$Jon Savage in conversation with \u00a0Josh Cheon (Dark Entries Records)$ City Lights and Liveright Books celebrate "The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From The Margins To The Mainstream"
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Jon Savage in conversation with Josh Cheon (Dark Entries Records)

City Lights and Liveright Books celebrate the publication of

The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From The Margins To The Mainstream

by Jon Savage

Published by Liveright Books

A monumental history of the gay influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.

Award-winning author Jon Savage takes us on a fast and captivating journey through the history of pop music as seen through the eyes of queer artists.

Jon Savage, the author of the canonical England’s Dreaming, explodes new ground in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 through 1979. In demonstrating that gay and lesbian artists were responsible for many of the greatest cultural breakthroughs in the last half of the twentieth century, he shows that it was their secretly encoded music—appealing to a closeted but greatly oppressed public—which led to the historic dismantling of discriminatory gay laws and the fusion of queer and straight culture.  

Fittingly, Savage’s kaleidoscopic work begins with the pomp-and-pompadour appearance of Little Richard, whose relentlessly driving sound, replete with gospel shrieks and sexual contortions, enthralled a generation of 1950s stultified white teenagers. Things soon went mainstream, as Elvis enthralled a nation with his seductive low moans and bump-and-grind twists, heavily derivative of Black music, while James Dean and Rock Hudson became the face of 1950s Hollywood; yet this explosion of queer expression remained covert and could not be accepted for what it was.  While music, with supporting roles from cinema and fashion, became the key medium through which homosexuality could be clandestinely enacted, overt expressions of gay behavior were met with arrests and crackdowns.

While hippies reveled in 1967’s “Summer of Love,” gays remained “harassed by police, demonized by the media and politicians, imprisoned simply for being who they were.” J. Edgar Hoover, himself a closeted homosexual, continued to spy on homosexual deviants; CBS’s Mike Wallace aired an invidious show about homosexuality; and the New York police continued to raid gay bars.  

Yet the music itself produced a cultural eruption that simply could not be stanched. While Bette Midler sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys” to a Continental Baths audience of 600 gay men, all naked except for towels, David Bowie “blew the whole topic wide open” and “became the most totemic pop star of his generation.” Even though roadblocks remained, the gear-grinding crunch of the music signaled that the gay civil rights movement could no longer be suppressed.  

Ending the narrative with the sudden collapse of disco, The Secret Public asserts then that the genie was out of the bottle, that queer culture had finally entered the mainstream, producing a transcendent vision of pop culture that could never be marginalized again.

Jon Savage is a writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his definitive history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming (1991). He is also the author of over a dozen books on pop music and subculture. These include This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else; 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded; Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture; amongst many others. He is considered to be one of the foremost pop culture historians of his generation. The winner of the Ralph J. Gleason prize, he lives in North Wales.

Josh Cheon is a music historian, a vinyl-focused DJ and collector, and the founder of Dark Entries Records. To learn more about Dark Entries Records visit: https://www.darkentriesrecords.com/

Praise for the work of Jon Savage

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

Impressive not only in its scope and detail but also in its subtlety.... The Secret Public can surely have no peers.

— Richard Dyer - Literary Review

The Secret Public is the missing story of the heart of pop, the untold story of bravery and love.

— Johnny Marr

Savage, a deeply knowledgeable British music journalist whose subjects have included the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, and teenage culture, tells this enthralling story by focusing on five moments between 1955 and 1979, when gay culture and popular youth culture, in tandem, took quantum leaps into public consciousness, along with the civil rights and women’s rights movements.... His encyclopedic scope ranges from the famous—James Dean, Andy Warhol, the Kinks, David Bowie, Bette Midler, Sylvester—to the less known but no less consequential contributors.... A keenly intelligent, comprehensive survey of some of the bravest artists in history.

— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation