I first started listening to the music of Lou Reed after I heard him featured in a Gorillaz song — one of the later recordings he’d make before his death at age 71, it turned out. As raspy and craggy as he sounded in his old age, I found something in the sound of his voice that soothed my anxieties and tended to my frayed nerves.

His was a voice that felt immediately sincere to me. Lou’s vocal quality was tinny and sort of hollowed out, especially in his later years. At times he sounded numb. Still other times he sounded contemptuous. But for me, there remained a central frayed tenderness to Reed’s vocals.

In my high school years and into my early college career, I clung to that voice in moments of bitterness. It felt OK, wrapped loosely in swathes of Lou’s sardonic, strung-out singing, to feel as fucked up, as bitter and as ugly as I felt.

The vanilla love songs I heard on the radio growing up rang false. Sheryl Crow and The Eagles weren’t real like Lou and I. Their pale, flat soft rock love lives were boring, unbelievable and inaccessibly straight.

Mine was the heroin addict, the Transformer Lou Reed, the Loaded fuck up. In my embittered heart, I heard “I found a Reason” as caustic irony, “Pale Blue Eyes” as a tragic warning. He sounded smarter than everyone else, like he was letting just me in on the bitterest secrets. I oozed with contempt the same way he did, and that made me feel safe in my spite.

Lou Reed wrote love songs for people like me, so wrapped up in all the ugliest feelings a person can feel that they’re hardly discernible as love songs at all. Love was for normal people. Love was for straight people. Love was not for people like us.

It took falling in love for me to realize how little I understood Lou at all.

A couple months ago I listened to Coney Island Baby for the first time. As an album, it seemed like a blip. It gave the impression of small potatoes, of Lou in some kind of mid-career rut. He sounded way too sweet, and I always sort of ignored it. But ever since Nov. 8, for obvious reasons, I’ve done everything in my capacity to listen to gentle stuff just to make me feel good.

“Man, I swear, I’d give the whole thing up for you,” Lou sings in the final line of Coney Island Baby’s closing song of the same name. “Coney Island Baby,” it turns out, was a love song Lou wrote for a trans woman by the name of Rachel, about whom very little is known. She’s mentioned in passing in music journalism from the period. She toured with him in the mid-70s; There are plenty of photographs of the two. But largely, all we have is the music Lou wrote in her honor.

I thought I loved the Lou Reed I’d constructed in my head, but I’d never heard a song of his more crushing, sincere or beautiful to me than “Coney Island Baby.”

It was during his first year in college that Reed’s parents consented to have their son undergo electroconvulsive therapy. “They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head,” he once recalled in interview. “That’s what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings.”

“Coney Island Baby” begins there, nostalgically lamenting the loss of his early innocence and then slowly turning to exalt Rachel, a princess on a hill who loved Lou even though “she knew you was wrong.” The “glory” of love, resplendent and gentle, Lou sets on a pedestal, without mockery, without pretense.

Here, finally, Lou was as weak as I’ve always secretly felt.

Whenever I return to this song, I’m reminded of everything being queer molded me into, against my will and by my own hand. I’m reminded of how scary love is.

James Baldwin once said, “love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Queer love, for better or worse, must inherently be an act of resistance. When gay people love, we heal.

I see now, with the world as real and as bloodied as it stands today, that Lou never had contempt for love. He only growled from the wounds his life had inflicted on him. Beneath the surface sat the same sort of earnest yearning that many of us feel in the pits of our stomach. Lou had the utmost reverence for the holiness of queer love. Quite possibly, it saved his life in the darkness of his younger years.

Here’s to any queer person who has ever loved me, who has known me, seen me, removed my mask and kissed me. I misconstrued being queer with being unloveable. I misunderstood myself as undeserving of love.

This one goes out to Lou and Rachel, for loving boldly so that I could love too.

“Off the Beat” columns are written by Daily Cal staff members until the spring semester’s regular opinion columnists have been selected. Contact the opinion desk at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @dailycalopinion.