The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture to the Mainstream by Jon Savage
Her Neighbor's Wife: Lesbian Desire Within Marriage by Lauren Jae Gutterman
Voting ended onMay 16
Book summaries below:
The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage
The legendary author of England’s Dreaming presents a monumental history of the queer influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.
In his kaleidoscopic new book, Jon Savage, the legendary author of England’s Dreaming, shows how music has been the key medium through which homosexuality was expressed for the last century. Depicting nothing less than the birth of rock and roll, the narrative begins in the mid-1950s with Little Richard, whose music possessed secret codes of the gay underworld and whose magnetism attracted millions of white teenagers. As Savage engagingly proceeds through the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with evocations of, among others, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Donna Summer, Sylvester, and the disco-era Bee Gees, he demonstrates that it was mostly music—with supporting roles from cinema, literature, and fashion—that broke the dam that led to the widespread acceptance of LGBTQ culture today. The Secret Public, with its “pancake and pompadour” descriptions of a generation in revolt, provides an electrifying look at the key moments in music and entertainment that changed pop culture forever.
Nonfiction, history, music, pop culture
Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage by Lauren Jae Gutterman
At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade.
Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.
"He was a fan, I really have to say. There was this young Liverpool person calling me with a posh accent really. He said, "I'm from Liverpool," and he worked in the record section of his father's family department store. He was up on what was going down in the charts, and in those days it was me a lot. I'd just had an immense hit with Cliff Richard doing my song "Living Doll", and it had broken all the records in his little shop there.
So he said he'd love to come down and meet me. We corresponded for a year or two, until eventually he did appear, and he looked the same then as he always did - immaculate. The suit, the very highly polished shoes, the tie, the cufflinks - terribly correct, more British than I think he needed to be. But he kept this thing up, and it wasn't an image. That was what he presented to the world. He blushed easily. He couldn't take compliments."
Lionel Bart on meeting Brian Epstein, The Secret Public by Jon Savage
“‘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.”
This excerpt from Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile was quoted in the book I’m reading (The Secret Public by Jon Savage) and it just reminded me so much of Jimmy. If I knew how I would make the saddest little edit of him with this quote 😔✌️
The 101'ers' Elgin residency 50th commemoration continues. The 101'ers' residency in the Elgin at 96 Ladbroke Grove put them and Notting Hill on the pub rock map. Over the course of 30 gigs in the back bar of the Elgin between May ’75 and January ’76, the 101’ers transformed from a Van Morrison-style urban rhythm’n’ blues orchestra into a more streamlined rock’n’roll outfit. This change in musical direction brought them in step with the ensuing pub rock boom led by Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads, Dr Feelgood and Eddie and the Hot Rods. Joe Strummer’s first original number, the single ‘Keys to Your Heart’, and ‘Junco Partner’ and ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ date back to the Elgin era. As ‘the 101’ers’ r’n’b rave on every Monday night at the Elgin’, the audience included the other future Clash members and the local Sex Pistols, Steve Jones and Paul Cook.
The Chippenham and Elgin pub rock scene was trailblazed by the proto-punk group the Derelicts, the 101’ers’ Latimer Road ‘squat rock’ rivals, described as ‘Trotskyite r’n’b’ in an Ian Penman NME review quoting the 101’ers’ singer. This legendary North Kensington group – consisting of John Studholme, Sue and Barbara Gogan, Dan Kelleher and Richard Williams – merged with the 101’ers and split into the Atoms with Keith Allen, the Martian Schoolgirls, prag VEC, and the Passions of ‘I’m in Love with a German Film Star’ fame. As the Elgin became part of the pub rock circuit, there were also gigs by Maggie Bell, McSmith with Alex Harvey, and comedy turns by Alexei Sayle, Keith and Tony Allen.
As the 101’ers became the main contenders to Dr Feelgood’s pub rock bar stool, they went on the road in an old hearse to play the Windsor and Stonehenge free festivals, various benefit gigs and student unions. They headlined the first gig at Acklam Hall under the Westway – a benefit for the North Kensington Law Centre on Golborne Road, promoted by the 101’ers and Sex Pistols tour manager John Tiberi, an Elgin Avenue squatters benefit at the Chippenham Factory in Chippenham Mews, the Harrow Road Windsor Castle, and the Queen Elizabeth College on Campden Hill Road. Dr Feelgood also played at Acklam Hall when it first opened.
After the Delinquents played at the Campden Hill college, Mick Jones formed an alliance with the Hollywood Brats, London’s existing answer to the New York Dolls, following a meeting with the guitarist Brady in Portobello market. British punk rock began on Portobello Road in 1975, when this Delinquents/Hollywood Brats practise group chose London SS as their working title. According to one explanation by Brady, the name was meant as a word play on life in London on Social Security, but it was a more successful attempt to out-outrage the New York Dolls with camp Nazi shock-horror tactics; influenced by the Dirk Bogarde films of the time, The Damned and The Night Porter, rather than the NF. Original punk rock accessories were purchased at the notorious military ephemera stall in the antiques market, to scare the squares in the heavy rock tradition of Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Mick Farren and Lemmy.
At the time of the New York punk scene, London’s equivalent to the Bowery Zone was Maida Vale. As the London SS practised at the Warrington Crescent flat of Matt Dangerfield (later of the Boys), they were taken under the wing of Bernie Rhodes, an associate of the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren. The group also included, at one time or another, Tony James (who went on to Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik), Brian James (later of the Damned and Lords of the New Church), Geir Waade, Kelvin Blacklock, Casino Steel and Andrew Matheson of the Hollywood Brats, Barry Jones and Steve Dior.
The first punk rock site in North Kensington is 93 Golborne Road, where from the early 70s the legendary Rock On record stall of Thin Lizzy’s manager Ted Carroll boasted a ‘huge and rocking selection’ of rare imported rock’n’roll, rhythm’n’blues, rockabilly, 60s beat, northern soul, US punk rock and garage. Phil Lynott pays tribute to him in ‘The Rocker’ with: ‘I got my records from the Rock On stall, sweet rock’n’roll Teddy boy, he’s got it all.’ Jon Savage cites Rock On as second only in punk rock importance to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Let It Rock/Sex/Seditionaries shop on King’s Road: ‘Going there was in its self an act of faith. Golborne Road was at the wrong end of Portobello Road, 10 years before urban regeneration.’
And it’s not for one person to say that they’re heterosexual or homosexual or a bisexual, because none of those things are real, none of those things have anything except media and cheapness. ‘Cause people are just sexual and people feel things that no-one can say are any one of those things, because they’re not. No-one is any of these things because everyone is all of those things. It’s all just a media creation. —David Johansen, interview with Ted Castle used in the press release for the New York Dolls album, excerpted in Gay News, issue 31, 6-19 September 1973
from The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024)
