Homosexuality has been a part of post-war pop since its very inception in the 1950s. Until the early 1970s, however, it wasn’t talked about openly in that world: it was coded, hidden, secret. This paralleled the status of homosexual men and lesbians in the wider societies of England and America – then the epicentres of mainstream pop – where, during the 1950s and ’60s, they were outcasts, harassed by the police, demonised by the media and politicians, imprisoned simply for being who they were.

This book is called The Secret Public because for so long the topic of homosexuality and the realities of homosexual life remained secrets, albeit open ones.* The title also makes the point that gay men and lesbians were the public, a part of societies that, for a long time, desired to erase their existence. It also recognises that, in the early 1970s, what had once been secret became public knowledge, which was ultimately liberating for all.

This change from secret to public began after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK in 1967 and the liberation politics that followed the Stonewall riots of late June 1969. It was the structural change of the former and the utopian energy of the latter that prompted an ambitious pop singer called David Bowie to be honest about the whole topic, declaring in the now famous interview with Melody Maker on 22 January 1972 that ‘I’m gay, and always have been.’ In turn, his success and obvious influence upon a generation of British teens gave extra confidence to the still embryonic British gay media and subculture.

Bowie thus stands at the pivot point of this book. It begins in late 1955, with the extraordinary success of Little Richard, the outing of Johnnie Ray and the ambiguous superstars James Dean and Elvis Presley; continues through early-1960s pop and pop art; and then moves on to Bowie and the omnipresence of that gay-derived style, disco, in the late 1970s. It ends with the success of the first openly gay superstar, Sylvester, whose cosmic genderfuck was paralleled by his ties to America’s foremost gay community, the Castro in San Francisco.

With Bowie, what had once been implicit became explicit.

With The Secret Public, I am not attempting a definitive survey of gay culture in pop music; rather, I aim to focus on its influence as demonstrated through five particular moments in history, the themes that arise during those periods and the events that led up to them. For those wanting a first-class survey of who was or wasn’t LGBTQ during this period in popular music and beyond, I would recommend Martin Aston’s Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache, which has a comprehensive list of gay male and lesbian performers and is the standard work on the subject.

There are a couple of caveats I should start with. It is not my purpose to out anyone, so I have not included performers who are still alive and who wish, as is their prerogative, to be non-specific about their sexuality. I have also taken care to be sympathetic towards people’s declared orientation and the human ambiguity that surrounds the topic; indeed, the history of performance and pop culture throughout the centuries shows a spectrum of gender and sexuality that seems to both reflect and shape the human condition. Sharp readers will also note the preponderance of male homosexuals, as opposed to lesbians and trans people. To today’s eyes, the attitudes towards gender and sexuality during the period covered in this book seem extremely archaic, and this was reflected in the pop charts and the pop media, which were overwhelmingly male-biased. In accordance with the gay politics of the time, women were under-represented and rarely had the same latitude to experiment given to men. Openly lesbian pop stars were thin on the ground.

The explosion of diversity in pop music and pop writing over the last twenty to thirty years is extremely welcome. When I started writing about pop music professionally in early 1977, the climate was still overwhelmingly male. Despite the fact that punk seemed to offer the possibility of new gender roles – the assertiveness of female performers like Siouxsie, Poly Styrene, Pauline Murray and the Slits; the non-macho stance of Buzzcocks and the Subway Sect – homosexuality in general was rarely discussed.

While working at Sounds, I was very friendly with another writer, Jane Suck. We were both same-sex attracted, but we never talked about it, ever. When I went to San Francisco in early autumn 1978, I interviewed the pioneering synth punk group the Screamers, two of whose three members were gay. We talked about technology and the souring of punk rock, but about our mutual homosexuality, not a word. The music industry, apart from the brave stance of Tom Robinson, was still very closeted and averse to addressing the topic. I wish we had all been more open then, but that wasn’t the time, for me at least.

This wall of silence began to crack in the early 1980s, when I met the gay writers Peter Burton and Kris Kirk. This was also the moment when pop began to encompass a new androgyny, with stars like Boy George, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, Marc Almond and Phil Oakey. I wrote about this new trend in the June 1983 issue of The Face, in which I tried to articulate my thoughts about what I saw and felt was the play of pop music, both at that time and throughout the 1960s and ’70s:

This was an attempt to articulate my own experience of pop music, one that is shared by many: namely, that it is a performance, an arena of play, alternatives, visions of the future. In my case, I was shaped as an early teen by the severe androgyny of the 1960s beat groups – the long hair and foppish dress of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Byrds – which was so different from the images of masculinity I saw elsewhere in the culture, the short back and sides in particular.

Apart from being both exciting and reassuring, these images and feelings helped me to begin to come to terms – at least – with my own sexuality, which I had settled on at the age of thirteen. Throughout my teenage years, there was almost nothing positive in my family or the wider culture about the topic; just sneers, prejudice, bigotry. This was why David Bowie had such an impact. He was a total contrast: open, glamorous, playful, sexy, successful and a cultural leader.

The disparity between what came up through pop culture and what was propagated by the mass media remained throughout the timeline of this book. In the late 1970s, the images in mainstream culture were hostile or insultingly caricatured: the extreme camp of Larry Grayson and John Inman; the disastrously closeted Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe. In contrast, Patti Smith – as captured by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her first album, Horses – Siouxsie, Buzzcocks and the like seemed beamed in from an ideal future.

As I engaged with performers, fans and other writers during the early 1980s and beyond, I realised that the topic was wider than just homosexuality. That might have been the key that unlocked the door, but the real play of pop was that it had the ability to liberate everyone: not just gay men, lesbians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn’t accept the standard definitions offered, indeed imposed, by the dominant culture. It wasn’t just about freedom for gay people; it was about freedom for all.

The stories in this book are dispatches from a different world, one that is revealed most noticeably in some of the language, which reflects the prevailing pejorative attitudes of the time. There are recurring themes – of demonisation, othering and prejudice – that, after years of progress, are unfortunately returning. The people depicted in this book displayed courage in insisting on being who they were, and by doing so they helped to bring about an easier future for LGBTQ people. It’s an inspiring story, but a cautionary one, as these battles will have to be fought all over again.