“They were coming into the light. They were coming into the world. This was very much a time when you could sense the role music and culture were playing in the evolution of homosexuality…now they had more and more places to go, where they were the pioneers, the ones in control, explicitly setting the trends. I belonged in these places.”
– Grace Jones on Paris in 1975, from “The Secret Public”
Were Little Richard and Johnny Ray our founding fathers? Did the influence of men like Andy Warhol and Brian Epstein open minds beginning in the 1960s? What was the impact of women like Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and Janis Ian?
These are the sorts of questions that Jon Savage’s fascinating book “The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream” stimulate.
Savage, a gay man, is perhaps best known for “England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond,” first published in 1991, but he is the author of more than a dozen books. He began writing for the rock press in the UK in 1976. As he is writing about popular music and youth culture in “The Secret Public” another of his books, “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture” is worth noting, because it too deals with both topics.
As for the title Savage says, “For so long the topic of homosexuality and the realities of homosexual life remained secrets, albeit open ones. The title also makes the point that gay men and lesbians were the public, a part of societies that, for a long time, desired to erase their existence. It also recognizes that, in the early ’70s, what had once been secret became public knowledge, which was ultimately liberating for all.”
The book is organized into five segments: November 1955, September 1961, June 1967, January 1973 and January 1978 and the timeline switches up and back between the United States and the United Kingdom.
I found this extraordinarily informative, for while I’m quite familiar with American LGBT history, I was a bit fuzzy on how the UK got from the Wolfenden Committee, which first proposed changes to British law regarding male homosexuality in 1954 (being lesbian wasn’t illegal) to the1967 Sexual Offences Act. That legalized homosexual acts between consenting adults. I had no idea, for example, that when the Homosexual Law Reform Society held its first public meeting in London at Caxton Hall on May 12, 1960, that more than a thousand people showed up.
Good golly
The 1955 section starts off with a bang with Little Richard (who is also featured on the cover). Richard comes off as both personally powerful and hilarious, with “Tutti Frutti” initially being a paean to gay sex before it was cleaned up for release as a single. Savage posits “Long Tall Sally” was a challenge to Pat Boone, as his blanched cover of “Tutti Frutti” irritated Richard because of its outdoing the original on the charts in the racist fifties.
Other chapters in this section cover singer Johnny Ray (who nearly didn’t have a career due to a bathroom bust in 1951), scandal magazines and publicity campaigns to counter them, James Dean and Elvis Presley (not for any direct association to gay sex, but as a male sexual icon).
Of particular note is the “Against the Law” chapter, named for the book written by Peter Wildeblood about his trial with two other defendants for sodomy in 1954 which led to a prison sentence. Wildeblood was among the first men to declare his homosexuality in Britain and his book contributed greatly to the creation of the Wolfenden Committee.
In the 1961 segment we are introduced to the world of gay managers and record producers in the UK, including Robert Stigwood, Joe Meek and Larry Parnes. Meek and Parnes were both extraordinarily successful at producing (Meek) and managing (Parnes) young male stars including John Leyton and Billy Fury, whose personalities and images were manipulated to great success for the teen pop music world.
This section also contains Savage’s first chapter on Andy Warhol, who hovers like an éminence grise throughout the book (he appears in all four subsequent sections). Here Warhol is presented breaking into the New York art world with his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in 1962.
Particularly interesting is Savage’s discussion of Warhol’s record collection from the early 60s (preserved in a time capsule at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh). Given Warhol’s outsize influence in the pop and music worlds later in the decade and into the ’70s, it’s fascinating to see what he was listening to in the early ’60s.
Also featured in the 1961 section are chapters on the film “Victim” (the first British film to deal with homosexuality in a sympathetic manner), “The Rejected” (the 1961 KQED documentary on homosexuality featuring Margaret Mead and Mattachine Society member Hal Call) and Colin MacInnes (the bisexual British journalist who was the author of “Absolute Beginners”).
Pre-Stonewall
The pivotal moment in British LGBT history is portrayed in the 1967 section. In the “Legalisation” chapter Savage details the passage of the Sexual Offences Act, which had taken twelve years from the Wolfenden Committee (and yet still preceded the Stonewall Riots by two years). Even though it had taken over a decade to move from discussion to legislation the BBC considered it newsworthy enough to cover the topic in in three programs on its “Man Alive” current affairs show, which featured interviews with both lesbians and gay men.
Savage points out the heartbreaking consequences of ostracization and the closet by noting that Joe Meek, Brian Epstein and Joe Orton all died the same year the act was passed. In the “Gay Power” chapter in this section, Savage details what was happening in the U.S. including the formation of Vanguard at Glide Memorial, the Compton Cafeteria Riot, Drum magazine, Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” and the rise of the gay marketplace in America (including gay pulps and the Camp Records label).
Also included in this section is the rise of Warhol’s Velvet Underground and a hilarious segment in the Gay Managers chapter on the origin of the Kink’s song “David Watts,” with the telling line “he is so gay and fancy-free.” The Kinks were invited to an all-male party where the drummer’s pants fell down while dancing and Ray Davies said to the host David Watts, “Don’t you fancy that big hunky drummer.” To which Watts replied, “Get lost; it’s your brother I’m after.”
Wide open
By the 1973 section, the world has changed quite drastically and (with apologies to Doris Day) the secret public is not so secret anymore. Primary in this change is the man who fell to earth, David Bowie. As Savage says “David Bowie blew the whole topic wide open.” Savage does an admirable job summarizing Bowie’s rise from clubs in Soho in 1965 though the Mr. Fish dresses of “The Man Who Sold the World” to the explosion of Ziggy Stardust. New to me were the facts that Bowie had done a benefit for the Gay Liberation Front in London in 1971 and that he had appeared quite extensively in the British publication “Gay News” (including on the cover).
The “Stonewall and Its Aftermath” chapter in this section chronicles the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the rise of the publications Gay Power, GAY and Come Out. Also in this section is the rise of the Cockettes and the clash of East Coast and West Coast sensibilities regarding camp, theater and sexuality in their New York debut.
The New York Dolls chapter was a revelation to me. I had no idea that David Johansen was connected to Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theater, or that the Dolls had played at the Continental Baths with Jackie Curtis. The Dolls were playing at the Mercer Arts Center in drag in 1971, beating Jayne County and her band Queen Elizabeth by a few months as the first band to perform in drag. Although this played well in New York, it didn’t go over in the rest of the country. The cover of their first album with the band in drag alienated radio DJs in the rest of the country, leading to poor airplay.
Fever
The1978 section of the book charts the crossover of disco from the world of gay discos to the screens of your local cinema in “Saturday Night Fever,” which culminates the influence of those in the British music industry (in this case Robert Stigwood). Chapters in this section chart the rise of Harvey Milk and the Tom Robinson Band as well.
And the crowning achievement of this era is the rise of Sylvester, who is featured in the last two chapters of the book, with the last chapter detailing his performance at the War Memorial Opera House. Also featured in this section of the book is local writer Mark Abramson, who relates his experience at the Snow-blind party on Mission Street:
“Someone gave me a hit of acid and I danced with a group of guys until six, mostly friends of mine. Somehow Sylvester ended up in the middle of our circle. The disc jockey put on Sylvester’s ‘Can’t Stop Dancing,’ and it was strange to be dancing with him to his own song.”
The book ends with the haunting line: “Let’s leave them there, frozen in their fabulousness, with no thought of what was to come.”
“The Secret Public” is an amazing and daunting book, with a barrage of facts and information that informs, excites and entertains. Savage succeeds in charting the movement of LGBT topics (although admittedly it’s mostly about gay men) from the margins to the mainstream of both British and American culture. At 667 pages, it’s a challenging read, but oh so worthwhile. Aside from the print version, it’s also available through the Hoopla online service as an audiobook from your local library.
‘The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream’ by Jon Savage, LiveRight/WW Norton, $35.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324096108
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