The Story of Rachel Humphreys: Lou Reed’s Transgender Girlfriend
By: Holden Kern
Tags: Lou Reed, Transgender, Rock, 1970s

Photo from the back of Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance (1974)

Rachel hails from Philadelphia. She frequented both Max’s and Club 82, two joints in NYC’s lower districts that welcomed drag. She meets Reed at Club 82. She materializes in front of him, like a forbidden fruit, and he falls into a deep infatuation with her.

I know little else about the beginning. Reed enters the club deliriously tired, most likely due to amphetamine use from days past, his usual state in this period of his career. Rachel was hoping for a boost to stardom, and Reed seemed to be the perfect candidate. He fixated on her, slim with long black hair, out of the pack. There are obvious reasons she stood out to him. For one, this was not the first time Reed took a “liking” to a transgender woman. His magnificent ode to dysphoria, “Candy Says,” offers an intimate portrait of Candy Darling, a Warholian magnate and actress. Then, of course, there is Rachel herself. A stunning figure, often seen in women’s tops, and with heavy yet articulately applied makeup, she was “obviously in another world.”

She was talked up incessantly, seemingly with no response of her own. This wasn’t her first time with the talkative sort. They went to Reed’s home, with his current (unnamed in his journals) live-in partner. He proposed a threesome. Shocked and disgusted, his partner stormed out like many of the others did. Rachel feigned disinterest, but she stayed. What would follow was an intense relationship, but she stayed.

Up to the point where she didn’t. Things get particularly hazy in this period. The relationship soured and ended, presumably between ‘77 and ’78, because of Rachel’s appointment for gender reassignment surgery. Lou did not approve, seeing that his perfectly realized partner was slowly fading into someone else. Or, at least, in his image. However, to say that this should have been a surprise to him is clearly wrong. She was always in drag, regardless of time of day. She despised her penis, and was very vocal about such emotions. In fact, in a conversation with Eileen Polk, she stated that she was “better as a woman than a man.” Rachel wasn’t like the other drag queens because, at the time, she didn’t consider herself one. Reed could never see that. So, he stormed out, he screamed, and left his crutch and companion like a poor friend.

Their relationship was not meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Reed wouldn’t mention her name after 1978 and would go on to have happier, stronger relationships in the future. He decided to go clean on everything, including “f******” behavior. She would die of AIDS, stuck in the brown of a potter’s field for eternity. He would die of tumor in the liver, but became trapped in gray. I know not what happened to Rachel in the twenty years of her life sans Reed. I can only assume not many do. I know not why she loved him, or perhaps why she didn’t. I know not what she means to the transgender community, for she is only briefly mentioned in biographies and repetitious articles. I only know what she means to me. I only know she is unknown, without much of a story beyond the four years she spent with Reed, a trait not many rock and roll appearances can share in. I only know she is the closest representative body of the transgender movement in the 1970s that I have to cherish. I know I want to know her beyond the passing lips and computer screens. Reed would “give the whole thing up” for Rachel, according to his song Coney Island Baby. Why? What was so special about her, what transfixed him so much, what transfixed her about him, and why does she so often transfix me?