Book Club

With David Bowie’s help, Lou Reed managed to make “Transformer”, an accessible rock’n’roll record that is also a meditation on ambiguity, gender and sexuality in a time when such topics weren’t acceptable in mainstream pop culture. “I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn’t met before, or hadn’t wanted to meet”, said Lou Reed talking about his signature song “Walk on the Wild Side”. The lyrics describe a series of regulars at Andy Warhol’s Factory, including the transgender superstars Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling.
Songwriter Ezra Furman, who has come out as a transgender woman herself, explores Reed’s and Transformer’s unstable identities through close listening and personal reflections. The book, though, serves as more than a mere essay on the record or its author: it considers how the notion of queerness has evolved over time and what Reed meant both to queer culture and to Furman as a person. Furman doesn’t shy away from the singer’s uglier sides (homophobia, domestic violence and racism) presenting us Lou Reed as a real person with his flaws rather than as just an idol.

Marco Astolfi is a literary translator, writer and fairy from Italy. He lives in Berlin, is a co-organizer of the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and runs the Book Club evening every two months. He is a regular at Creative Writing and can occasionally be found modeling for Life Drawing classes. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and led the Cock O’Clock workshops at Easter Stretch Festival 2019 and Private Talk at Stretch Imagina 2020.

About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to GBTQ themes and personalities.
Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
The discussion will be conducted in English.