The Secret Public Quotes

“During the Second World War, conscription had brought together gay men and lesbians from all over America. Many had found freedom away from their home environments and, realising that there were many others like them, togetherness in these new possibilities for association. The carpe diem atmosphere of wartime also loosened sexual constraints. This in turn fostered the basic building blocks of the post-war gay world: sympathetic venues, insider code language – the Second World War saw the term ‘gay’ begin to replace ‘homosexual’ – and ideas of equality and freedom”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“An inquisitorial momentum developed into a full-blown attack on anyone who was seen to be un-American: first of all communists, then left-wingers, then homosexuals, who, with their perceived weakness, softness and feminine ways, were considered a threat to the ideal of martial masculinity – ‘lavender lads’, as the right-wing senator Everett Dirksen called them in 1952.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“In early September 1955, there was a purge in Sioux City, Iowa. ‘Crackdown on “Queers” Has Begun’ ran the headline in the local press. Using agents provocateurs – a process they called ‘fruit picking’ – and applying heavy pressure on the gay community to name other homosexuals, the local police netted twenty-two men in a concerted operation. This sweep was triggered by the unsolved murders of two young children in the area in 1954 and 1955. None of those arrested had anything to do with the murders, but the local authorities’ inability to solve the case made them useful scapegoats. In a series of trials throughout the month, the twenty-two men were deemed ‘criminal sexual psychopaths’ and committed to the Mount Pleasant State Mental Hospital.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“This was parodied in the period’s pioneering gay activist, or homophile, publication, ONE, which fearlessly proclaimed itself ‘The Homosexual Magazine’. In the May 1955 cover story, ‘The Margin of Masculinity’, James Douglas Margin evolved his ‘Theory of Masculine Deportment’, in detailed phrases that could have come straight out of Henry Willson’s remodelling of Rock Hudson. Setting the tale in a gay bar, the writer gave programmatic instructions to a fictional friend, Johnnie. In order to hide his homosexuality, Johnnie was advised ‘to avoid the limp wrist as you would the plague’, while cultivating a firm handshake and watching out for any tendency of the little fingers to wave about. Butchness could be achieved by learning how to strike a match and letting the cigarette dangle loosely from the mouth in ‘a brutally tough effect’. He was to watch his language: no gushing, and cut the fizzing superlatives. Most importantly, he was to learn the upright position of masculine males and at all costs to avoid the hands-on-hips position. The article was half serious, half a spoof on the degree to which homosexuals assumed the most extreme forms of masculinity, simultaneously as a method of concealment and a code of sexual attraction.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“. In the May 1955 cover story, ‘The Margin of Masculinity’, James Douglas Margin evolved his ‘Theory of Masculine Deportment’, in detailed phrases that could have come straight out of Henry Willson’s remodelling of Rock Hudson. Setting the tale in a gay bar, the writer gave programmatic instructions to a fictional friend, Johnnie. In order to hide his homosexuality, Johnnie was advised ‘to avoid the limp wrist as you would the plague’, while cultivating a firm handshake and watching out for any tendency of the little fingers to wave about.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“As Rodney Garland wrote in his 1953 novel, The Heart in Exile: ‘The invert’s whole life is spent hiding his real passion from the enemy. A double life becomes second nature to him; he learns the technique in his teens.’ This double life had to be rigidly patrolled at all times; the penalties for a mistake could be severe.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“The sexual and gender roles that these magazines were ruthlessly policing for men and women – in terms of homosexuality, their targets were mainly men – were constructed to be immutable, yet at the same they were fearful of change, seeing threats and nonconformists everywhere. Christine Jorgensen had observed ‘the many variations and combinations of masculinity and femininity . . . that exist side by side in the world’, but any understanding of this complex reality was way beyond most of Britain and America in the mid-1950s.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“This ‘masculine contempt’ was hysterical stuff, full of envy and spite, almost an incitement to violence, but it reflected the scandal magazines’ confidence and their explicit modus operandi: if you are in the public eye, you are fair game; step out of line and we’ll harass, caricature and intimidate you.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“In spring 1954, Time magazine called his phenomenal success ‘musical momism’ – an explicit reference to Philip Wylie’s best-selling book Generation of Vipers, which had bemoaned, inter alia, the adoration of the mother and the consequent emasculation of the American male.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“By the time he found fame with his syndicated television show in 1953, he had refined his act down to an art, involving his family, talking to the audience through the camera and embracing a dizzying array of costume changes and dramatic gestures.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“It was common for Hollywood actors to be physically remodelled. Even so, Willson’s regime sometimes involved permanent damage. Deciding that Hudson’s natural speaking voice was too high-pitched for his macho image, the agent hired a vocal coach to make the requisite change. Waiting until Hudson had a cold, the coach made him scream for hours until his vocal cords were permanently altered to produce a deeper – and hopefully more seductive – register.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“As Willson’s biographer Robert Hofler writes: ‘Rock got his wrists slapped when they went limp, his hips smacked whenever they swayed. Legs were never to be crossed or pressed together when he sat down . . . any trace of effeminacy was identified so it could be eradicated.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“Ray definitely wasn’t, and his lack of conventional masculinity was a matter of criminal record. He was haunted by the fear that his 1951 arrest would be made public. Realising in the intense scrutiny that followed his success that he was in danger of being exposed, he quickly married Marilyn Morrison, whom he had met in New York nightclub the Mocambo; she was the daughter of the owner. She knew of his attraction to men but had hopes of straightening him out, particularly as she was pregnant with his child at the time.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“However, becoming a teen idol carried a price. It was precisely his appeal to young women that had rendered Frank Sinatra’s masculinity suspect in 1943 and 1944. Classified 4F – unfit for military service because of an ear injury sustained at birth – Sinatra was constantly attacked by the press for not being in uniform and resented by serving GIs for attracting female attention at home. As it happened, Sinatra didn’t have any skeletons in his closet, or if he did, they weren’t career killers. He appealed to women, but he was all man.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“In the years following the war, it was clear that the atomic bomb and the more powerful hydrogen bomb had changed consciousness. If the world could be blown up in an instant, then the only sane thing to do was to live for the day, to live for pleasure and damn the future. Very few Americans lived that way in the early 1950s, but homosexuals and teenagers were two groups that did. Neither was fully invested in American society. Whether by choice or by forced exclusion, their interests would coincide more than anyone wished to admit at the time.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“Unlike Sinatra, however, his whole persona was unthreatening, androgynous – an archetype for almost every major post-war pop star to come.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“Beauty and love: men sang about these topics, but they were not encouraged to inhabit them to the extent that Ray did every time he stepped on stage. The comparisons to Frank Sinatra were apt: Ray’s fanbase was comprised almost entirely of young women, and they were attracted not to any machismo but to his vulnerability and intensity.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“– he realised that emotion was all-important. That was the gift; that was the key. ‘I just show people the emotion they’re afraid to show,’ he said in April 1952. ‘People are too crowded inside themselves these days. They’re afraid to show love. And boy, what is the primary existence for existing? It’s beauty and love.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“His performance is the anatomy of self-pity.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“In contrast to this hard-edged militarism, Johnnie Ray’s freakishness was accentuated. It wasn’t just his complete absence of emotional restraint, his use of make-up or his identification with Black American female performers; in the Life article, he is photographed wearing his hearing aid – not hiding his disability but making it an important part of his image.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“The political and social tenor was paranoid and vengeful. Riding a populist, nationalist wave, the senator for Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, instituted inquisitions to root out communists and homosexuals from public life.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“On 14 March 1952, Life magazine ran a story on ‘a tearful new singer’ who ‘leads his young followers to the brink of frenzy’. The accompanying photos showed Ray getting mauled and mobbed by a mass of young women. The text announced him as an era-defining performer for a new generation, a Sinatra for a more unbuttoned decade. ‘He pants, shivers, writhes, sighs, and above all, cries. He is America’s No. 1 public weeper.’ In early-1950s America, this was shocking. Real men did not cry.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“Tall, partially deaf and bisexual, Johnnie Ray was an unlikely teen idol, but during his spring tour of the UK, young female fans besieged his hotel and screamed their hearts out at a set list that included hits like his cover of the Drifters’ ‘Such a Night’ and standards like ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“In its April 1955 story about the new music – typified as rock ’n’ roll rather than R&B – Life magazine observed the growing controversy created by the adoption of this Black musical form by white teenagers: ‘In New Haven, Conn, the police chief has put a damper on rock ’n’ roll parties and other towns are following suit. Radio networks are worried over questionable lyrics in rock ’n’ roll. And some American parents, without quite knowing what it is their kids are up to, are worried that it’s something they shouldn’t be . . . But hardly a teen-ager afoot had time to listen.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“On 29 October 1955, Billboard – then the leading music industry magazine – included a release by the little-known Little Richard in its ‘Reviews of New R&B Records’. These were ranked in order: at the top came Piano Red’s jump boogie ‘Gordy’s Rock’, followed by the Cadillacs’ tricksy doo-wop song ‘Speedoo’; sixth down, ‘Tutti Frutti’ was awarded 76 points – ‘Good’ in Billboard terms, ‘a cleverly styled novelty with nonsense words delivered rapid-fire. The singer shows a compelling personality and an attractive vocal style.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“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.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“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.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“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.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream