Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.
Meaning: A wop pop and a loo mop and boom bam lop. Looking at it from a certain angle you could say that a pop story is a queer story. Or at least that queerness – in its broadest sense – is a fundamental block in that story. If rock and roll was a rift in American culture, then sexuality – in all its forms – is one of the faults that tore through it.
“Johnny Ray, Elvis and Little Richard; they all give radical new definitions of masculinity,” suggests author and cultural commentator Jon Savage, “whether it’s in the wildness and wildness and open republicanism of Little Richard; or is it the naked emotion of Johnny Ray that stirred up many comments at the time and was taken from his love for black American R&B; or do you have the aggressive, turbulent initial sexuality of Elvis.
“Elvis was not gay of course, but he offered a very different new masculinity to the extent that he was called a female stripper in contemporary reports. This is something very new.
This is what the new generation wants. They don’t want John Wayne.”
Savage’s new book, The Secret Public, is subtitled How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Popular Culture (1955-1979). It takes readers from the birth of rock and roll through the 1960s and the importance of gay managers – Larry Parnes, Robert Stigwood and, of course, Brian Epstein – in the pop story and on to the 1970s when David Bowie announced he was coming out. and disco went from being a queer, black subculture to the mainstream.
It’s an incredibly broad, deeply researched cultural history that attempts, he says, to “tell the story of pop music through an LGBT filter,” though the end result is far more ambitious than that.
It catalogs the struggles faced by lesbian and gay performers in a culture that was at best hostile and at worst violently aggressive towards them. Again and again, in The Secret Public Savage he reveals a pattern that sees the work of queer musicians either condemned or co-opted. It started early when Pat Boone recorded covers of Little Richard’s original songs. “Very bad,” Savage notes. “He’s hysterical, he can’t even get the words out. But nobody ever talks about Pat Boone now. They still talk about Little Richard because he’s amazing.”
Throughout the 1960s gay sexuality remained under wraps. Brian Epstein managed the biggest band in the world while constantly hiding his own sexuality.
“Brian was a genius because he saw that the Beatles would be as big as they were,” Savage suggests. “Early in ’62 he said the Beatles would be bigger than Elvis and everyone said he must be crazy, what is he talking about? But he was right.
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“And Brian died – I’m sure it was an accident – a month after male homosexuality was partially decriminalized in this country.
“I did an event the other night with Tom Robinson and we started talking about gay mental health. If the emotional and physical expression of your sexuality is illegal, that’s not going to help. Brian is in a way a very tragic story because he had this incredible achievement, this incredible grace really, and he couldn’t find emotional and sexual stability.”
Yet five years after Epstein’s death David Bowie was telling The Melody Maker “I am gay and always have been.” Bowie’s career didn’t end. If anything, it helped get it started.
Bowie’s admission – whether it was true or not (he would later say otherwise) – was an example of how quickly things were turning in the 1960s and 1970s and how pop was a vehicle for cultural transformation.
“I think he was obviously mischievous and calculating,” Savage said of Bowie, “but he was also brave.
“Now, the question of who he had sex with or who he didn’t is disputed. It appears that he was essentially heterosexual, but occasionally had sex with men. He decided to be honest about it. I think he saw that the early seventies was a good time for this.
“He wasn’t a career killer and that really made the difference and then by 73 he would become the biggest pop star in the UK and a cultural leader.”
In fact, Bowie wasn’t the first pop star to come out. Dusty Springfield did it in front of him in an interview with Ray Connolly in 1971. But it didn’t have the same effect. And well into the 1980s big stars hesitated to reveal their sexuality for fear of ending their careers.
Although Tom Robinson was the most prominent gay pop star in the late 1970s, it was disco rather than punk that offered a playground for queer artists and audiences.
Savage himself was a punk in the late 1970s but hearing I Feel Love was transformative, he admits. Suddenly punk didn’t sound like the future anymore. “It was just four men in leather jackets going, ‘one, two, three, four.'”
Disco emerged in America’s gay clubs, but soon went underground. “The Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever give the disco a boost. It’s like the Beatles in ’64, a huge thing in American pop culture,” Savage explains.
“What happens with disco is that Saturday Night Fever de-gays it – although there are gay touches in the film; you can’t completely erase disco’s gay roots. But it makes it white and suburban and disco becomes this huge mainstream phenomenon.”
That in turn sparked a backlash from conservative rock fans, leading to the famous Comiskey Park riot in Chicago in 1979 which saw the burning of disco records.
“It encouraged the music industry to think disco was dead and so after Chic’s incredible Good Times there was no mainstream disco in the US,” argues Savage.
Savage ends his 1979 book with a celebration of the late, great Sylvester.
“It starts with an incredibly charismatic black American performer and it ends with an incredibly charismatic black American performer, so it just made sense,” Savage said.
And if he’s honest, he admits, he couldn’t face dealing with the subject of Aids. “It’s too crude.”
The story of queer pop did not end in 1979, of course. Indeed, in some ways it would reach a peak in the early 1980s, as Ian Wade points out in his new book 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer.
1984 was the year that Holly Johnston, singer with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive would become pop stars, the year that the Queen would dress up in drag and the year that Bronski Beat announcing their arrival. Meanwhile disco would return again with a high energy birth.
“It looked like gay culture was hovering above pop music,” Wade suggests when I talk to him. “Pop music was a Trojan horse for a lot of these people to get through.”
That said, many of the same tensions and threats that had been present from the 1950s were still alive in the culture. Queen’s appearance in drag in the video I Want To Break Free derailed their success in the US, while the biggest star of the year, George Michael of Wham! feel comfortable coming out. He wasn’t the only one. You could say the same about Morrissey and Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys, although in both cases there were plenty of signs if you wanted to find them, Wade points out.
Perhaps it is not surprising, however, when the tabloid culture of the time was actively harassing gay men under the shadow of the threat of Aids.
Which makes the outspoken Bronski Beat at the time all the more brave. Their breakthrough single Smalltown Boy offered a story many young gay men and women could relate to, Wades suggests.
“Bronski Beat looked like your next-door neighbours,” he adds. “I think gay artists up to that point had used androgyny or make-up. Bronski Beat seemed like your brother or uncle. And that was quite political. ”
Wade believes that 1984 opened a door that allowed pop stars to be more open about their sexuality in the years and decades that followed.
“There were still situations where boy bands in the late nineties said, ‘Oh, I still haven’t met the right girl yet.’ “But that was really annoyed by Will Young with the Pop Idol thing where he said, ‘I’m being blackmailed, but maybe you know I’m gay too.’ And that took the power out of him.”
Then in 1998 George Michael, after being arrested for squatting in a public toilet in Los Angeles, terrorized the situation in his video for his song Outside. “It kind of normalized it,” Wade said.
That said, there is still pushback today. Just ask Sam Smith, who was attacked when they came out as non-binary in 2019.
“The more confirmation and visibility there is for LGTB people the more, I’m afraid, the likelihood of a backlash,” said Savage. “And a lot of it is pure bullying. But it is also an index of success.”
Wade adds: “With someone like Sam, they don’t give *** up, which is great. I think they embraced themselves in the last few years. It amazes me, the palaver about their Grammy performance. Annie Lennox dressed up as a man 40 years ago upset Grammy viewers. Good grief, are clothes upsetting?”
Whether it is or not, clothes – like queerness – are part of the pop story. It would be much less interesting without either.
The Secret Public, by Jon Savage, published by Faber, £25, is out now. 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, by Ian Wade, is published by Nine Eight Books on July 18, £16.99
(Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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