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.
