THE SECRET PUBLIC
How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream
by Jon Savage
Liveright. 784 pages, $35.
IN THE WORDS of queer musicologist Philip Brett, “all musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.” Author Jon Savage seeks to demonstrate this point across almost 800 pages of The Secret Public, tracing the connection between music and queerness from the 1950s to about 1980, but he also goes well beyond. Pop, he argues, “had the ability to liberate everyone: not just gay men, lesbians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn’t accept the standard definitions offered, indeed imposed, by the dominant culture.”
Savage begins with Little Richard and his heavy makeup, flamboyant dress, sequined sunglasses, and outrageous hairdo. Although he was openly gay in 1950s America, Richard had to sanitize the original lyrics of “Tutti Frutti,” which went: “Tutti Frutti, good booty/ If it don’t fit, don’t force it/ You can grease it, make it easy.” But (hetero)sexual subtext remains in these lines: “She knows how to love me/ Yes indeed/ Boy you don’t know what she do to me,” while the word “fruit” would have been common parlance for gay men at the time.
The book moves on to Richard’s contemporary Andy Warhol, who’s more famous for his visual art but is also associated with music: He designed album covers and assembled an LP collection with a definite bias toward “young, attractive, solo male singers—no women at all.” Later, Warhol would manage the Velvet Underground and make them the house band at The Factory. What were gay men listening to in the early 1960s, Savage wonders? We know that show tunes, opera, and drag shows were popular, but little is recorded about queer preferences in contemporary pop, which was soon complemented by girl groups, soul, and the Twist, a favorite dance in gay circles because it could be done solo (men were forbidden to dance together).
Savage then moves on to the crooner Johnnie Ray, who identified with Black female singers, cried theatrically on stage, and unashamedly wore a hearing aid. In short, he showed himself to be vulnerable. Entrapped by the police, Ray was outed by the decidedly non-confidential Confidential magazine. Savage looks next at Dusty Springfield’s popularity among gay men, fueled by speculations about her lesbianism, an atypical confluence of gay and lesbian worlds that were quite separate at that time. More follows on Janis Joplin, who admired many of the bisexual singers of the Harlem Renaissance.
wedding in London, 1969. Allan Warren photo.
The Secret Public also focuses on the men behind the music. John Leyton’s “Johnny Remember Me” was turned into a gothic queer anthem by his manager Robert Stigwood and producer Joe Meek, both of whom were gay, just as Billy Fury and Tommy Steele worked with gay songwriter Lionel Bart and gay manager Larry Parnes. And of course there was the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, an iconoclast for his promotion of a group when solo artists were in vogue. Epstein also asked gay playwright Joe Orton to write the script for a new Beatles movie, but it fell through. As Paul McCartney remembered: “We didn’t do it because it was gay. We weren’t gay and that was really all there was to it. Brian was gay … and so he and the gay crowd could appreciate it. Now, it wasn’t that we were anti-gay—just that we, The Beatles, weren’t gay.”
Savage describes how Epstein was blackmailed for $10,000 by a toxic former lover, John “Dizz” Gillespie, who stole a briefcase with pills, love letters, and gay Polaroids. Epstein turned Gillespie in to the police, but the situation aggravated his depression and ultimately ruined his career. The book shows that there was a lot of queer networking in the music scene, though no major star came out in Britain during the 1960s (not even after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalized homosexuality, which is described in the gripping chapter “Legalisation”).
The book contains poignant moments, such as its sections on the deaths of Epstein, Orton, and Meek: “Murder, suicide, drug addictions, depressions, overdoses, lives without moorings: this was grim stuff. … [They] were bound together, through their deaths, to a particular place and time: the moment when homosexuality could slowly begin to emerge from the shadows—a freedom that they had, in their different ways, helped to foster and create, but from which they would not benefit.”
The music scene took a queerer turn in 1972, when David Bowie (married with a son) declared in an interview with Melody Maker: “I’m gay, and have always been.” Bowie, together with the dazzling Marc Bolan, lead singer and guitarist for T. Rex, represented “a new generation, one where boys could be more feminine and, at the same time, if that was what they wanted, remain attractive to girls.” What is less known is that Bowie’s admission might have been opportunistic (and was later backpedaled), and that Bowie refused to become a poster boy for gay liberation. There is little doubt, however, that it boosted his career.
The book moves on to the Bee Gees and the film Saturday Night Fever (produced by Stigwood), which became hugely popular but also erased disco’s Black, Latin, and queer roots. The movie became a cult classic, because of or despite Tony Manero’s non-macho masculinity, but Savage rightly points out its homophobia. Here he also makes a connection between disco and a widely felt sense of American malaise in the late 1970s. In the words of historian Peter Shapiro: “With its mincing campness, airbrushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblematic of America’s dwindling power.” Savage pertinently notes that the booming disco genre produced no gay stars (except for the caricature of the Village People, while the authentic Sylvester is mostly forgotten nowadays).
Savage includes a lot of background. “The Homosexual in America,” for example, covers well-trodden territory: the Kinsey Report, McCarthyism, Executive Order 10450, Donald Webster Cory, the Mattachine Society, ONE magazine, and Bob Mizer, while “Against the Law” surveys the same period in the United Kingdom. There are discussions of James Dean, Christine Jorgensen, Harvey Milk, and Rock Hudson that seem extraneous.
Some chapters bear little relation to music: Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners; Modernist culture; teenage fashion as shaped by American and Italian imports; the emerging market of gay æsthetics; the British movie Victim; or the U.S. documentary The Rejected. There is also overstatement: “In America as in England, music was the key medium through which homosexuality was discussed—and even enacted—in the wider culture.” What about literature, theater, musical theater (which gets remarkably short shrift), the physique magazines, and the first stirrings of pornography?
In the UK, the book has a different subtitle, “How lgbtq Resistance Shaped Popular Culture 1955–1979,” which takes a different angle, and a more appropriate one in my view. Despite its sometimes discursive organization, The Secret Public is a highly informative encyclopedia of queer culture from Little Richard to the Big Apple, from Soho to Studio 54.
Nikolai Endres, professor of world literature at Western Kentucky U., is the author of Patricia Nell Warren: A Front Runner’s Life and Works.
