Jon Savage – The Secret Public (hardback book)

Jon Savage, author of the canonical “England’s Dreaming,” charts bold new territory in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 to 1979. He argues that gay and lesbian artists were central to many of the twentieth century’s most significant cultural breakthroughs, creating a body of coded work that spoke to a closeted, oppressed audience and helped catalyse the dismantling of discriminatory laws while merging queer and straight culture.

Savage begins with the explosive arrival of Little Richard, whose gospel-infused shrieks, sexual energy, and pompadoured spectacle rattled the staid world of 1950s white American youth. From there, he moves through Elvis, James Dean, and Rock Hudson: stars whose magnetism, aesthetics, and borrowings from Black culture pushed queer expression into the mainstream, even as its meaning remained unspoken.

Music—supported by cinema and fashion—became the primary medium through which homosexuality could be enacted in plain sight. Yet, offstage, arrests, police raids, and media hostility persisted. While hippies embraced 1967’s “Summer of Love,” gay people were still harassed, demonised, and criminalised. J. Edgar Hoover continued his surveillance campaigns, CBS aired hostile broadcasts, and New York police raids remained routine.

Against this backdrop, the music itself broke open the culture. Bette Midler performed “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” to towel-wrapped crowds at the Continental Baths, while David Bowie “blew the whole topic wide open” and redefined the possibilities of pop stardom. Even with resistance, the momentum was irreversible: the sound and style of this era signalled that a new civil rights movement was already underway.

Closing with the crash of disco, “The Secret Public” argues that by 1979, the genie was out of the bottle. Queer culture had entered the mainstream with a force that could no longer be pushed back, reshaping popular culture in ways that remain profound and permanent.