GLR March-April 2023

fixation on Hollywood glamor: Candy Darling went “directly from grim boyhood—a violent drunken dad and bullying schoolmates—to Hollywood movie star, female.” He agrees with Warhol’s assessment that “Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen; Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier.” Holly Woodlawn, he writes, “vibrates with manic, drug-fueled con viction ... a stomping tour de force of feminine self-belief.” Their influence on the album Transformer cannot be overstated. After examining all the background that informs Trans former , Doonan takes us on a track-by-track trip through the album. In the opening song, “Vicious,” he finds a touch of de lightfully campy badinage on a par with “the relentlessly bitchy queens in The Boys in the Band ,” with the two characters in the song swatting each other with flowers. “Andy’s Chest,” he tells us, was written in response to Valerie Solanas’ shooting of Warhol. He briefly dissects other tracks on the album but saves most of his surgical skill for “by far the most significant cut” on the album, “Walk on the Wild Side.” The characters who are name-checked in the latter song are Warhol superstars. Besides Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis, there’s Joe Dallesandro and Joe Campbell (a Warhol actor known as “Sugar Plum Fairy,” ex-boyfriend of gay icon Harvey Milk). Doonan finds the core of this song in “the electrifying juxtaposition between the sordid screenplay of Lou’s poetry [Candy ‘never lost her head even when she was giving head’] ... and the sumptuous musical arrangement. It’s like a corpse in a satin-lined coffin.” Reed’s sordid images couched in the soaring arrangement thus elevated the lives of these charac ters to the level of romantic, campy myth. For readers who ap preciate the minutiae of how a record is produced, Doonan explains how Ken Scott (who did the final mix on the song) in corporated the “doo-de-doo-de-doos” sung by the three girls in the group Thunderthighs. Scott and Reed were somewhat bored with the repetitiveness of the chorus. So, in order to mix things up, Scott asked the girls to start at a distance from the micro phone, walking toward it as they sang, to simulate hearing the girls walking toward you on a Manhattan street, their voices get ting louder with each step of their walk on the wild side. “The song is ultimately a hymn to visibility,” Doonan writes. The critics, however, were having none of it. Rock ’n’ roll crit ics, especially in the U.S., brutally scorched the album, filling their critiques with homophobic dog-whistles, as if to ask: How dare those faggy freaky glamazons Bowie and Ronson co-opt our classic rocker Lou Reed? Ellen Willis in The New Yorker blasted the album as “lame, pseudo-decadent lyrics, lame, pseudo-something-or-other singing, and a just plain lame band.” Even Lou Reed came to hate the album and retreated from his androgynous glam rock persona. Despite the critics’ lambasting Transformer , the new cen tury brought a deeper, fuller appreciation of the album. It regu larly appears high on several magazines’ and critics’ list of the greatest albums of all time. And, of course, the centerpiece of the album, “Walk on the Wild Side,” still plays on radio stations around the world. Doonan’s book is a serious yet campy hom age to the very first explicitly, purposely queer-oriented music album. In addition to being a funny, fact-filled history, the book sent me back to listen more intently to the album and led me to the conclusion that Transformer is indeed a glamdrogynous (Doonan’s coinage) masterpiece. 38

Sins of Omission

L AURA A RGIRI

SORROW’S DRIVE: A Quartet by Michael Alenyikov Spectrum Books. 252 pages, $13.99 S orrow’s Drive consists of four novella-length stories about, yes, sorrow. Michael Alenyikov’s soft, deft hand wields an ethos as harsh as Greek tragedy. His humor at tains surpassing cruelty. He knows how real sin is. Sins of omis sion concern him. Two of the stories address “ghosting,” that bloodless, cowardly cruelty that keeps its victim wondering and never grants the relationship a clean death. “Izzy’s House” is Eddie’s story. Eddie lives with a plangent grief for the San Francisco of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He’ll never stop wishing his transient connections there had lasted. AIDS deprived him of gay mentors and a Bacchanalian youth. A sufferer at the hands of history, Eddie is the innocent amongAlenyikov’s characters. He walked away with his life and health, but he lost what he barely had, and the loss feels like pre emptive punishment for glorious, uncommitted, unavailable sins. “Wish You Were Here” is Willie’s story. He’s a UN peace keeper who works in war and disaster zones where mortal dan ger is continual. People ask him why he chose his job. “I do it because I feel nothing,” he says, “and once, I thought, this will make me feel alive again.” People beg him for stories. His Swiss pickup, Hans, wants to “suck the reality out of him.” Willie re gales them all with gore porn, though their admiration embar rasses him. The reader keeps wondering why he does this job, and with such obsessive fervor, such ... love. Finally he tells us: “I want to be caught, to have it done with; to be condemned, whatever the crime. Perhaps this time I will get what I deserve.” He’s beyond masochism, reaching a towering sadism toward the self, mortal malice fromWillie against Willie. Is he his own stand-in for our whole violent species, and is that why he offers himself on the altar of war? His words are Wagnerian in force, godlike in their finality. “Mi Firenze” focuses on the preteen, pre-gay Riley and his grandmother Florence (Flo). Her lovers called her “mi Firenze” after the Italian city she loved as a young aspiring painter. In her last year, she has Riley read her journals and her unsent letters to Georgiana. Flo blew like a hot and violent wind through her intimates’ lives. She chose American domesticity over painting and Georgiana—the best luck Georgiana ever had, from what we know about Flo—and ghosted her guiltless friend. Flo’s guilt never left her alone; perhaps it tainted all her endeavors. Abandonment spared Georgiana the forced marches in heat stroke weather and re-enactment of the wild dog attack at Subi aco from The Omen that another lover suffered instead. As in the film, the dog-attack scene is absurd. It’s as horridly funny as the film version. You’ll feel queasy with guilt for laughing, but you’ll laugh. And it’s harrowing despite the gall of these over privileged narcissists running loose in a remote locale, feeling

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