Start it here. Start it in October 1955 when Little Richard releases Tutti Frutti, his first record on the Speciality label.

Richard Penniman is just 22, but has already been performing for 10 years, a provocative, thrilling live act - hair teased up high, make-up applied, aggressively playing the piano. He is about to announce himself to the world with a song he wrote while washing dishes in a Greyhound Bus Station. A song that, until the lyrics were changed in the studio during recording, was a lubricious ode to gay sex.

A wop bop a loo mop a lop bam boom.

Viewed from a certain angle you could say the story of pop is a queer story. Or at the very least that queerness - in its widest sense - is a foundational block in that story. If rock and roll was a rupture in American culture, then sexuality - in all its forms - is one of the fault lines that tore through it.

“Johnny Ray, Elvis and Little Richard; they all provide radical new definitions of masculinity,” suggests author and cultural commentator Jon Savage, “whether it be in terms of the wildness and freakiness and pretty damn overt queerness of Little Richard; or whether it be the naked emotion of Johnny Ray which excited loads of comment at the time and was taken from his love of black American R&B; or whether you’ve got the initial aggressive, tumultuous sexuality of Elvis.

“Elvis of course wasn’t gay, but he did propose a very different new masculinity to the extent that in contemporary accounts he was called a female stripper. This is something really new.

"This is what the new generation wants. They don’t want John Wayne.”

Little RichardLittle Richard (Image: free)

Savage’s new book The Secret Public is subtitled How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Popular Culture (1955-1979). It takes readers from the birth of rock and roll through the 1960s and the importance of gay managers  in the story of pop - Larry Parnes, Robert Stigwood and, of course, Brian Epstein - and on into the 1970s when David Bowie announced that he was gay and disco moved from being a queer, black subculture to the mainstream.

It’s a wide-ranging, deeply researched and fascinating cultural history which seeks, he says, “to tell the story of pop music through a LGBT filter,” though the end result is much more ambitious than that.

It catalogues the struggles lesbian and gay performers faced in a culture that was at best resistant and at worst aggressively violent towards them. Again and again, in The Secret Public Savage reveals a pattern that sees the work of queer musicians either condemned or co-opted. It started early when Pat Boone recorded covers of Little Richard’s original songs. “Really badly,” Savage points out. “It’s hysterical, he can’t even get the lyrics. But nobody ever talks about Pat Boone now. They still talk about Little Richard because he’s amazing.”

Through the 1960s gay sexuality remained under cover. Brian Epstein managed the biggest band in the world while constantly concealing his own sexuality.

“Brian was a genius in that he perceived the Beatles would be as big as they were,” Savage suggests. “Early ’62 he actually said the Beatles were going to be bigger than Elvis and everybody just said he must be mad, what is he talking about? But he was right.

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“And Brian died - I am sure it was an accident - a month after male homosexuality was partially decriminalised in this country.

“I did an event the other night with Tom Robinson and we started talking about gay mental health. If the emotional and physical expression of your sexuality is illegal that’s not going to help. Brian in a way is a very tragic story because he had this incredible achievement, this incredible grace really, and he couldn’t find emotional and sexual stability.”

And yet five years after Epstein’s death David Bowie was telling The Melody Maker,  “I’m gay and always have been.” It didn’t end Bowie’s career. If anything, it helped kickstart it.

Bowie’s admission - whether truthful or not (he would say otherwise later) - was an example of how quick things were turning in the 1960s and 1970s and how pop was a vehicle for cultural transformation.

“I think he was obviously mischievous and calculating,” Savage says of Bowie, “but he was also brave.

“Now, the question of who he had sex with or who he didn’t is moot. It seems he was basically heterosexual, but occasionally he had sex with men. He decided to be honest about it. I think that he saw that the early seventies was a good time for this.

Frankie Goes to HollywoodFrankie Goes to Hollywood (Image: free)

“It wasn’t a career killer and that’s what really made the difference and then by ’73 he’d become the biggest pop star in the UK and a cultural leader.”

In fact, Bowie was not the first pop star to come out. Dusty Springfield did it before him in an interview with Ray Connolly in 1971. But that didn’t have the same impact. And well into the 1980s major stars hesitated to reveal their sexuality for fear of ending their careers.

While Tom Robinson was the most visible gay pop star of the late 1970s it was disco rather than punk that offered a playground for queer artists and audiences.

Savage was himself a punk in the late 1970s but hearing Donna Summer's I Feel Love was transformative, he admits. Suddenly punk didn’t sound like the future anymore. “It was just four blokes in leather jackets going, ‘one, two, three, four.’”

Disco emerged in America’s gay clubs, but it soon went overground. “Disco is turbo-boosted by the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever. It’s like the Beatles in ’64, a huge thing in American pop culture,” Savage explains.

“What happens with disco is that Saturday Night Fever de-gays it - although there are gay touches in the film; you can’t entirely eradicate disco’s gay roots. But it makes it white and suburban and disco becomes this huge mainstream phenomenon.”

George MichaelGeorge Michael (Image: free)

That in turn sparked a backlash from conservative rock fans, culminating in the infamous Comiskey Park riot in Chicago in 1979 which saw the burning of disco records.

“It encouraged the music industry to think that disco was dead and so after the incredible Good TImes by Chic there were no overt disco number ones in the US,” Savage argues.

Savage ends his book in 1979 with a celebration of the late, great Sylvester.

“It begins with an incredible charismatic black American performer and it ends with an incredible charismatic black American performer, so it just made sense,” Savage says.

And if he is honest, he admits, he couldn’t face dealing with the subject of Aids. “It’s too raw.”

The queer story of pop didn’t end in 1979, of course. Indeed, in some ways it would peak in the early 1980s, as Ian Wade points out in his new book 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer.

1984 was the year Holly Johnson, singer with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive would become pop stars, the year Queen would dress up in drag and the year Bronski Beat would announce their arrival. Meanwhile disco would make another return with the birth of high energy.

Bronski BeatBronski Beat (Image: free)

“It looked like there was a hovering of gay culture above pop music,” Wade suggests when I speak to him. “Pop music was a Trojan horse for lots of these people to come through.”

That said, many of the same tensions and threats that had been present from the 1950s were still alive in the culture. Queen’s appearance in drag in the I Want To Break Free video derailed their success in the United States, whilst the biggest star of the year, Wham!’s George Michael didn’t feel comfortable coming out. He wasn’t the only one. You could say the same of Morrissey and Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys, though in both cases there were plenty of signals if you wanted to find them, Wade points out.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, though, when the tabloid culture of the time was actively monstering gay men under the shadow of the Aids threat.

Which makes the out-outspokenness of Bronski Beat at the time all the braver. Their breakthrough single Smalltown Boy offered a story many young gay men and women could see themselves in, Wades suggests.

“Bronski Beat just looked like your next door neighbours,” he adds. “I think gay artists up until that point used androgyny or make-up. Bronski Beat just seemed like your brother or your uncle. And that was quite political.”

Wade believes 1984 opened a door that allowed pop stars to be more open about their sexuality in the years and decades that followed.

“There were still situations where boy bands in the late nineties were saying, ‘Oh I still haven’t met the right girl yet.’ “But that was kind of trounced by Will Young with the Pop Idol thing where he just said, ‘I’m being blackmailed, but you might as well know I’m gay.’ And that took the power out of it.”

The Secret Public, by Jon SavageThe Secret Public, by Jon Savage (Image: free)

Then in 1998 George Michael, after being arrested for cottaging in a Los Angeles public toilet, spoofed the situation in his video for his song Outside. “He kind of normalised it,” Wade says.

That said, there is still pushback today. Just ask Sam Smith, who was attacked when they came out as non-binary in 2019.

“The more affirmation and visibility there is for LGTB people the more there is, I’m afraid, the likelihood of a backlash,” says Savage. “And a lot of it is sheer bullying. But it’s also an index of success.”

Wade adds: “With someone like Sam, they don’t give a f***, which is brilliant. I think they are embracing themselves the last couple of years. It does amaze me, the palaver about their Grammy performance. Annie Lennox dressing up as a man 40 years ago upset Grammy viewers. Good grief, is clothing that upsetting?”

Whether it is or not, clothing - like queerness - is part of pop’s story. It would be much less interesting without either.

The Secret Public, by Jon Savage, published by Faber, £25, is out now. 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, by Ian Wade, is published by Nine Eight Books on July 18, £16.99