\"The Secret Public\" — A Book by Jon Savage on How LGBT Artists Shaped Pop Culture
Jon Savage's study of LGBT influence on pop music and pop culture from 1955 to 1979.
In June 2025, British publisher Faber & Faber released The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream by British music critic and cultural historian Jon Savage. In June 2026, a Spanish translation appeared under the title El Público Secreto, published by Liburuak. The book was written in English.
Savage examines how LGBT artists, musicians, and visual artists shaped mass culture between 1955 and 1979. At the heart of the book is the idea of a “secret public” — an audience that could recognize hidden signals and codes in music, fashion, and visual art, signals that the surrounding culture overlooked or rejected. These codes carried the experience and identities of people whose lives remained invisible or prohibited in public life.
The book spans from early rock and roll through glam rock and disco. Key figures include Little Richard, David Bowie, Sylvester, and other artists whose work combined alienation with new forms of self-expression. Savage shows how marginalized communities gradually moved from invisibility toward the center of cultural change.
Jon Savage is a British music journalist and cultural historian. He is widely known for England’s Dreaming (1991), which became one of the defining accounts of punk rock and the Sex Pistols. In The Secret Public, he continues to explore the connection between youth, music, sexuality, and social transformation.
