David Shariatmadari at The Guardian:
“King of New York” was the epithet given to him by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvets fan who rescued Reed’s lacklustre solo career by producing Transformer, which spawned his biggest hit, Walk on the Wild Side. It’s also the title of Will Hermes’s meticulous yet vivid new biography, the first to draw on the archive donated to the New York Public Library by Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson. As in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, about the city’s mid-70s musical landscape, Hermes expertly conjures the different scenes Reed inhabited, placing him amid a rich cast of collaborators, friends and lovers.
There’s a sense that he’s updating Reed for a new generation, particularly as a prophet of queer liberation and gender nonconformity. This isn’t a stretch: one of his best songs, 1969’s Candy Says, is an achingly poignant evocation of gender dysphoria, among other things. On 1972’s Make Up, three years after the Stonewall riots, he proclaimed “Now we’re coming out, out of our closets / Out on the streets”.
more here.