GLR March-April 2026

of understandable pain shifts. Herman, in the laundry room, awkwardly chatters to the man from upstairs, who’s in and out retrieving laundry. When the neighbor is gone, Herman kneels before the still-warm dryer, sticks his head and shoulders in side, and breathes, a gesture that seems at once comfort-seeking, fetishistic, and suicidal. Head inside the drum, he continues reciting a list of things he loves about Stella, a litany that we re alize is as well-practiced as a prayer. Herman thinks of loneli ness and “love bottled up.” His performance is so oddly rote that we stop believing in the previous Herman. The man kneel ing half inside the dryer isn’t mourning but enacting his form of conversion therapy. In “The Lady in the Moon,” Mason fumes silently during a family road trip. He’s agreed to share Grandma’s bed in the same hotel room as his parents, while his straight married

brother gets a private room with his wife. On the phone, Mason’s boyfriend asks why he goes along with it. He says he doesn’t know, but thinks: “It takes too much to explain to some one in your world about another world that you also live in. Sometimes it’s just easier to go along.” In Daddy Issues , Wat creates characters with recalcitrant problems that people struggle with for years. As we read about these individuals, red flags go up. It’s no wonder the characters in these realistic stories don’t find solutions. At the end of “This Business of Death,” Walter contemplates coming out to his young son, who seems ready to understand. We think Walter might come out before the story’s end, but he doesn’t get there, only closer. We register his incremental progress, movement in the right direction, but Wat leaves a breakthrough outside the narrative, in the future, just a hope.

The Music Set Us Free

I N THE WORDS of queer musicolo gist Philip Brett, “all musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.” Author Jon Savage seeks to demonstrate this point across almost 800 pages of The Secret Public , tracing the connection be tween music and queerness from the 1950s to about 1980, but he also goes well be yond. Pop, he argues, “had the ability to liberate everyone: not just gay men, les

Savage then moves on to the crooner Johnnie Ray, who identified with Black fe male singers, cried theatrically on stage, and unashamedly wore a hearing aid. In short, he showed himself to be vulnerable. Entrapped by the police, Ray was outed by the decidedly non-confidential Confidential magazine. Savage looks next at Dusty Springfield’s popularity among gay men, fueled by speculations about her lesbian ism, an atypical confluence of gay and les

N IKOLAI E NDRES

THE SECRET PUBLIC How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage Liveright. 784 pages, $35.

bians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn’t accept the standard definitions offered, indeed im posed, by the dominant culture.” Savage begins with Little Richard and his heavy makeup, flamboyant dress, sequined sunglasses, and outrageous hairdo. Although he was openly gay in 1950s America, Richard had to sanitize the original lyrics of “Tutti Frutti,” which went: “Tutti Frutti, good booty/ If it don’t fit, don’t force it/ You can grease it, make it easy.” But (hetero)sexual subtext remains in these lines: “She knows how to love me/ Yes indeed/ Boy you don’t know what she do to me,” while the word “fruit” would have been common parlance for gay men at the time. The book moves on to Richard’s contemporary Andy Warhol, who’s more famous for his visual art but is also associated with music: He designed album covers and assembled an LP collec tion with a definite bias toward “young, attractive, solo male singers—no women at all.” Later, Warhol would manage the Vel vet Underground and make them the house band at The Factory. What were gay men listening to in the early 1960s, Savage won ders? We know that show tunes, opera, and drag shows were pop ular, but little is recorded about queer preferences in contemporary pop, which was soon complemented by girl groups, soul, and the Twist, a favorite dance in gay circles because it could be done solo (men were forbidden to dance together). Nikolai Endres, professor of world literature at Western Kentucky U., is the author of Patricia Nell Warren: A Front Runner’s Life and Works . 36

bian worlds that were quite separate at that time. More follows on Janis Joplin, who admired many of the bisexual singers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Secret Public also focuses on the men behind the music. John Leyton’s “Johnny Remember Me” was turned into a gothic queer anthem by his manager Robert Stigwood and producer Joe Meek, both of whom were gay, just as Billy Fury and Tommy Steele worked with gay songwriter Lionel Bart and gay manager Larry Parnes. And of course there was the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, an iconoclast for his promotion of a group when solo artists were in vogue. Epstein also asked gay playwright Joe Orton to write the script for a new Beatles movie, but it fell through. As Paul McCartney remembered: “We didn’t do it because it was gay. We weren’t gay and that was really all there was to it. Brian was gay … and so he and the gay crowd could appreciate it. Now, it wasn’t that we were anti gay—just that we, The Beatles, weren’t gay.” Savage describes how Epstein was blackmailed for $10,000 by a toxic former lover, John “Dizz” Gillespie, who stole a brief case with pills, love letters, and gay Polaroids. Epstein turned Gillespie in to the police, but the situation aggravated his de pression and ultimately ruined his career. The book shows that there was a lot of queer networking in the music scene, though no major star came out in Britain during the 1960s (not even after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalized homosexu ality, which is described in the gripping chapter “Legalisation”). The book contains poignant moments, such as its sections on

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