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

A monumental history of the gay influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.

Award-winning author Jon Savage takes us on a fast and captivating journey through the history of pop music as seen through the eyes of queer artists.

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.