‘Lou Reed’s “Kill Your Sons” was a song he wrote in 1974 describing the electro-shock therapy his parents made him go through because of his homosexual tendencies at the time. Reed was an openly bisexual musician for the rest of his career until he died in 2013.
Lou Reed is most famously known for his performance in The Velvet Underground. However, he also had a solo career of his own and this song was one of his most popular. Reed had a very public and open relationship in the 1970s with a transexual person named Rachel for four years. This song in particular explains the treatment Reed faced from his parents for being different. It was a common mistreatment at the time, and his act in writing the song explained that to many of his fans.’
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“All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electroshock,” is how Reed begins “Kill Your Sons,” and though in Lou’s case, ECT trauma would fuel his art, such trauma often only destroys; as the ECT that Ernest Hemingway and William Styron received late in their lives only served to hasten their end. And even in Reed’s case, his ECT fueled not just his art but his rage, which sometimes hurt people who cared about him.
As a teenager living in suburban Freeport, Long Island, Lou felt alienated. He became increasingly anxious and “resistant to most socializing, unless it was on his terms,” according to his sister Merrill Reed Weiner, whose parents were overwhelmed by her brother’s behaviors and by his disregard of them, and so they sought treatment for Lou. They would comply with a psychiatrist’s recommendation.
In the summer of 1959, Lou was administered 24 ECT sessions at two-day intervals at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York. Weiner recalls, “I watched my brother as my parents assisted him coming back into our home afterwards, unable to walk, stupor-like. It damaged his short term memory horribly and throughout his life he struggled with memory retention, probably directly as a result of those treatments.”
“Weiner continues to be pained by her brother’s ECT, and she feels sorry for their parents who, she tells us, may have been guilty of much poor parenting but not, as some have suggested, of seeking treatment for Lou’s homosexual urges.
Weiner remains angered by doctors for destroying her family, concluding that “the ‘help’ they received from the medical community set into motion the dissolution of my family of origin for the rest of our lives. . . . My parents were like lambs being led to the slaughter — confused, terrified, and conditioned to follow the advice of doctors. . . . Our family was torn apart the day they began those wretched treatments.”
Lou Reed’s talents enabled his rage over his ECT to be transformed into the kind of art that deeply touched society’s outcasts.
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In the 1996 oral history of punk
Please Kill Me Lou Reed describes having a similar experience in the early 1960s:
“They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable.”
‘ ….
never to be trusted’
Long live Lou, and all those that society has failed to ‘fix’.
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