Jon Savage, the author of the epic punk history “England’s Dreaming,” returns with an even longer examination of the dual histories of pop music and gay life, from the beginning of the rock era in 1955 to the fall of disco in 1979, ending just before MTV and AIDS. His intention in “The Secret Public” is to show how gay musicians and audiences affected the mainstream, but too often the connections are left implied.
Over more than 700 pages, we are provided pocket biographies of the gay or bisexual musicians Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Joe Meek, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin, Janis Ian, Jobriath, Tom Robinson and Sylvester. But there are also long excursions into the lives of figures who are not gay, or not musicians: Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy Warhol, Rock Hudson, Bette Midler, Joe Orton, Donna Summer, Grace Jones, the New York Dolls and the Bee Gees.
Their presence is often perplexing. Presley’s appeal was very much focused on millions of teenage girls, and only tangentially on gay men. Dean, Hudson and Orton have nothing to do with pop music, unless you count the Beatles’ rejection of Orton’s screenplay “Up Against It.” It’s certainly interesting to read about these people, but their relation to the thesis is tenuous. (That the book, first published in the U.K. and very Brit-centric, was originally subtitled “How L.G.B.T.Q. Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955-1979)” may explain the mixed messaging.)
Along the way we look in on Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” summed up in her quote, “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” But unless I’m unaware of a newly discovered “Susan Sontag Sings Lotte Lenya” album, she is not especially relevant to a book that promises to be about music’s gay influence on mainstream culture.
Much easier to make a case for is David Bowie, whose genderfluid cultural influence even in the United States was central to Gen X’s understanding of the sexual revolution. “The key concept was ‘out of the closets and into the streets,’” Savage writes, “and this is what Bowie courageously lived out.”
The book’s most harrowing sections follow three gay celebrities — Orton, the pop producer Joe Meek and the Beatles manager Brian Epstein — who all died in shocking and tragic ways within seven months in 1967. A graphic novel could be written, and a lurid three-way biopic filmed, with Tilda Swinton in a triple role.
Savage’s coverage of disco’s popularity, springing from gay, Black and Latin nightclubs, is thorough and interesting. But as a gay musician and a child of the ’70s, I was more inclined to see my possibilities in the largely lesbian D.I.Y. label Olivia, which focused on actual gay people. When I started dealing with “professional” recording studios, their open contempt for me and my female collaborators shocked us into home recording for decades.
In discussing “Saturday Night Fever” and its disco-dancing antihero Tony Manero, Savage proclaims: “If it’s to be liberation, then it must be liberation for all. One of pop culture’s great achievements is to free up heterosexuals from the macho paradigm, and Tony Manero is iconic proof of that.” But one could equally argue that the film’s total erasure of disco’s emergence from gay culture (not to mention its Black and Latin origins) is even more striking.
Not that gay artists needed help erasing themselves. Then, as now, gay artists were shy about appearing recognizably on album covers; even Bowie was often in disguise. And the Village People (a boy band hired to embody gay archetypes) literally danced last month at Donald Trump’s re-inauguration party, after announcing their gay anthem “Y.M.C.A.” was not a gay song at all, and that anyone who called it one would be sued.
One of the pleasures of “The Secret Public” is its description of who listened to what records — Orton and Warhol took in at least as much opera as pop. We also learn that Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder and the Supremes were among the artists on the Stonewall Inn jukebox at the time of the police raid that provoked the historic riots.
There’s an enjoyable CD and streamable Spotify playlist to accompany the book, too. “Y.M.C.A.” is nowhere to be found on either of them.
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