GLR January-February Supplement 2024

his street cred grew, much of his out put at this time was initially maligned. In addition to music, the restless Reed continued to pursue prose writing at a high level. His pieces appeared in The NewYorker and The New York Times Magazine , and he published three photobooks. In 1989, Reed and Cale reunited to present Songs for ’Drella: A Fiction, a stark, elegiac homage to their es tranged mentor Warhol, who had died two years earlier. (Their nickname for him was “Drella,” a contraction of Cin derella and Dracula; Reed was called “Lulu,” according to Cale.) Perform ances premiered at the Brooklyn Acad emy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Amphetamines, heroin, cannabis,

with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson. They became the quintes sential New York hipster elders before Reed died, after a failed liver trans plant, in 2013 at the age of 71. Even as he was beset with failing health, Reed was planning new projects. Anderson described his death to Hermes: “His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open ... He wasn’t afraid.” Lou Reed’s final words: “Take me into the light.” In eulogies, poet and musician Patti Smith called him “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingmen and Lorca its persecuted.” Singer Michael Stipe praised him as a “queer icon”

Transformer album cover, 1979.

and alcohol fueled Reed’s prodigious output, but this appetite wreaked havoc on his bandmates, road crew, colleagues, friends, and family. Hermes delves into the musician’s destruc tive behavior, particularly toward Cale, the ethereal violist whose monotonal surround sound provided such an effective contrast to Reed’s four-chord beats and primal lyrics. Another target of Reed’s misbehavior—in this case, domestic violence— was Rachel Humphreys, his trans partner during the ’70s. Reed and Humphreys separated, and the musician married Sylvia Morales in 1980. She helped Reed get clean and suc cessfully licensed his work for use in films and commercials. After divorcing Morales in 1990, Reed blissfully settled down

who, in the late ’60s, “proclaimed with beautifully confusing candidness a much more 21st century understanding of a fluid, moving sexuality.” Will Hermes reveres Lou Reed’s music, and he expounds on his love in this voluminous, well-researched biography. Each of Reed’s albums is accompanied by discussions filled with riveting backstories and sympathetic analysis of his songs. So, on the one hand, Lou Reed: The King of New York is a delightfully deep dive into what looks to be a canonical legacy. On the other hand, Her mes should also be credited for not shying away from the harsher realities of Reed’s life: the abusive behavior driven by his per sonal demons. He was a brilliant but flawed monarch.

The Invisible Man

B AYARD RUSTIN, strategist and spokesman for nonviolence, civil rights, and social justice, left an astonishing legacy. His extraordinary life story is that of a Black, openly gay activist who combined a paci fist’s vision with an electrifying presence to motivate political action in the mid-20th century. Rustin organized the 1963 March

ars titled Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics. Long is a former professor of religion at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. As he notes in his introduction to this stim ulating collection, Rustin was a compli cated figure with wide-ranging skills and achievements. The nineteen essays focus on Rustin’s work from the perspectives of

R OSEMARY B OOTH

BAYARD RUSTIN A Legacy of Protest and Poli ti cs Edited by Michael G. Long NYU Press. 256 pages, $27.95

on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and his leadership con tinues to shape movements like the Black Lives Matter protests today. Interest in Rustin’s life and work has been growing. Previous works of note include John D’Emilio’s 2003 biography, which probed the impact of Rustin’s work and his struggles to maintain a public leadership role, and a collection of Rustin’s impassioned correspondence titled I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Let ters , edited by Michael G. Long and published in 2012. Long has now edited a collection of essays by a range of Rustin schol Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer who lives in Cam bridge, MA. 6

history, political science, law, sociology, theology, cultural stud ies, and organizational activism. An incisive opening essay by political scientist Erica Chenowith, “Rustin’s Legacy of Civil Resistance in the U.S.,” gives a useful chronology of the ac tivist’s work, including his conscientious objection to war in the 1940s, his steering of bus boycotts and early marches for free dom and integrated schools in the 1950s, and his leadership in the March on Washington, which prompted the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s. Along the way, he founded or helped form such civil rights groups as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinat ing Committee (SNCC), and he marshalled them into powerful

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