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

Jon Savage, the author of the canonical England's Dreaming, explodes new ground in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 through 1979. In demonstrating that gay and lesbian artists were responsible for many of the greatest cultural breakthroughs in the last half of the twentieth century, he shows that it was their secretly encoded music-appealing to a closeted but greatly oppressed public-which led to the historic dismantling of discriminatory gay laws and the fusion of queer and straight culture.Fittingly, Savage’s kaleidoscopic work begins with the pomp-and-pompadour appearance of Little Richard, whose relentlessly driving sound, replete with gospel shrieks and sexual contortions, enthralled a generation of 1950s stultified white teenagers. Things soon went mainstream, as Elvis enthralled a nation with his seductive low moans and bump-and-grind twists, heavily derivative of Black music, while James Dean and Rock Hudson became the face of 1950s Hollywood; yet this explosion