Lou Reed

Times have changed since the seventies what was acceptable in the 60s and 70s is no longer acceptable and you probably know what I am talking about, “Walk On The Wild Side.” I want to talk about later but now something disturbing…

Lou Reed Dated a Trans Woman. That Doesn't Mean He Treated Her Well.
The photos of Reed and Rachel suggest a happy couple, but what is known about their relationship paints a far more complicated picture.
Vice
By Harron Walker
May 7 2020

In a photo passed around queer pockets of Twitter earlier this week, we see a 30something-year-old Lou Reed slouching in a booth, leaning his head against a woman’s shoulder and appearing to gently scratch at her thigh with affection. She cradles his head in her left hand, looking on as she nearly rests her chin on his crown. “Thinking about this picture of Lou Reed with his trans partner,” reads the tweet, which was posted this past Sunday.
[…]
Reed’s “trans partner” was a woman named Rachel Humphreys. She was a Mexican-American transsexual who met Reed at a New York City nightclub named Max’s Kansas City in 1973. Not much is publicly known about Rachel’s life before or after Reed, beyond the fact that she died in 1990 at Saint Clare’s Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen. Historians even disagree on the basic facts of their relationship, like whether Rachel was even a fan of Lou’s music, or if a party they threw in 1977 was supposed to be a wedding ceremony or not.

But then things started to fall apart for them and it turned ugly, Rachel wanted surgery but Reed didn’t want her to have it (even now we see that happening).

By Reed’s own account, if we dare to read his lyrics autobiographically, it was Rachel who broke up with him. “Love has gone away,” he sings on the title track of 1978’s Street Hassle, an album that Page asserts is about his and Rachel's breakup. “Took the rings off my fingers, and there’s nothing left to say.”

We only have conjecture in what happened between the two of them. Was there Domestic Violence? Did Reed prohibit her from having bottom surgery we just don’t know.

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There has been much talk that Lou Reed was a racist because of the lyrics in “Walk On the Wild Side” but we cannot view it through the glasses of 2020’s we have to look back at the 70s.

No one is safe from political correctness - even Lou Reed
Art shouldn't be censored because of a fashion, even by the work's creator
Independent
By David Lister
1 March 2003

Where does this pop lyric come from: "And the colored girls say doo do oo do doo do do doo"? Dead easy; it's Lou Reed's classic song "Walk on the Wild Side". One doesn't have to be of a certain age to know the line and its subsequent, erotic female chant. The song has never gone out of fashion in three decades; and you can still hear the coloured girls sing on most radio stations and in most people's record collections.

The one place you won't hear the coloured girls say anything is at a Lou Reed concert. Reed, it has been reported in the pop press, now sings "And the girls say...". His original lyric, he has decided, might offend.

I had to rub my eyes at this. A song about a male prostitute and transvestite in a drug-crazed section of New York is a curious place to introduce political correctness. Perhaps it's a sign that the former wild man of Velvet Underground has turned 60 and become very literally censorious. Perhaps he is just another victim of the political correctness epidemic in America. Either way, there is something that makes me feel uncomfortable when a work of art is censored because of a fashion, even if that work of art is a pop song, and even if the censor is the work's creator.

If you look at the later 60s and early 70s many words used then are not acceptable even a decade later and according to the article Lou Reed realized that and in concerts later he stopped using the word.

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The other point of controversy is the phrase “doo do oo do doo do do doo” once again you have to look  back in history for where that comes from. Backup singers were called DooWop.

Backup singers get their time in the spotlight
CBS NEWS
September 16, 2013

You may not know her name or recognize her face, but you have heard Merry Clayton's voice.

Clayton is one of the most famous women in a rather anonymous line of work: professional background singers.

They are the "friends" who helped Joe Cocker "get by" . . . they made Michael Jackson's made-up language in "Wannabe Startin' " memorable . . . and they are more than just "a little bit" of what made us "Respect" Aretha Franklin.

"I had no problem with being a background singer, a side-ground singer, an under-the-ground singer," said Clayton. "I was just a singer who happened to sing background."
[…]
Lou Reed infamously paid tribute to this often-unheralded role in the music industry, in "Take a Walk on the Wild Side":
“And all the colored girls go: Do do do doo doo do do doo."
"Why do most background singers tend to be black women?" asked Tracy.

"Because of the soul and feel, and the church feel, that we give them," said Clayton. "We came out of the church, and when you come out of the church there is a certain vibe that you have -- it's a spiritual vibe we have that we lay on you, and it's undeniable."

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The word “Transvestite”

Also raises red flags but once again we have to look back to history, it was the word we the trans community used to describe us. Quora had this to say about the word…

The term was not always as offensive as it is today. The term is generally considered to be obsolete and is potentially offensive to those that occasionally or regularly crossdress or are gender variant.

Just since I came out in 1999 the word “Transsexual” has changed and it has become derogatory.

We cannot and should not judge words in history without look at the context and era of when the words were used. Times change, words change.