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‘T he dancing was of the usual superlative quality. Them queers sure can break a leg.” So went a report from a dance organised by the Gay Liberation Front in New York in 1970, quoted in Jon Savage’s new book.

With kaleidoscopic detail and exhilarating verve, he tells the intertwined, transatlantic story of pop and the struggle for LGBTQ+ emancipation. The narrative stretches from 1955 and the emergence of Little Richard – the rock’n’roll pioneer who from boyhood was known as “a sissy, punk, freak and faggot” – to the ascent of the gender-blurring disco star Sylvester in 1978, whose anthem You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) Savage aptly describes as “a major gay liberation statement”. Savage is a former music journalist for Sounds who wrote England’s Dreaming , a history of punk published in 1991 that is still unsurpassed, and several other weighty cultural histories, including 2007’s Teenage: The Creation of Youth about the emergence of the teenager as a social and cultural category.



The Secret Public, however, reads like the book he was born to write – it even takes its title from a fanzine he made in his punk youth with the mononymous collagist Linder, and speaks to the taboo around homosexuality which the bravest pop stars did their best to dispel. In the turbulent 24 years the book covers – during which pop music passed through a scarcely believable transformation from raw rock’n’roll, through soul, psychedelia, glam and punk, to futurist ele.

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