Enriqueta Rylands would have been proud. On the 125^th anniversary of the opening of the library she bequeathed to Manchester in her husband’s name, a glorious celebration of the requited love between LGBTQ culture and pop music more than fulfils her intention to mark the city out as a place of culture and importance, not only by curating the ancient but also the near-modern.

Although it might be elasticising the truth to declare that the only good ‘Rock’ bears the surname Hudson, it’s transparently the case that, while the music that trades under the dispiriting flag of rock too often wearies the spirit with its crushing masculinity and attendant reverence for the self-importantly earnest, pop, by way of contrast, has always used the full rainbow palette of colours in its glittery make-up case. As the cosmetics counter metaphor implies, it’s the more gender-inclusive of the genres. And, in the words of turn-of-the-century miss-makers Baxendale, it’s music for girls.

Taking its cue from co-curator Jon Savage‘s book The Secret Public while broadening its time frame by a further six years (a remix extending it from 1979 to 1985), as an exhibition The Secret Public: LGBTQ Pop 1955–1985 draws back the curtain on a history that began in illegality. Until 1967, when it was at long last partially decriminalised in England and Wales, to be openly homosexual was to court both persecution and prosecution, to risk career and sometimes suicide. In the circumstances, Oscar Wilde’s love that dared not speak its name was forced to learn a different language. As the flamboyantly singular Little Richard put it, singing in tongues, “a wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom”.

Pop, it turned out, was the ideal idiom. An artifice itself, like a burlesque striptease its surfaces could conceal as much as they revealed. For artists like the aforementioned Little Richard or Liberace, this might mean wearing extravagance as though it was a mask; a flamboyance so theatrical that, in suitably Wildean paradox, it obscured the fact that actor and act were one and the same.

Ending the exhibition’s narrative at the mid-point of the 1980s affords the overview a final flourish of optimism, one that the regrettable recent rise in transphobia suggests can never be other than guarded. Bronski Beat, unlike so many of their predecessors, had no time for dressing up who they were. Their Age of Consent may well be the most under-appreciated LP of the 1980s. All face and no mask, all text and no subtext, they seemed all the more fearless for the vulnerability in lead singer Jimmy Somerville’s bruised and yearning falsetto.

Also present, and then still correct, are The Smiths. Inducted these days into the canon of the music monthlies, it’s easy to overlook how far apart they once shimmied from their peers. Their unapologetic otherness – the blouse-clad Morrissey baring chest and soul on Top of the Pops, with partner-in-crime Johnny Marr, hair teased into a Ronettes‘ inspired beehive hand in glove at his side – inspired ridicule and adulation in equal measure. The former’s largely genderless lyrics owed something, to be sure, to Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, yet still spoke in those days to those who shared his uncommon cause.

In displaying the ephemera of mass-produced popular culture with the reverence the Rylands more typically extends to collection-piece signifiers of the art and literature endorsed by the fiscally advantaged, The Secret Public makes an eloquent case for its emotional equivalence. What’s vividly, rhythmically present within its walls and display cases is the cascade of feelings by which life is actually lived, compressed with artistry into artefacts of lust, pride, heartbreak, anger and ultimately love; nothing more and nothing less than Pop Life, because – as Prince knew – “we all got a space to fill”.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: The Secret Public exhibition John Rylands Library. Courtesy University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.

 

The Secret Public: LGBTQ Pop 1955–1985 is at John Rylands Research Institute and Library until November 15, 2025. For more information, click here.