Is lou reed gay
How Lou Reed Showed It’s OK to Be Gay
Barely over 40 years ago, being “outed” as gay, lesbian, or pretty much anything but a straight-up hetero could charge you your position, your friends, and even your claim to be fully sane. Today, even a Fox News anchor can swan around New York with his lover without raising anyone’s eyebrows—as Gawker discovered recently, when it tried to construct an issue out of Shepard Smith’s apparent sexuality and got only a little remonstrative head-shaking from other media in response.
Those songs, especially when performed by a guy in heavy mascara and leather pants, presented something shocking and new.
One of the catalysts behind this welcome societal sea-change is surely the art and example of the matchless Lou Reed. He may have been the world’s first openly out rock star; Mark Joseph Stern has a kind round-up of the anecdotes and evidence of Reed’s dalliances with other men. But the show isn’t really so much whether he was actually attracted to both genders or pansexual or whatever—it’s that everyone thought he was. It was part of his deliberately transgresssive, drug-stabbing, weird-sex-having image. (The w
By Mark Joseph Stern (www.slate.com)
Soon after Lou Reed’s death at age 71 on Sunday, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend tweeted that the legendary rock star was “maybe the first out songwriter,” an allusion to his purported bisexuality. During his lifetime, Reed was famous for his sybaritic pursuits and unorthodox lifestyle. But was he bisexual?
He certainly wasn’t heterosexual. As a teenager, Reed displayed “homosexual feelings” that alarmed his parents, who forced him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. (He vividly described the treatment in the tune “Kill Your Sons.”) During his glam rock years, Reed’s on-stage persona frequently bordered on androgyny, which—combined with his well-known and tumultuous friendship with the openly bisexual David Bowie—created an mark of epicene pansexuality.
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Reed was also rumored to have pursued a number of same-sex lovers, though most of these stories remain pure scuttlebutt. Billy Identify, a photographer and Factory regular, has claimed that he and Reed had sex in 1968, though their run-in sounds less than passionate. Better documented is Reed’s affair with Rachel, a trans woman about whom li
Lou Reed(b. 1942) is a bisexual American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for The Velvet Underground (1965-1973), but has enjoyed a decades-long flourishing solo career.
Reed grew up in a middle-class Long Island, NY, Jewish household, but he was greatly at odds with his parents. While a teenager, his parents had him confined to a mental hospital, where he was forcibly administered electro-shock treatments and various drug therapies to counter his nascent homosexual tendencies. I’m not making this up. Nevertheless, he survived undeterred and played in amateur bands until he left for Syracuse University, where he experimented in free jazz and avant garde musical forms. At some point during these college years Reed decided to become a writer, declaring a major in English Literature (he graduated with honors). While at Syracuse he had his first gay love affair, but for the next decade Lou dated both men and women in a sexually ambiguous, drug-fueled haze.
Post college, Lou found hims
| Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 07:01 pm: |
Things are getting a little slow around here, so it's time to start a potentially controversial thread that I ponder would be interesting. By the way, this is meant seriously, with no disrespect intended. If you have a problem with the topic, please don't post to it!
It seems like a lot of great music in the past few decades has come from openly gay/bi performers. Certainly, their perspective has been welcome, especially after all the stupid macho posing of the '60s and '70s. Of course, back in the '60s, no one dared come out. Then Bowie (who was probably straight or bi at most) did it, which launched or at least legitimized glam. Tom Robinson was the first openly (and honestly) gay player that I can believe of who achieved significant mainstream success.
Then in the '80s, the stigma started to go away--even a mainstream performer favor Elton John came out. A lot of really successful American performers of that decade were openly gay--Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, kd lang, Melissa Ethridge, Ani diFranco, etc., not to mention Brits fond Erasure, Frankie, Marc Almond, Pet