Coney Island Baby: The Transgender Woman Who Inspired Lou Reed

I’ve been a big fan of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground for a long time, and stumbled across a post about Lou Reed’s relationship with Rachel Humphreys when I was looking into the inspiration for the album Coney Island Baby. Ever since I discovered Humphreys, and became a little bit obsessed with her, I’ve been listening to a lot of Lou Reed’s music from a different perspective with her in my mind.  

Lou Reed is likely best known for being in The Velvet Underground, the band which he was a co-founder of and the primary singer/songwriter for. The Velvet Underground was managed and initially financed by artist Andy Warhol, with his artwork being featured on the front cover of their first album The Velvet Underground & Nico. They were well known for having a heavy focus on taboo subjects like drug use, something that Reed carried with him throughout his career. But after four studio albums, Reed left The Velvet Underground in 1970, explaining in an interview that “I didn’t belong there … I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group with followers.”

It’s no secret that Reed’s music as both a solo artist and as part of The Velvet Underground was influenced by his romantic and platonic relationships with transgender women. ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ tells the stories of many celebrated trans women, such as Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and other guests of Andy Warhol’s factory – the iconic New York studio in which Warhol surrounded himself with unique and brilliant characters. However, the woman who was in my opinion one of Reed’s greatest inspirations, Rachel Humphreys, entered his life after the release of ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and was the muse for many of my favourite Lou Reed songs.  

Lou Reed and Rachel Humphreys met in 1974 at Manhattan’s Club 82, where Humphreys was a well-loved drag queen. Reed later recalled to Bambi magazine that “Rachel was wearing this amazing make-up and dress and was obviously in a different world to anyone else in the place”, continuing to say that “Rachel knows how to do it for me. No one else ever did before. Rachel’s something else.”. Before long, she had many roles in Reed’s life – she was his road manager, appeared on the back cover of his fourth solo album Sally Can’t Dance, and was even his hairdresser. Humphries and Reed lived together for much of their relationship, spending some of that time at the infamous Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. The hotel was a rock and roll epicentre, housing stars like Bowie and Madonna throughout its history. One journalist reported that “Room service orders included not just food, but cocaine”, and if you caught it at the right moment, you could find both Reed and Bob Dylan based there. 

In 1977 Reed and Humphreys held a three-year anniversary party, considered by their friends to have been an imitation wedding ceremony, which even had a wedding cake and ring exchange. However, they separated at some point in 1978, and this is generally considered to have happened because of Humphreys’ decision to undergo gender confirmation surgery. This topic had caused a lot of debate within their relationship, and many consider it to be because of Reed’s opinion that this surgery was “a conformist concession to society’s heteronormative prejudices”. After this Reed rarely acknowledged Humphreys, but is quoted as saying “All the albums I put out after this are gonna be things I want to put out. No more bullshit, no more dyed-hair f*gg*t junkie trip”. Reed’s relationship with being queer was heavily impacted by his experiences with electroshock therapy at the age of 17, described in his song ‘Kill Your Sons’. I think that it’s incredibly likely that this, and his other experiences of being queer, impacted his relationship with Humphreys and came to a head during debates of her gender confirmation surgery.  

There is little documented about Humphreys, something I find a shame as she’s an incredibly interesting person, not just because of her relationship with Reed but how enigmatic she seemed. Despite this, Humphreys can be found throughout Reed’s discography, most notably as the muse for his album Coney Island Baby, which was released in 1976 at the height of their romance. The title track for the album features the lyrics, “I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel”, a sweet dedication to Rachel. I am also strongly suspicious that the album Reed released in 1978 after the end of his relationship with Rachel, Street Hassle, was heavily shaped by her. During the making of the album, Reed was likely going through the process of separating from Humphreys or was deep in the aftermath of this split, something that probably inspired a lot of the turbulent characters within the album. The titular song is split into three sections: Waltzing Matilda, Street Hassle, and Slipaway. Slipaway is very evidently an elegy to his relationship with Humphreys, “Come on, baby, I need you, baby / Oh, please don’t slip away”. This final section of the song shows Reed’s vulnerability after losing Humphreys, and his unhappiness about their split. The song also features a surprise verse from Bruce Springsteen, and the interaction between Springsteen and Reed’s verses seems to mimic a conversation about Reed’s feelings and recent experiences. Don’t let the length of the song put you off, it is well worth a listen.  

Reed ultimately married his wife Sylvia Morales, a cis woman, in 1980, around 3 years after his split from Humphreys. Reed has said that his album Growing Up In Public wasn’t meant to be autobiographical, but that the song ‘Think It Over’ was for Morales. She also had a huge impact on his life during their marriage, encouraging Reed to become sober and acting as an integral creative half of much of his solo work. It’s incredibly clear that his marriage to Morales was special to Reed, and his beautiful song ‘Heavenly Arms’ shows just that. She described it as “my little thing he gave to me” when talking in an interview to Please Kill Me.  

In 1990, Rachel Humphreys died at age 37 at St Clare’s hospital, a facility specialised in treating AIDS patients. Lou Reed died over 20 years later in 2013 at 71, interestingly on the same day that he was supposed to meet with Lana Del Rey to record ‘Brooklyn Baby’.  

Words by Beth Hibbard, she/her