TRANSFORMER

Doonan turns a sharp, funny eye on an icon of early LGBTQ+ musical expression: an album by the acerbic Lou Reed.

It was the early 1970s, writes the author, when “pretending to be a bit femmy worked for the gay and female fans, but God forbid you actually were a friend of Dorothy’s.” Performers like Elton John and Little Richard hid their sexuality by writing off their performances as camp. But then came David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, blowing the cover off the whole thing, and suddenly, as if in the transition from the tornado to Oz, the world gained shape and color for gay people. Following shortly after was Transformer, “the perfect soundtrack for the new glam-drogyny,” in which Reed—poet, curmudgeon, late of the Velvet Underground—paired with Bowie as producer to exercise a particular insight, which Reed expressed like this: “I thought it was dreary for gay people to have to listen to straight people’s love songs.” One great LGBTQ+ love song, as Doonan writes in this song-by-song dissection of the 1972 album, was “Perfect Day,” but it’s another song on the album that’s the perfect anthem: “Walk on the Wild Side,” with its evocations of street life and transgression. The effect on hearing it, writes Doonan exultantly, was immediate and electrifying: “I am immediately smitten. It’s 1972. I am a gay bloke, listening to tales of drag queens, on an album I just bought in the Manchester town center. This is so fucking insane. I am just about ready to blow a gay gasket.” Other marginalized people in that barely-past-Stonewall era felt the same, at last having music unmistakably of their own—and, Doonan adds, many more liberatory albums followed on the heels of a release now reckoned as one of the greatest rock albums of all time.

A perceptive, pleasingly idiosyncratic work of music appreciation and cultural history.