to watch it immediately. The pages on Lou Reed’s Transformer captures that moment when “Walk on the Wild Side” slipped coded queer references into the mainstream. And I was delighted to revisit Tom Robinson — a hero of mine in 1978, whom I saw twice in concert and even met once for an autograph. I hadn’t thought about him and his music for a while, and that chapter sent me back to my collection for a re-listen. Savage’s range is astonishing; even in well-trodden territory (Warhol, Bowie, the New York Dolls, the Velvets), he unearthed stories that were new to me.

That said, the book isn’t flawless. It’s big (767 pages, although the last 100 pages are notes and sources) and occasionally I wanted to skim through some sections just for the sake of feeling like I was making progress. (I didn’t, though.  I actually read every word.) There’s waaaay more than I needed on gay newspapers and niche publications, and the Brit-centric chart references, with so many performers who were unfamiliar to me became, at times, more burdensome than enlightening. Elton John and Freddie Mercury are notably absent, though historically understandable given the timeline; they didn’t come out until the 1980s. I’m sure their inclusion would have made the book even more interesting. Warhol pops up repeatedly: fascinating in the 60’s, tiresome in the 70’s. But always compelling, in his freakish way.

Overall, Savage’s book is an undeniable accomplishment, a sprawling, provocative reminder of just how much richer our cultural soundtrack has been because of the secret public that helped write it.

Note: you might see the above version in a bookstore rather than the one at the top (which is the one that I read). Both books are the same, but take note of the different subtitle.The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream. I think this is a very misleading subtitle. The book isn't limited to music at all. It deals with film, politics, and printed publications. It also might mislead you into thinking the book covers up to the present day, instead of stopping at 1979. So beware. Not sure why they do these things.