GLR March-April 2026

the deaths of Epstein, Orton, and Meek: “Murder, suicide, drug addictions, depres sions, overdoses, lives without moorings: this was grim stuff. … [They] were bound together, through their deaths, to a particular place and time: the moment when homo sexuality could slowly begin to emerge from the shadows—a freedom that they had, in their different ways, helped to foster and cre ate, but from which they would not benefit.” The music scene took a queerer turn in 1972, when David Bowie (married with a son) declared in an interview with Melody Maker : “I’m gay, and have always been.” Bowie, together with the dazzling Marc Bolan, lead singer and guitarist for T. Rex, represented “a new generation, one where boys could be more feminine and, at the same time, if that was what they wanted, re main attractive to girls.” What is less

atic of America’s dwindling power.” Sav age pertinently notes that the booming disco genre produced no gay stars (except for the caricature of the Village People, while the authentic Sylvester is mostly forgotten nowadays). Savage includes a lot of background. “The Homosexual in America,” for exam ple, covers well-trodden territory: the Kin sey Report, McCarthyism, Executive Order 10450, Donald Webster Cory, the Mattachine Society, ONE magazine, and Bob Mizer, while “Against the Law” sur veys the same period in the United King dom. There are discussions of James Dean, Christine Jorgensen, Harvey Milk, and Rock Hudson that seem extraneous. Some chapters bear little relation to music: Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners ; Modernist culture; teenage

Johnnie Ray as best man at Judy Garland's wedding in London, 1969. Allan Warren photo.

known is that Bowie’s admission might have been opportunis tic (and was later backpedaled), and that Bowie refused to be come a poster boy for gay liberation. There is little doubt, however, that it boosted his career. The book moves on to the Bee Gees and the film Saturday Night Fever (produced by Stigwood), which became hugely popular but also erased disco’s Black, Latin, and queer roots. The movie became a cult classic, because of or despite Tony Manero’s non-macho masculinity, but Savage rightly points out its homophobia. Here he also makes a connection between disco and a widely felt sense of American malaise in the late 1970s. In the words of historian Peter Shapiro: “With its mincing camp ness, airbrushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblem

fashion as shaped by American and Italian imports; the emerg ing market of gay æsthetics; the British movie Victim ; or the U.S. documentary The Rejected . There is also overstatement: “In America as in England, music was the key medium through which homosexuality was discussed—and even enacted—in the wider culture.” What about literature, theater, musical theater (which gets remarkably short shrift), the physique magazines, and the first stirrings of pornography? In the UK, the book has a different subtitle, “How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture 1955–1979,” which takes a different angle, and a more appropriate one in my view. Despite its sometimes discursive organization, The Secret Public is a highly informative encyclopedia of queer culture from Little Richard to the Big Apple, from Soho to Studio 54.

Friends of Society

T HE QUAKERS, a Christian sect founded in 17th-century England, are known for their belief in non violence and the equality of men and women, as well as their work for the abolition of slavery and for prison reform. But what led the liberal strain of Quakers to become champions of gay rights is their trust that each one of us is guided by an Inner Light that shows us the right thing to

prisons with convicted sex offenders. In 1946, Quakers in New York City opened a clinic in their meetinghouse run by the Quaker Civilian Readjustment Committee working in conjunction with the Magis trates Court. Instead of prison, some ac cused sex offenders were sent to the clinic for counseling, not to change their orienta tion but to help them manage their com pulsion to seek sex with other men in

D ANIEL A. B URR

TO HEAR AND TO RESPOND The Quakers’ Groundbreaking Push for Gay Libera ti on, 1946–1973

by Brian T. Blackmore Brill. 108 pages, $84.

do even if it contradicts established religious and civil author ity. They understood that gay men and women are responding to their Inner Light when they embrace their sexual orientation. Brian T. Blackmore begins To Hear and to Respond , hishis tory of Quaker support of homosexuals, in the years following World War II, when the U.S. was engulfed in a wave of homo phobia. Police entrapment of men seeking sex with men filled Daniel A. Burr, a frequent G&LR contributor, lives in Covington, KY.

public. The clinic saw hundreds of men each year and docu mented that rearrests were few. But it lasted only until 1951. The Quakers closed it when the director was arrested for seek ing sex with an undercover policeman. They could extend com passion to nonmembers, but the Quakers were not yet ready to accept homosexuality in their midst. Blackmore is frank in describing the failure of liberal Quak ers to fully support the rights of homosexuals in the 1950s. Like many, they were concerned about the threats postwar social

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