I wanna look like what I am but dont know what someone like me looks like, Lou Sullivan wrote in his diary, in the mid-sixties, when he was living as a teen-age girl in suburban Milwaukee. I mean, when people look at me I want them to thinktheres one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness. Thats what I am.

Sullivans diaries, which he began in 1961, at the age of ten, and continued until his death, from AIDS-related complications, in 1991, chronicle his quest to exist in the world as he wasand to partake in the happiness that might result when he did. The entries, which the editors Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma have collected in We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991, track his evolution from a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl obsessed with the Beatles to a noted transgender writer and activist in San Francisco. Throughout more than twenty volumesall of them chatty and tender, casually poetic and voraciously sexualSullivan workshopped his identity and his relationships, committing to the page an interior monologue of self-discovery that paralleled the gay-liberation movement, the burgeoning transgender-rights movement, and the AIDS crisis.

Sullivan was a gay trans man at a time when his sexuality and gender were seen as contradictorya dual identity that couldnt really exist. He wasnt the first gay trans man, but, through his writing, activism, public speeches, occasional TV appearances, and dogged networking, he became one of the most visible. He lobbied the hidebound medical profession to recognize the existence of gay trans men and to remove sexual orientation from the criteria of gender-identity disorder. He organized support groups, edited newsletters, and, in 1980, wrote a book that billed itself the handbook to address the needs of the female-to-male. All the while, he made good on his adolescent vow to keep a diary as long as I live, in hopes that one day he would publish ita record of a phenomenon such as myself.

Sullivan grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. His father, John, owned a hauling and moving company; his mother, Nancy, was a homemaker and sales clerk. Part of Sullivan aspired to be a good Catholic like the rest of his family: as a pre-teen, he declared in his diary that he loved Jesus and promised, Im gonna try to be beautiful in soul. But already he had a subversive streak. He devoured pop musicthe Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylanand enjoyed playacting as a boy. But if his music tastes were innocuous (his mother agreed that he could maybe have a Beatles haircut before the last day of school), he sensed that the stakes of his deeper rebellionone that was as much existential as culturalwere far higher.

I have a horrible temptation for sex acts, he writes. Id never do these with anyone, though. I do play with myself, which is supposed to be wrong. But I cant see it as wrong. As a young child, he fantasized about prowling the streets at night dressed as a boy. He recorded the intensity of his adolescent sex drive (I masturbated bout 5 times at work, drew dirty pictures, wrote dirty stuff), along with his B.D.S.M. reveries and fascination with homosexuality. My problem is that I cant accept life for what it is, he writes in a diary from the mid-sixties, I feel there is something deep and wonderful underneath it that no one has found. And what was underneath was his desire to be male.

Early on, this desire was intertwined with wanderlust. I wish I was a boy! God, do I want so bad to roam, Sullivan writes as a teen-ager, when he daydreamed about lighting out for Chicago or New York to live like his bohemian idols. After high school, he moved to Milwaukee, where, although still outwardly identifying as a woman, he found refuge in the local gay sceneits leather bars, S & M clubs, and grassroots activist groups. Sullivan joined the Gay Peoples Union, an early gay-liberation organization, where he contributed articles to the groups magazine and ran uncontested for the office of secretary. According to Brice D. Smiths biography Lou Sullivan: Daring to be a Man Among Men, from 2017, Sullivan started wearing male clothes full time in 1973.

Like most other places in America at the time, Milwaukee provided scant access to transgender health care or information. Wish there was a fucking gender clinic in this asshole city, Sullivan writes. After he got a secretarial job at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he roamed the university library for books about gender identity, but, as Smith writes, found no mention anywhere of individuals born female who identified as gay men.

Some of what Sullivan initially learned about transgender culture came from an underground network of confidantes who found each other via the back pages of community newsletters and magazines. Loretta, a pen pal from Michigan whom Sullivan describes as that Mich drag, saw herself as cleaved in two by the gender binary: she considered her male half her brother. She answered the phone with a male voice that climbed into a feminine register when Loretta, supposedly a different person, took the line. Gives you the willies, Sullivan writes, of her split identities.

Sullivans own notion of identity aspired to be more fluidat first, anyway. I know how to be one of the boys, I never knew how to be a chick + Im glad! Yet I think I can still be one of the guys + keep my identity as a girl, I hope, to make a pleasant combination, he writes. That dtente didnt last. Sullivan began binding his breasts and made a penis from rolled-up socks, although those were poor substitutes for the body he wanted. Im so ashamed of my breasts + C [cunt], he writes in one entry. When he finally worked up the nerve to buy a strap-on, he slept with it harnessed to his body all night.

Sullivans self-presentation made him a riddle to others, and sometimes to himself. A friend dubbed him sissy butcha term he approved of, although at other times he called himself a transvestite. (At the time, the word transvestite denoted someone who presented as the opposite sex but didnt want surgery; this was in contrast to a transsexual, who did want surgery.) Even as he understood the limitations of these labels, Sullivan seems to have craved their clarity: he felt at odds with other gay men (how do I fit in?), with feminists (they always object to my dress), with lesbians (I like men), with heterosexuals (no way), and with other transvestites (theyre all male [to] female + put the make on me). I cant relate to anyone, he concluded.

In the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, what today is called gender dysphoria didnt have a diagnostic label. In 1966, Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist, published The Transsexual Phenomenon, a landmark study of transgender identity. (According to Smith, Sullivan read the book obsessively, but was disheartened that it sidelined female-to-male, or F.T.M., cases.) A year later, Christine Jorgensen, a former G.I. who underwent sex-reassignment surgeries in the early nineteen-fifties, published a best-selling autobiography that enshrined her as the public face of what many Americans knew about transgender life.

An earlier, more esoteric memoir, Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Ralph Werther (who also called himself Earl Lind and Jennie June), appeared in 1918, to little fanfare, but in many ways its a closer ancestor to Sullivans diaries. It details the frankly sexual exploits of a religious boy who opted for castration and lived as a fairie among the working-class immigrants of New York City. Still, neither Jorgensen nor Werthers writing has quite the same real-time immediacy of Sullivans diaries. His journals are also dense cultural artifacts, interlaced with quotations from books, movies, song lyrics, and news reports. Many of these references are touchstones of the gay-liberation movement, and of queer culture more broadly: City of Night, John Rechys seminal novel, from 1963, about a young hustler; Death in Venice, Luchino Viscontis film adaptation, from 1971, of Thomas Manns novella (It irritates me becuz people cannot associate beauty with males unless introducing homosexuality into it, Sullivan writes); the androgynous glamour of Lou Reed; and Jorgensen, whom Sullivan heard lecture in Milwaukee. His diaries are a textured archive of primary documents: Martin and Ozma note that some pages had additional sheets, newspaper clippings, and photographs glued, taped, or stapled-in.

Reading Sullivans diaries now is both dissonant and familiar. Outdated termstransvestite, transsexual, and crossdresserand places from the recent gay pastbathhouses, porn theatrescan lend his world the mustiness of a time capsule. And yet Sullivans struggle to claim and embody his identity, and the way he writes about that struggle, is wholly contemporary. Some of this is surely due to the universality of self-doubt: his loneliness and isolation, his fear of being stigmatized or unloved, still resonates.

But Sullivans self-possession is just as noteworthy. His diary was hardly his only confidant; he was frank about his identity off the page, too, even when he was confused by it. One weekend, at home with his mother, he read aloud an article about a girl who had a sex-change to a man, and Sullivans mother confessed that, had she known of such a procedure when she was younger, she might have transitioned as well. I told her about how I felt, Sullivan writes. + She was very understanding + even said she felt that way, too! (Later, when Sullivan told a therapist about his familys support, he was met with incredulity: Isnt that rather unusual?) When Sullivan left for San Francisco, in 1975, following his boyfriend, J (as hes noted by the diaries editors), his mother gave him a suit as a going-away present.

In San Francisco, Sullivan finally had access to doctors, therapists, and transgender support groups. Yet even among these communities, the coexistence of gayness and transness was seen as bafflingalmost unbelievable. One doctor asked Sullivan to classify his routines according to whether they were stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine. Sullivan writes:

How the hell am I supposed to answer that?? Oh, I put cream + sugar in my coffee, thats feminine; I like to watch boxing matches on TV, thats masculine; I put bath oil in the tub, thats feminine; and I use Brut deodorant, thats masculine. [...] I left there rather discouraged. I first went to a bar (masculine!) and then home to cry (feminine!)

Sullivans diaries from his San Francisco years offer a connoisseurs index of male bodies and male beauty; almost nothing is too quotidian to excite his eye. His observations were arguably sharpened by his supposed otherness. Theres something Whitmanesque in his celebrations of male lust, of cruising, of anonymous bodies coming together in an ecstasy thats quasi-spiritual. He writes about the caresses and kisses bestowed on him from men in a dark porn theatre: Somehow those brief displays of tenderness between two men mean more to me than I can say... more than so many of the undying devotions [and] commitments spewed out by those who know no better.

Writing about J, the first of his three serious partners, Sullivan sometimes sounds like his exuberant teen-age self, at once guileless and bawdy. He describes one of the first times Ive really been turned on KISSING, then adds, approvingly, that J has gotten to be an anal-erotic too which I just love. He wears an earring all day long! Js ambiguous sexualityhe had same-sex encounters of his ownthrilled Sullivan. Once, walking together in Milwaukee, he and J passed a group of teen boys:

One of them, seeing J run across the street in all his beauty remarked to the other Look at that fag. I was instantly turned on, ran after him + threw my arms around him.... hell never know why.

Although Sullivan fantasized that he and J could live as a gay couple in San Francisco, that fantasy unravelled as Sullivan began contemplating a mastectomy and living full time as a man. [J] said he didnt feel any operation was the answer for me because he sees my problem as being mainly one of fashion, i.e., I am tired of the look I have now and just cant think what to do next, Sullivan writes.

When the couple broke up, Sullivan pursued hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgeries, but it took him nearly a decade to convince medical professionals that someone like him even existed. The Stanford University Gender Dysphoria Program, which was then the largest university program performing gender-confirmation surgeries, rejected Sullivans applicationperhaps because there was no clinical history of gay F.T.M. participants.

Nonetheless, he found doctors in private practice willing to help him transition. He began taking testosterone shots in November of 1979, at the age of twenty-eight. He writes in his diary that they made him feel electrified... sensual + strong + vibrant. The following July, as he was preparing for a mastectomy (that word sounds like a species of dinosaur), he reflected on the uncanny sensation of caring for a body that soon wouldnt exist: To wash my body with surgical soap, according to instructions, washing, washing, and watching my body that is there, that isnt there, that wont be there in 3 days. How can I share this emotion; how can I find an outlet for these incredibly strong feelings?

Surgery was, at best, a partial outlet. Even afterward, Sullivan writes, I need to remember that I have made the choice of being a defective male instead of trying to continue as a defective female. Wrestling with despair, his philosopher self takes over. He writes, For our whole lives, our bodies are the only things we have here on earth. Life here is the body. Death is leaving the body behind.

In April of 1986, Sullivan completed genital surgery. He writes, I want to learn to love my body + feel all its sensationsa desire that turned tragically ironic when, in early 1987, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Here, too, Sullivan delivers an almost journalistic account of his physical decline: Well, diary, I didnt think Id be writing the Last Chapter so soon. My penmanship is pretty bad because I have an intravenous needle in my right wrist & Im in the hospital.

Sullivans activism took shape in his final years. He published F.T.M., his trans-community newsletter, and the third edition of Information for the Female to Male Cross Dresser and Transsexual, which he called the most important thing Ive done. In 1990, he published a biography of Jack Bee Garland, a gay trans man who lived in San Francisco (and died there, in 1939), and who was a kindred spirit for Sullivan. Though it is Garlands story, it tells about me, Sullivan writes in his diary. It explains my reality for future generations of female-to-gay males. He wanted to see the book in libraries everywhere, so that if anyone went in search of transgender predecessorsas Sullivan himself had, to no availthere Garland will beproud and beautiful!

Today, the small shelf of F.T.M. literature that Sullivan envisioned is much larger, and includes his own diaries. He didnt want to be footnoted as an anomaly, or have his life dismissed as a clinical one-off. A big fear of mine is that I will die before the gender professionals acknowledge that someone like me exists, and then I really wont exist to prove them wrong, he writes.

These diaries are proof. Its impossible to say what form they might have taken had Sullivan lived long enough to edit the pages himself. We Both Laughed in Pleasure is necessarily provisional and condensed; the editors acknowledge they have prioritize[d] the intangibles of Sullivans San Francisco, tracing his worldly pleasures and ephemeral expressions of identity. And yet given how many contemporary trans narratives are rooted in trauma, their choice to foreground trans pleasure and sensuality is celebratory, even radical.

In the late nineteen-eighties, as he was dying of AIDS, Sullivan jotted this entry in a gay bar in the Castro:

Ive come all this way, gone thru this whole change, crossdressing 14 years, hormone shots for 8 yrs. Finally got all the surgery, or all Im ever going to get. And now what? Now I sit here the same way I sat before hormones, before surgery. Now what? My future compressed into a shortened time slot. Most dead in 2 yrs. Some live for 5. [...] Yet its been worth all these years just to be in this bar, here, now, with AIDS, + to be a man among men.

Was this happinessor, at least, one interpretation of it? Part of the beauty of Sullivans diaries is how they reckon with emotional paradoxes. Just as he wore his diagnosis as a badge of honorhe was the first known gay trans man diagnosed with AIDS, a fate that seemed to authenticate his identity even as it claimed his lifeso, too, did he understand that happiness is more complicated than simply getting what you want. Happiness is a story we tell ourselves, and sometimes the meaning of that story changes depending on who is listening or whats at stake. As Sullivan wrote in Milwaukee in the early seventies, Its so hard to separate happiness + sorrowsometimes theyre almost the same thing.

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Lou Sullivans Diaries Are a Radical Testament to Trans Happiness - The New Yorker

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