The Secret Public

How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

by Jon Savage

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Pub Date Feb 04 2025 | Archive Date Jan 31 2025

W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright

Arts & Photography | Biographies & Memoirs | LGBTQIAP+

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Description

The legendary author of England’s Dreaming presents a monumental history of the queer influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.

In his kaleidoscopic new book, Jon Savage, the legendary author of England’s Dreaming, shows how music has been the key medium through which homosexuality was expressed for much of the last half century. Depicting nothing less than the birth of rock and roll, the narrative begins in the mid-1950s with Little Richard, whose music possessed secret codes of the gay underworld and whose magnetism attracted millions of white teenagers. As Savage engagingly proceeds through the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with evocations of, among others, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Donna Summer, Sylvester, and the disco-era Bee Gees, he demonstrates that it was mostly music—with supporting roles from cinema, literature, and fashion—that broke the dam that led to the widespread acceptance of LGBTQ culture today. The Secret Public, with its “pancake and pompadour” descriptions of a generation in revolt, provides an electrifying look at the key moments in music and entertainment that changed pop culture forever.

The legendary author of England’s Dreaming presents a monumental history of the queer influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.

In his...

Advance Praise

"With kaleidoscopic detail and exhilarating verve, [Savage] tells the intertwined, transatlantic story of pop and the struggle for LGBTQ+ emancipation...The depth of Savage’s research is one reason why this book feels so definitive. As well as hidden B-sides and underground films, he excavates long-lost gay artefacts and personalities...Savage handles his mountains of material with total authority and control, and in the course of doing so reveals the way that pop music was able not just to point the way to a more liberated existence, but also to realise dreams that had previously seemed unreachable." -Alex Needham - Guardian

"This is a meticulously researched tome…but Savage’s central achievement is to wear all his knowledge lightly, to tell us these stories as easily and engagingly as if we were stood in line with him, waiting to go into a gig….The Secret Public is constantly in motion, spinning outwards from its glimpses of individual stars and managers into the collective story of entire nations, not just of LGBTQ+ people. Readers who come for the insights into certain schools of music, or particular singers, will also find a book that is brilliant on shifting ideas of postwar masculinity in the UK and US, and the wider cultural consumption of the era." -Andrew McMillan - The Observer

"Magisterial…. In an overcrowded field, [Jon Savage] is the essential and pre-eminent British writer on pop culture and pop art….The Secret Public might be the book he was born to write." -Alex Bilmes - Esquire