Jon Savage’s mammoth new book skilfully navigates, across more than 700 pages, key moments in music and entertainment history and maps their significance for the advancement and acceptance of queer culture. The Secret Public takes its name from that duality of the public and private self and early chapters describe the brutal dangers and difficulties, before the legalisation of homosexuality, encountered by singers and artists in the UK and US who were not able to fully be themselves. Often, he points out, they had public personas and identities at odds with their private selves, operating as some of them were “in the claustrophobic sexual and gendered atmosphere of America in the early 1950s” where “any perceived deviancy was automatically suspect”. The book tells the story of how we have arrived at our modern moment, with LGBTQ+ artists more fully, if not entirely, accepted, while also serving as a prescient warning about not slipping back.
As you would expect, Savage can really write about music, its poetry and cadences. Early on, he examines the opening refrain of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, digging deep into each syllable of that opening “first eruption”, describing how the final two syllables of “Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom” have the “force of a fist, a blow, an explosion – a caption in a superhero comic”. And by choosing a condensed period of time, just 24 years, he is able to revel in details, both the seismic and the sidelined. He brings new life to Bowie, Dusty Springfield and… Rock Hudson who, when it was thought his “natural speaking voice was too high-pitched for his macho image”, was forced to scream when he had a cold in order to permanently alter the tone, making it deeper and supposedly “more seductive”. With Bowie, Savage gives us not just the better-known story of the evolution of the stage persona, but the backstage and managerial minutiae of his rise as well.
This is a meticulously researched tome, as evidenced by more than 50 pages of notes and references, 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. This is a tricky book to pull off, in that it is both academic and has a broad appeal. Savage is knowledgable and has a wide range of reference, bringing his experience of previous books on the Sex Pistols (England’s Dreaming) and screenplays for film documentaries such as 2007’s Joy Division to the page, so that you alway feels he is in command of his subject.
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 (mainly driven by women, “who were at the forefront of consumerism in the postwar years”, and whose participation in “massed fandom” brought “public attention to the power of teenage girls…” ).
Savage writes of the shifting tides of history with the pinpoint distillation of the line of a song; he notes that “the relationship between gay pop and politics” was “complex and vexed”, and it’s this book’s achievement that it gives us that entanglement in intimate snapshots.
A first cousin, though different in style and focused on the decades directly after The Secret Public, is David France’s classic How to Survive a Plague and it’s impossible to read the final sentence of Savage’s book without shuddering. He leaves us with a glimpse of the cover of Sylvester’s 1979 album Living Proof and its fold-out sleeve, describing the singer at the centre, “pouring champagne into a glass”, as “the perfect party host”. “Around him, on the steps up to a nightclub, framed by the marquee roof, are upwards of 35 celebrants: a mixture of ages, genders and races… Packed tight together, they are all smiling with pleasure and anticipation.”
The author ends with a plea to “leave them there”, while they are “frozen in their fabulousness, with no thought of what is to come”. Less than 10 years later, Sylvester would die of an Aids-related illness. We can only hope this book might herald a sequel in which Savage can turn his rigorous depth and tenderness to what did happen next.
• Andrew McMillan is a poet. His debut novel Pity (Canongate) was published earlier this year
• The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) by Jon Savage is published by Faber. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
