Simon Doonan - Transformer: a Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed

Biddie (in bra) and me, snapped by Mum, circa 1960, and observed by sister, Shelagh, the only person not wearing Mums clothes.

(Photograph courtesy of the author)

In the 1960s I developed a habit of mincing round the backyard in the style of the Ballets Russes with a dollop of Carmen Miranda. My non-mincing hours were spent gagging over fashion mags filled with startling shots of models du jour Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. On rainy days my best friend and I busied ourselves putting on fashion shows in my attic, wearing my mums clothes. I was not out. Nobody was. Being out wasnt a thing back then.

Sensing there might be a pansy among the begonias, Terry Doonan, my dad, a veteran of the Second World War, swung into action. All the adult men of my youth had fought in either the First or the Second World Wars. They were straightforward. They were butch. Some had undiagnosed PTSD and were drunken and violent. My dad was a rather nice chap.

One Sunday afternoon Terry surprised me in my drag atelier, which, as chance would have it, offered a fantastic view of Reading Gaol, as in Oscar Wilde, as in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Yes, the very institution where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated, having been convicted of gross indecency, which sounds very louche and Lou Reedish. Without ever addressing my sexuality directly, my dad delivered a short speech that was clearly intended to put the kibosh on my emerging flamboyance.

Homosexuals lead lonely lives. They get beaten up and thrown in jail, just like Oscar Wilde. They get blackmailed too. They often commit suicide.

I have no recollection of responding. The coming out process did not exist back then. Most likely there was an excruciating Pinter-esque silence during which we stared at the Victorian jail, wreathed in noxious vapors belching from the adjacent Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory. My mother once had applied for a job at H & P and was told that they would have to pay her less because she was Irish. Needless to say, she told them where they could shove their buttered shortbread triangles.

In cities and villages and tenements, from Scranton to Glasgow, parents were attempting the exact same Terry Doonan scared-straight tactic in the hope that their kids might avoid the brutal outcomes that ruined so many lives. Some parents, like Mr. Doonan, used words. Some used violence. Some used bribery. Lou Reeds parents opted for eight weeks of electric shock treatment.

By 1959 Sidney and Toby Reed were at the end of their joint rope. A decade prior they had moved to Long Island from gritty Brooklyn to enjoy the delights of wholesome, suburban Freeport. Dad was an accountant and Mum was a good-looking typist, as evidenced by the fact that she won a pageant titled Queen of the Stenographers, which sounds an awful lot like a Shangri-Las song.

By the age of seventeen, attention-junkie Loua kooky, creative kid who compulsively wrote songs and poetrywas doing everything in his power to torpedo the Utopian fantasies of his parents and challenge the notion of the nice Jewish boy. When he wasnt tormenting his family by extracting earsplitting wails from his electric guitar, he was throwing tantrums andhere comes the most lethal activity of allhe was acting gay, prancing and posing and generally behaving like somebody the neighbors might mistake for one of those terrifying inverts who drown their sorrows at the Hayloft in Freeport, the local gay bar, which, by the way, young Lou was already frequenting.

Freudian ideas dominated American psychiatry back then. Sigmund Freud saw homosexuality as a form of arrested development. (It was a bit like being a rock star.) He did not feel it was possible to cure this condition. However, he subscribed to the idea that sinceaccording to Siggyhuman beings were essentially bisexual, homosexual impulses could be discouraged, and heterosexual impulses could be nurtured to the point where they might then coexist alongside the gay stuff, allowing, say, the dude in question to marry and have kids. I have several gay peers who, upon revealing their sexual identity to their otherwise free-thinking American parents, were met with a dont-worry-we-can-fix-this-lets-go-see-my-shrink response. Sidney and Toby, like my dad, legitimately feared for their sons survival at a time when homosexuality frequently had catastrophic outcomes. Et voil! They surrendered their only son, aged seventeen, to a shrink who recommended a course of high-voltage electric shock treatments at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital.

The grim brutality of these sessionsthe endless corridors, the locking and unlocking of doors, the restraints, the twitching, the seizures, the spitting, the terrorhad a lasting effect on Lou and became part of his legend. The aftermath of each session plunged Lou into a torpid state that resembled senility. You cant read a book because you get to page 17 and you have to go right back to page 1 again. If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were, Lou reportedly recalled to a friend. Somehow he survived, but with fairly horrifying deficits. According to biographer Victor Bockris, The shock treatments helped eradicate any feeling of compassion he might have had and handed him a fragmented approach. I think everybody has a number of personalities, he told a friend, to whom he showed a small notebook in which he had written, From Lou #3 to Lou #8Hi! You wake up in the morning and say, Wonder which of them is around today? You find out which one and send him out. Fifteen minutes later, someone else shows up. Thats why if theres no one left to talk to, I can always listen to a couple of them talking in my head. I can talk to myself.

How long did these extreme effects last? His subsequent struggles with addiction and interpersonal meshuggaas suggest that they lingered, but there is no reliable way to separate the electric-shock trauma from the slings and arrows that subsequently came his way.

Did it fix the gay thing? Lous sexuality, the subject of so much speculation during his lifetime, is not easily understood. Its a bit like reading The Waste Land, the T. S. Eliot poem, which Lou loved. You are enjoying the ride, but you never quite feel that you know what the actual fuck is going on. Lous love life zigged and zagged, recalling the patterns of courageous self-dramatizing viragos like Vita Sackville-West and Madonna. As you will see, Lou flows into other peoples beds and their lives purely based on the person, rather than the gender. Lou was tortured with electric shocks to eliminate his Liberace and his Paul Lynde, after which he became more of a Marlene Dietrich. His fluidity and his gay solidaritywildly at odds with midcentury Americaalign him more with todays youth, who embrace pansexuality and queerness with casual lan.

My dads gays-are-doomed thesis did not have the desired effect on me, but it certainly got me thinking. I knew that he was largely correct, and that we poofsand wee poofs like mewere ubiquitously reviled. Homosexuality was still illegal on both sides of the Atlantic. Gay bashing was a local sport in my hometown. Despite a cavalcade of downsides, there was nothing I could really do about my urges. Try as I might to fantasize about sex with Jayne Mansfield, my mind always strayed back to my handsome scoutmaster with the hairy knees. My only option was to adopt a Pollyanna attitude.

There was cause for tentative optimism. I had already clocked the window dressers at the local department store, creating magic in the display windows with their staple guns, scampering up and down ladders in their tight pants and flowery shirts. As far as I could see, they seemed to be having a whale of a time. And Oscar Wilde? Wasnt he the toast of the Mauve Decade, at least for a while? I saw no reason to think of myself as a victim. When people told my mother she was less-than because she was Irish, she pushed back. Betty Doonan always made a point of passing her resilience and her confidence on to me. Me: The other kids are saying things about me at school. Mum (rhetorically): Theyre all ugly so who cares what they think?