The Secret Public — how the gay experience drove a 20th-century cultural revolution

Jon Savage was one of the first serious writers to pay serious attention to pop culture. Punk sat outside the mainstream history of postwar Britain until Savage separated its facts from mythmaking in his 1991 history England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock.

So to find him examining the influence of LGBTQ performers on popular culture, and how quickly attitudes shifted between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, is an exciting prospect. Savage brings new perspective to familiar territory by highlighting the variety of sexualities of stars, impresarios and those in their orbit. Some of these parallel lives are familiar and well-documented; others elusive.

What emerges is a new history of the recent past. That is especially valuable now, when greater acceptance and freedom of expression mean we could easily forget it was once dangerous to be anything other than heterosexual.

Gay stars from Johnnie Ray to Dusty Springfield — even George Michael, whose rise in the 1980s falls outside the book’s parameters — felt compelled to hide their sexuality, sometimes at huge personal cost. Take Joe Meek, the gay British record producer, whose studio techniques brought a new, metaphysical atmosphere to music in tracks such as John Leyton’s existential hit “Johnny Remember Me” (1961) and the joyous “Telstar” by the Tornados (1962).

Even Margaret Thatcher, whose Conservative government in the 1980s was responsible for legislation that prohibited “the promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, was unable to resist Meek’s magic. She once told an interviewer “Telstar” was among her favourite tracks.

As Savage puts it, Meek’s sound was only possible because he translated the gay experience into peerless pop melodrama: “less committed to traditional mores”, he was “better placed to seize the opportunity and shape it into an expression of [his] own desires — which happened to coincide with those of the all-important female audience”. But he was also obsessive, volatile and became violently paranoid. Meek killed himself in 1967, having first shot his landlady during an argument about money. He was 37. 

Meek’s mental decline was extreme, though his career was emblematic of many in the 1950s and ’60s. But not everyone repressed their natures, and many secrets were wide open, from those of Beatles manager Brian Epstein to Andy Warhol and his orbit in New York. A photograph of a young, beautiful Little Richard in 1950s America, wearing full make-up while rolling his eyes as he’s kissed on the cheek by a woman, crystallises what fans knew to be true, explicitly or instinctively.

When private homosexual acts were decriminalised in England for men aged over 21 in 1967, things moved quickly. Straight stars commandeered gay motifs — the androgyny of early 1970s Glam, Mick Jagger’s make-up, The Kinks’ gender confusion. David Bowie, as Savage puts it, “blew the whole topic wide open” with his demonstrative onstage bisexuality and his 1972 assertion to Melody Maker that he was “gay and always [had] been”. (Savage emphasises that Bowie’s claim was mercurial — he was never one thing.)

Other chapters cover shifting scenes and movements as they cope with the backlash against these new freedoms into the 1970s. Attacks on vital magazines and newspapers, such as that in the UK on Gay News by the self-appointed moralist Mary Whitehouse — who had described homosexuality as “an excrescence” — become depressingly routine.

Even into the late 1970s, LGBTQ meeting places were precarious. The mafiosi who for decades ran the Stonewall Inn in New York (which closed in 1969) relied on bribing the police with “gayola”. One entertaining chapter deals with the triumph of overtly gay mainstream disco stars Sylvester and Village People, before the Aids crisis cut short that burst of optimism.

Other books have tackled similar territory, but Savage brings a new depth of observation. His perspective is sociological as much as cultural — lively if occasionally dizzying.

But I don’t think he is writing for the casually interested reader — at least, not primarily. Savage, now 70, seems to be working with an urgency, perhaps for LGBTQ people in the future. His sources are detailed and lengthy, as if leaving a trail of evidence. After decades of progress, future freedoms cannot be taken for granted.

The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955-1979) by Jon Savage Faber £20, 784 pages

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