Looking back on the popular music of the 1950s to the 1970s, it’s almost unbelievable how performers from Liberace to the Village People were embraced by clueless (and often homophobic) heterosexual audiences. Didn’t the rhinestones and leather chaps set off any alarm bells? Then again, with Donald Trump dancing at a pre-inauguration party with the Village People to “Y.M.C.A.,” audiences in 2025 are no less baffled. You can’t tell the closet cases from the flaming queens without some expert guidance.
Help, luckily, is at hand. In The Secret Public, music journalist Jon Savage gives readers a nearly comprehensive history of popular music and gay culture in the U.S. and the U.K. in the years between the rise of rock ’n’ roll and the death of disco—including the (very gay) origins of Trump’s new anthem.
Savage, the author of several books on bands such as the Sex Pistols and Joy Division, is the ideal person to tell this story: he himself was once a young, queer fan. In 1977, just out of college, he co-authored a zine, also titled The Secret Public, dedicated to the Buzzcocks. The band’s front man, Pete Shelley, pioneered a form of campy, ironic, and often tender pop punk with lyrics about the pains of love and lust (“Orgasm Addict”) before, in 1981, outing himself with the album Homosapien.
Less morose and coy than, say, Morrissey, Shelley is one of the prime examples for Savage’s argument that the 1970s witnessed a major shift in popular culture, opening new possibilities for queer artists. Savage’s experience as a young zine-maker also equips him to pay attention to how queer fans were just as important as the artists themselves in changing social norms.
The story Savage tells is a rich and fascinating one, shedding new light on familiar icons and bringing forgotten ones out of the past. At nearly 800 pages, it’s also a bit of a doorstopper. The narrative regularly trails off from the history of popular music into digressions on Hollywood, visual art, politics, and other topics. These sidelines are informative and entertaining but make the book perhaps twice as long as it might have been otherwise (and often merely repeat material better covered elsewhere).
Savage also stretches credulity by making David Bowie’s 1972 declaration “I’m gay and always have been” the central moment in popular music’s shift from coded to open messages about homosexuality. Bowie, after all, was not gay, and he seems to have used queerness much as he used Nazi imagery later in the decade: as a way to shock audiences and try on new personas.
The story Savage tells is a rich and fascinating one, shedding new light on familiar icons and bringing forgotten ones out of the past.
Creating the template for postmodern stardom, Bowie inspired later pop artists like Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have similarly flirted with queer image-making (respectively, lipstick lesbianism and an embarrassing stint as a drag king). Bowie’s greatest contribution to actual gay culture, however, was to inspire Todd Haynes’s 1998 film, Velvet Goldmine, a sharp critique of the sort of cynical and, as the title suggests, lucrative image manipulations that Savage, at times, mistakes for authenticity and progress.
If The Secret Public makes a dubious case for Bowie as the pivotal figure in popular music’s opening up to gay sexuality, its claim that Sylvester was “the first openly gay superstar” is more convincing. The gender-bending performer rose to prominence in the early 1970s with the San Francisco avant-garde drag group the Cockettes. Later in the decade, during the brief heyday of disco, he became an international star while always keeping the Castro’s denizens as his core audience. Struggling in the 1980s to re-invent himself after the disco fad ended, he was on the cusp of a comeback (with help from Joan Rivers, who chatted with him about his boyfriend on her talk show) just before his death, from AIDS, in 1988.
Sylvester often lacked the resources and collaborators he needed to make excellent music. But the best of his work, from his fusions of gospel and disco backed up by the future Pointer Sisters and the Weather Girls to the computerized dance music produced by Patrick Cowley, remains central to the canon of gay-male culture. Like Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel, Dancer from the Dance, Sylvester’s biggest hit, the 1978 song “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” expresses the exuberance of urban gay life, centered on dancing and sex, in the years before AIDS.
What Sylvester and other artists might have achieved if, like much of their audience, they had not perished in that catastrophe can only be guessed. Any celebration of gay music is tragically shadowed by an awareness of all the songs that were never written, never sung, never danced to. But the legacy of performers like Sylvester continues to inspire new generations of queer artists and audiences, and The Secret Public is an invaluable guide to anyone wanting to understand how it all got started.
Blake Smith is a writer and translator who lives in Chicago
