The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream

Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond still stands as a definitive work on punk history, and his latest is an equally crucial work on the impact of queer performers, managers, producers, and artists on pop culture from the 1950s to the 1970s. Savage focuses on five central moments and their preceding and succeeding events in the States and UK, in a 23-year sweep that encompasses Little Richard, James Dean, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and the rise and fall of disco. (As he concedes in the introduction, with the overall bias of public attention toward men, the representation of queer women and transgender people in the text is lighter, although Dusty Springfield and Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis are featured.) While music is the central topic, Savage also weaves in boundary-pushing movements in fashion, film, and the arts and sets them alongside threads of everyday LGBTQIA+ existence and resistance, showing how cross-pollination among them all provided critical influence for changing attitudes in multiple directions.