In the latter half of the 20th century ‘music was the key medium for which homosexuality was discussed in the wider culture’, writes Jon Savage in his new book The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture 1955–1979 (Faber £20). ‘The gay themes and images that emerged in music and mass media seemed to come out of nowhere, but they were the product of a prolonged struggle on the ground’.

Much of this influence was kept secret from the public. Anyone under the age of 25, used to a world festooned with rainbow bunting, will struggle to imagine a time when gay life was criminalised and gay men and lesbians were harassed by the police and pilloried in the press.

Savage’s hugely readable history tells of the LGBT influence on popular culture from Billy Fury to Bowie. From the early days gay performers lived in fear of exposure and powerful gay puppet masters and producers – Larry Parnes, Joe Meek, Brian Epstein, Robert Stigwood – helped them hide their love away.

Notable among these was singer Dusty Springfield. Rumours about her sexuality swirled after her rise to near national treasure status in 1966. She was adored by gay men for her theatricality. The raw emotion in her songs was accentuated by a visible vulnerability beneath the beehive and the panda eyes.

At some reputational risk Dusty made regular forays into the nascent gay scene in London, often spotted at the Gateways club, one of the first safe spaces for lesbians. The venue was featured in the hateful 1968 film The Killing of Sister George in which gay women were portrayed as self-lacerating predators.

Jon Savage covers other aspects of secret pop culture from Warhol’s explicit underground movies to the gay Scot, John Stephen, who virtually invented the Mods. There’s much on glam rock and a long disquisition on disco that most reviled yet pivotal of all pop genres.

Humourist Craig Brown looks at another old queen in A Voyage Around The Queen (4th Estate £25). Even for ardent republicans this is an absolute treat. The most famous woman on the planet, she appeared on the covers of magazine since the age of three. But is there anything left to be said about Elizabeth II?

Well, yes there is. Part biography, part cultural history, Brown weaves a skilful tapestry of humorous factoids and barely-credible coincidences.

Did you know that Anne Frank kept pictures of Princess Elizabeth on the wall of her annex and years later the Queen visited Anne’s grave in Auschwitz; that the corgis were evil little ankle-biters; that the Queen was the most photographed person in human history? How did Idi Amin, the butcher of Uganda, and the Sex Pistols nearly disrupt the Silver Jubilee? Why did the author find his visit to the former royal yacht Britannia in Leith so utterly hilarious?

A news photograph reproduced in the book shows a 1953 coronation street party. Kiddies sit at a long table tucking into jelly and ice cream. Mums stand sentry. In the background redbrick terrace houses sport union jacks and bunting but one at the end seems to have the ground floor boarded up. It could be any coronation street. But it’s not. It’s Rillington Place in Notting Hill. The boarded-up house was the former home of serial killer John Christie.

Brown takes up the story: ‘the day before the photograph was taken [Christie] confessed to the murder of two women whose skeletons had been found in the back garden. In all, he probably killed seven women and a baby. He was responsible for another death, Timothy Evans who had been renting an upstairs flat was executed for the murder of his wife and child; it now seems probable that the perpetrator was Christie’.

Probably, but not definitively. The grisly and sordid Christie killings have been refocussed in Kate Summerscale’s The Peepshow (Bloomsbury £19.80) which gives a face to the female victims and the context in which they met their horrendous fate. With women’s wages a lot less than men’s, austerity Britain made it hard for many working-class women who often resorted to prostitution to earn extra and to back-street abortionists to end unwanted pregnancies.

Conman John ‘Reg’ Christie was a mild-mannered former reserve policeman. He was above average intelligence (and above the law, or so he thought). He was good with children, an animal lover, a polite man who was also a self-important sniveller, a pornographer and a necrophiliac.

The case became a renowned miscarriage of justice and helped end capital punishment in Britain. Summerscale – in devastating, novelistic prose – tells of the crimes and the Old Bailey trial that became a media circus replete with star tabloid reporters attempting to out-do each other and pontificating celebrities.

Was Christie an evil monster who hated women? Was he medically insane? And, more crucially, might Evans not be the entire innocent he was painted? ■

X: KenWilson84