The Secret Public

January 6, 2025
From the first days of rock ’n’ roll to the last days of disco, pop culture was markedly influenced by gay themes and undertones in movies, music, and art, according to this exuberant history. Journalist Savage (England’s Dreaming) surveys American and British showbiz figures, from rocker Little Richard, who deleted the explicit anal sex lyrics from his 1955 hit “Tutti Frutti,” but got plenty of "fruity" subtext across anyway, to the late 1970s disco group Village People, whose overt hymns to gay bliss became standards at straight weddings. Among the other cultural phenomena that he revisits are Andy Warhol’s elevation of camp into high art, David Bowie’s androgynous style and his 1972 confession that he was gay, and the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever, which brought disco, a musical style incubated in gay dance clubs, to its peak popularity. (The movie and its star John Travolta fairly oozed a homoerotic vibe, Savage contends, while deflecting it with a few homophobic scenes.) Savage offers a rich analysis of the symbiosis of gay subculture and the dominant postwar youth culture, both yearning for more sexual freedom, and backgrounds his narrative with the story of the evolving gay rights movement (he depicts the 1979 “Disco Sucks” destruction of thousands of disco records in Chicago's Comiskey Park as partly fueled by antigay backlash). Perceptive and elegantly written, this captivates.