Éve-Claudine Lorétan (Coco) (1969 – 1998) model, housekeeper

​Lorétan was raised in Thun, south of Bern. She was taking black-market hormones from the age of 13. Her elder sister had been raped at age 13, and afterwards turned to drugs and died at a young age.

After high school, Lorétan trained as a model. At age 20 she took the name Éve-Claudine and Coco as a professional name. She met 32-year-old photographer Olivier Fatton in a sauna in Bern in November 1989, and they instantly fell in love.  She asked him to document her transition.

Her surgery was further video-documented by film-maker Paul Riniker. However there was an error, and more  surgery was required. The day her friends took her home from the hospital, she did cocaine to deal with the pain, and also insisted on performing that night. On stage she tore out her IV, howled and bled.

Riniker’s film Traum Frau Coco was shown on Swiss television in 1991 and watched by over 660,000 on the first broadcast. This made Coco famous in Switzerland, and sporadically she was in the news over the next few years, but she had to work as a housekeeper at a mental hospital in order make a living.

She also suffered from osteoporosis and depression. Doctors prescribed morphine, but that led to addiction.  She did model for the Bernese fashion designer Marianne Alvoni, and for a while was working at a sex salon in Thun, but was too well known.

In 1997 the manuscript of her autobiography was stolen. She made several suicide attempts, and so died at age 29.

In 2018, Coco’s life was made into a musical, Ein Transgendermusical by author Alexander Seibt and composer Markus Schönholzer. A male was cast for pre-transition and a female for her later years.

In 2019, Fatton published his photographs of Coco.

• Paul Riniker (dir) Traum Frau Coco. With Coco. Switzerland, 56 mins 1991.
• Miss Rosen. “Candid Photographs of 1980s Trans Trailblazer and Model, Coco”. AnOther Mag, March 01, 2019. Online.
• Miss Rosen. “The Majesty and Tragedy of a Trans Radical Gone Too Soon”. Feature Shoot, May 2, 2019. Online.
• Dunia Miralles & Olivier G Fatton. Coco. Edition Patrick Frey, 2019.
• Dunia Miralles. “Olivier et Coco: Art, amour, passion et tragédie”.  Des Avenues et des fleurs, 21 février 2019. Online.

DE.Wikipedia        transgender.at (translation)

Candy Lee (193? - ) female impersonator, bartender, Mardi Gras, muse to Tennessee Williams

The first gay 'krewe' – of the krewes that put on the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations – was the Yuga Krewe, founded in 1958. The name is an exoticism referring to the Kali Yuga of Hinduism. It was also a gay in-joke to refer to it as KY (after the branded lubricant), and perhaps Yuga is a play on (are) you gay? The Krewe had grown out of the Steamboat Club, a gay social organization. These were the years when gay organizations had to be discreet; Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison and Louisiana district attorney Richard Dowling pursued an anti-gay clean-up, supposedly for the tourists, and a crackdown ensued. The first two Yuga Balls were held in a private house on Carrollton Avenue, but the neighbors had become irate. The third Yuga Ball in 1960 was held in a jazz club, Mama Lou’s on Lake Pontchartrain, reached by a wooden walkway that proved quite difficult for those who came in high heels. The fourth and fifth Yuga Balls were held in the suburb Metairie in a school that had a large dance studio, and was surrounded by a wooded area close to the lake. The second gay krewe, that of Petronius, held its first ball in 1962 at the same location. However the Yuga Ball a week later was raided by the Parish Police. Some managed to flee, but many were arrested in what the police dubbed a ‘lewd stag party’. Those arrested had their names printed in the newspapers and thus most lost their jobs.

Candy Lee had started a career as a female impersonator at the Club My-O-My on Lake Pontchartrain. She also worked as a bartender at Bacino’s bar, and was an acquaintance of playwright Tennessee Williams when he returned to the city in the late 1950s.

Williams wrote an one-act play, And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens in 1958, which is said to be inspired by the life of Candy. The play’s protagonist, an interior decorator who sometimes cross-dresses, is called Candy, and is about to turn 35. Her older lover who set her up in business has left her for a younger man. Candy picks up a sailor, Karl, in a gay bar. She spends money on him, and he then beats her up and steals more. This was the first play by Williams with explicit gay characters, and was never performed during his lifetime.

The real Candy Lee had been arrested five times at Bacino’s in 1958, as had the other bartenders. She was also one of the founder members of the Yuga Krewe. However she did not get on with the other members, and by the early 1960s had been banned from the balls. The word is that she called the police on the 1962 Fifth Yuga Ball.

• Michael Paller. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-Twentieth-Century Broadway Drama. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005: 133-7, 246n45n47. Discussion of the play.
• Howard Philips Smith. Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 2017: Chp 1 The Royal Krewe of Yuga and the Birth of Gay Carnival.

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Clay Shaw, New Orleans business man and prominent in the city’s gay scene was likely a member of the Yuga Krewe. He is best known as the only person to be prosecuted for the assassination of US President Kennedy (Tommy Lee Jones portrayed Shaw in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.)

Rachel Humphreys (1952 - 1990) hairdresser, muse to Lou Reed

++confirmation of death added April 2020

Humphreys was raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey and San Antonio, Texas. It was said that the family were of part Mexican Native descent. An apparent trans child who played with dolls, and wore girls’ clothes, Humphreys wanted to do people’s hair. As Rachel she graduated in hair-dressing at a cosmetology school in Bayonne, New Jersey (north of Staten Island, across the river from Manhattan).

She was a regular at Max's, Kansas City, the hip and glam rock nightclub on Park Avenue South. She also frequented the 82 Club on E 4th St which was in transition from a transvestite performance club to a glam rock and then punk club. The New York Dolls did their first show there on April 17, 1974, when they performed in drag, except for Johnny Thunders who refused. They were followed by Wayne County (not yet using the name Jayne) and short-lived glitter bands like Teenage Lust and Harlots of 42nd Street. 

It was there at this time that Rachel met Lou Reed, the musician. Lou described Rachel in an interview with Bambi magazine:

"It was in a late night club in Greenwich Village. I’d been up for days as usual and everything was at that super-real, glowing stage. I walked in there and there was this amazing person, this incredible head, kind of vibrating out of it all. Rachel was wearing this amazing make-up and dress and was obviously in a different world to anyone else in the place. Eventually I spoke and she came home with me. I rapped for hours and hours, while Rachel just sat there looking at me saying nothing. At the time I was living with a girl, a crazy blonde lady and I kind of wanted us all three to live together but somehow it was too heavy for her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out. Rachel was completely disinterested in who I was and what I did. Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did. Rachel knows how to do it for me. No one else ever did before. Rachel’s something else.”

She moved in with him right away. He was then living in a modest one-bedroom apartment at 405 East 63^rd street. Lou had already written a few songs about trans women, and with the single “Walk on the Wild Side” (which referred to the Andy Warhol-sponsored trans stars, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis) had his biggest hit. Rachel was at this time oscillating. Some days she was Ricky, and others he was Rachel. People who knew Lou and Rachel used either pronoun. One journalist referred to Lou’s ‘boyfriend named Rachel’. Both Lou and Rachel enjoyed the confusion and further muddied the water by wearing each other’s clothes. She was street-wise and spunky in a way that Lou only pretended to be. She was said to always carry a knife, and was good in a fight – which proved useful when a concert at the Pallazzo dello Sport in Rome turned into a riot 15 February 1975.

Lou had been working on his fourth solo album, Sally Can’t Dance – the title track and spin-off single assumed to refer to trans woman, Sally Maggio, who was manager at the 220 Club, another trans bar where Lou went drinking. Sally would in the 1980s open Sally’s Hideaway, and then Sally’s II, again a bar for trans persons and with trans performers. However it was Rachel whose image was on the obverse of the Sally Can’t Dance LP sleeve, drawn as if reflected in Lou’s shades.


She supported him on some of his tours. In New York, they lived for a while in the Gramercy Park Hotel, and then an upscale apartment on East 52^nd St at FDR Drive where Henry Kissinger, Greta Garbo and John Lennon had lived. In 1975 they began to frequent the rather grimey but seminal punk club, CBGBs. Lou was recording Coney Island Baby, released January 1976 and several tracks refer to Rachel. At the end of the follow-up tour, Rachel was mugged and assaulted. A doctor was called, who inevitably referred to Rachel as ‘she’, even though Lou was saying ‘he’. As Aidan Levy says:

“Rachel had been contemplating gender reassignment surgery, but the transgender rights movement had not yet solidified, and not fully understanding the nature of the decision, Lou was adamantly opposed to any operations, a growing source of conflict in their relationship”.

Despite this, a friend commented: ““I think that Rachel was the glue holding Lou together, or at least keeping him in the public view in many respects … I know that he doted on her. If there was a light shining, it was the two of them together. It doesn’t mean it was the healthiest relationship in the world.” The cover of Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed, 1977 is of photographs of the two of them.

Rachel acted as road-manager on the next tour, managed the money, and watched over the road-crew. They were in London for their third anniversary and ordered a three-tier cake to celebrate, and Lou gave her two diamond rings. He said:

"Rachel knows how to do it for me, no one else before ever did”.

However by the end of 1977, Lou and Rachel were fighting more and more, and frequently it was about the issue of transgender surgery. She had a date for surgery but backed off as Lou said:

“Well why are you doing that? I love you because of the way you are”.

The title track of Street Hassle, 1978 is about her, and an article in Rolling Stone referred to Rachel as the raison d’etre of the album, although in fact it marked the end of their relationship. Lou moved on, having met Sylvia Morales, who became his third wife in 1980.

Reed completely refused to talk about Rachel after 1978. He desisted and decided to go straight. Both his later marriages were with cis women.

There is a rumor that Rachel died in the early 1990s, possibly from HIV complications.

Rachel died in 1990 age 37 at St Clare’s Hospital, which specialized in treating AIDS patients, and she was interred in the gigantic pauper burial site on Hart Island off the Bronx coast (which contains over a million corpses).

Lou died in 2013, aged 71, from liver failure.

• LegsMcNeil & Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Penguin books, 1997: 154-5, 206.
• Marc Campbell.  "Rachel: Lou Reed’s transsexual muse".  Dangerous Minds, 02.06.2013.  Online.
• Howard Sounes. Notes from the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed. Doubleday, 2015: 182-4, 187, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 202, 203, 205, 208, 212, 213, 214, 215-6, 221-2, 226, 229, 235, 248, 269.
• Simon Reynolds. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. William Morrow Publishers, 2016: 271-2.
• Aidan Levy. Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed. Chicago Review Press, 2016: 221-2, 227, 233, 244, 251-3, 264, 285.
• Corey Kilgannon.  "Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter's Field:  In an untold chapter of the AIDS epidemic, scores of unclaimed bodies were buried in a remote spot on Hart Island.  How many exactly remains unclear".  New York Times, July 3, 2018.  Online.  

EN.WIKIPEDIA(Lou Reed)

___________________

Many books and articles say that Lou Reed married three times, but of course he and Rachel were prohibited by the regressive laws in force at the time.    If they had been married legally, Lou would have had to pay alimony.   While separation from Lou left her free to pursue transgender surgery, the rumors are that she descended into poverty and homelessness.

It is of course the case that most of the New York music and movies trans women of this period opted against surgery:  Candy, Holly, Jackie, Chrysis, Kim Christie, Jayne County.

Miss Destiny (1936 -) sex worker, muse to John Rechy

Original March 2007; revised March 2019.

The person who became Miss Destiny was born in Trinidad, Colorado, and raised in a nearby mining camp.  Her parents took her to California age 6.  "I simply loved my mother's clothes. I couldn't imagine why she dressed me as a boy.  Even then I wanted to talk to her about my feelings, but I just couldn't." (Drag, p13)

In her 20s she took the name, Miss Destiny.
She became famous in 1963 when she was featured in John Rechy's City of Night.  "Take John Rechy for instance. I can't recall whether I first met him in Pershing Square or in the 1-2-3. I do remember I had just turned 21. In fact on the eve of my 21st birthday I waited around the corner from the 1-2-3 until midnight and burst into the place at exactly 12:01 expecting to dazzle the girls and boys. It was the first bar I was ever in." (Drag p15)

She became part of the scene in Pershing Square, (map) Los Angeles.  John Rechy used her for a chapter in his book. A year later she was interviewed in the September 1964 issue of ONE magazine, and expressed scepticism of Rechy's masculinity.  "When I first saw Rechy he looked butch. ... I loved it because that was exactly what I wanted to see in him. I only had sex with him once, and he didn't disappoint me. But I was a silly girl in those days, and I couldn't stand to do the same one twice. Besides, I could see that he was really a queen."

As she was in her early 20s in the early 1960s, she will be in her late 60s now. Did she ever have completion surgery?  What did she do with the rest of her life? Neither Charles Casillo nor Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons have any extra information.

*not the band from Melbourne.

• John Rechy. City of Night. Grove Press. 1963: 94-119.
• “The Fabulous Miss Destiny”. ONE Magazine. Sept 1964. 6-12. Interview.
• "The Common Sense of Miss Destiny". Drag Magazine, 1,2, 1971. Online.
• Charles Casillo. Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy. Advocate Book 2002: 93-7, 158-160.
• Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. Basic Books 430 pp 2006: 114, 115.
• John Rechy. After the Blue Hour.  Grove/Atlantic, 2017.