How pop music introduced queer culture to the mainstream

In the decades before Stonewall, when the global LGBTQ+ community was persecuted and criminalised, Little Richard became pop music’s first superstar and the architect of rock & roll. His larger than life persona was as flamboyant as his pompadour and fancy footwork, his band stacked with future legends including Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. 

“Little Richard was going to be fabulous, and that was it. He was on his own planet and, in a way, too much for everybody to deal with. Authorities didn’t know what was going on for a long time,” says music journalist Jon Savage, who has released The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream (Liveright), a 700-page masterclass in cultural reportage. 

Savage weaves a complexly layered tapestry of public and private lives, inextricably intertwined in poetry, persona, performance, and fame, tracing the evolution of queer aesthetics as artists like Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, and Village People upended stale cis-het norms with wit, glamour, and fearless aplomb. 

• Read next: Revisiting Casa Susanna, the legendary Trans refuge in pre-Stonewall America

“The music industry was new, so you could get the mavericks and outcasts who couldn’t make it in established society,” Savage says. ​“Even in Hollywood you had to behave yourself, and the music industry was like the Wild West in comparison, and the people who were sharing it up were the minority: Black Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and independent women.” 

Organised across five seminal dates in music history – November 1955, September 1961, June 1967, January 1973, and January 1978 – The Secret Public charts queer history as pop music exploded on the world stage, each incarnation even more intoxicating than the last. In record time, rock & roll gave way to soul, psychedelia, glam, punk, and disco – the very soundtrack of Black queer liberation. 

The book culminates in the rise of Sylvester, ​“the first openly gay superstar” who rose to fame as a member of The Cockettes, the legendary ​’70s San Francisco avant-garde performance group. ​“Beginning and ending the book with Little Richard and Sylvester was deliberate,” Savage says. ​“I wanted to end the book on an up, and the ​’80s is just too sad.”

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The Secret Public was a lifetime in the making, taking its title from a Buzzcocks fanzine Savage made with collagist Linder in their youth. But the book’s motivations go much deeper. ​“It’s my revenge. It’s totally like, fuck you. Fuck all of you,” says Savage. ​“It’s a very angry book because of all the stuff I went through and saw when I was younger. I knew elderly men born in the ​’20s and ​’30s, before it was legalised, and they were all really damaged by this.”

Savage dug into that anger and used it to create, to make visible what had been hiding in plain sight all those years the code of silence tried to erase queer identity in public spaces. ​“It’s good for self-affirmation,” he says. ​“I was always out, and I didn’t get any support when I was younger. I had to find my own way to all of this. I think of the people who still suffer. Creeping authoritarianism. Leave the LGBTQ+ people alone.” 

The Secret Place: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage is published by Penguin.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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