candlewinds:

Yeah, well, I can remember. I can remember everything.

Following up the Michael Stipe piece about Lou Reed I just reblogged

rubyvroom:

I bought the issue of Rolling Stone a couple days ago that has Stipey’s tribute and it is lovely, although they did edit out a fair bit, they kept the important parts.

I learned something about Lou Reed in this magazine that I did not know. I did know that he was basically pansexual (although he never really labeled himself) and had relationships with people of all genders. What I didn’t know is when he was a teenager his parents sent him to electroshock therapy to cure him of his “alarming homosexual tendencies”.

He later wrote some lyrics about this (“All your two-bit psychiatrists / Are giving you electroshock / They said they’d let you live at home with mom and dad / Instead of mental hospitals”) and talked about it in a few interviews.

“They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland State Hospital to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can’t read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.”

—Lou Reed quoted in Please Kill Me (1996)^[16]

Fucking hell.