Memories are whatever we want them to be. We can stretch new truths around them or manipulate their meanings, but they’ll never actually be true, you know? All I’ve got are these photographs of Reed and Humphreys. I have their song and what radical, fleeting, possibly false love exists within it. I’m sitting in my parents’ house, listening to all seven superb minutes of “Coney Island Baby,” looking at David’s backyard. It’s quiet, nearly blacked out. I haven’t seen him in seven, maybe eight years, when I ran into him and his newborn daughter at a Target and we exchanged brief life updates. Mom says he’s living on the other side of the county now, working locally. I’ve been thinking a lot about him and how I spent the end of my sculptable teenage years obsessed not with a history where a cis, transamorous man loved a person that society (or, in this specific case, also Lester Bangs) could so easily deem disposable, but with a history where a rock star could love a trans person so much that he made perfect, impossible art about them—that he’d tell the whole fucking world about how much he loved them. But Lou Reed moved on from that faggy bullshit just like everyone else and here I still am, gathering my transness in prose and trying to not mistake any of it for grief.

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