This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
“I walked down the middle of Market Street,” Lou Sullivan wrote in his journal in June 1981, about participating in San Francisco’s gay pride parade. “The first time I can say I actually felt I ‘marched in the parade.’ My opened shirt blew in the wind — the sun tanning my stomach — feeling lean and alive and beautiful — saying I am a man — saying I love men.”
Sullivan had long sought a sense of belonging in gay spaces. Having been assigned female at birth, he had also long sought gender-affirming care — and had been denied because of his sexual orientation. This was his first time celebrating Pride after he had undergone top surgery, or chest reconstruction, and the experience was one of affirmation.
At the time, the medical model of transsexuality assumed that the goal of gender transition was to live a heterosexual life. As a gay transgender man, Sullivan confounded this model and spent much of his life actively challenging that thinking. His activism ultimately helped make queer trans masculinity legible to the medical world.
While Sullivan was many things — a secretary, typesetter, educator, activist, historian, community organizer and pleasure seeker — he is best remembered as a writer and activist. His main goal: providing resources to those who identified as female-to-male, or F.T.M., then the dominant term for transgender people who were assigned female at birth.
Information on trans experience, especially F.T.M., was scant, and during his early adulthood Sullivan had encountered no precedents for his identity.
In 24 diaries that he filled over three decades, he documented his own journey, creating a historically significant archive of trans experience that he hoped to one day publish. He also produced newsletters; corresponded with researchers, medical professionals and other transgender people; published a biography; and wrote a widely circulated pamphlet. Resounding across all of his writings is his adamance about the validity of desire.
Louis Graydon Sullivan was born on June 16, 1951, in Wauwatosa, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, one of six children of John Eugene Sullivan, who owned a trucking company, and Nancy Louise Sullivan, a homemaker.
Having grown up during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s, he understood the value of political activism early on, and participated in civil rights and antiwar protests as a teenager. In 1973 he joined Milwaukee’s Gay People’s Union, a rights organization, serving as secretary. He also published his first article, “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” in the group’s newsletter — a kind of coming out.
Sullivan moved to San Francisco in 1975 with his longtime partner, a cisgender man who encouraged Sullivan’s gay identity but did not see himself as gay. Sullivan’s first few years in San Francisco were difficult: He found the L.G.B.T.Q. community much larger and more diffuse than Milwaukee’s, and his relationship was collapsing amid tensions around his desire to medically transition.
In 1979, Sullivan ended his 11-year relationship and sought medical support for transition — pursuits stymied by therapists and doctors who determined that his sexual orientation toward men made him an “atypical candidate.” In a powerfully worded response to a denial letter he received from Stanford University’s Gender Dysphoria Clinic, Sullivan wrote, “The general human populace is made up of many sexual persuasions — it is incredible that your program requires all transsexuals to be of one fabric.”
With help from the transgender activist and mentor Steve Dain, Sullivan finally got the medical care he needed at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, where he also became a regular speaker on F.T.M. concerns.
Sullivan later volunteered at the Janus Information Facility, a counseling and education resource for transgender people, where he established a friendship with the psychotherapist Paul Walker, who had helped draft the first international care standards for treating transgender patients. Walker came to rely on Sullivan’s knowledge and often sent clients to him for peer counseling.
In an interview, Sullivan’s brother Flame Sullivan remembered Lou’s accounts of attending medical conferences. Everyone else had multiple degrees after their names, Lou told him. “And it was just him: ‘Lou Sullivan.’ They usually put him at the end of the conference, so he could blow everybody away,” Flame Sullivan said. “He knew what he was talking about. More than some of these doctors did.”
Many in the F.T.M. community, including the author and activist Jamison Green, came to know Sullivan through his booklet, “Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” first published in 1980 and revised and updated twice. Published and distributed by Janus, the booklet was notable for its acknowledgment of sexual diversity, and brought a younger, more queer-centered perspective than that of other transgender activists at the time. Though written for other trans men, it also piqued the interest of researchers, many of whom engaged Sullivan in correspondence.
“Lou was the one who pushed the envelope around sexuality and gender,” Green said in an interview, adding that Sullivan’s main interest was making sure that people had the information they needed. “That’s all he cared about.”
In 1986 Sullivan began hosting quarterly F.T.M. get-togethers, reporting on the meetings in a newsletter called FTM that reached subscribers as far away as New Zealand.
Sullivan learned he had AIDS in 1987 and, according to his biographer, Brice D. Smith, was the first transgender man known to be living with the disease. He took perverse pride in this status: “They told me at the gender clinic that I could not live as a gay man,” he wrote, “but it looks like I will die as one.”
Before his death, he planned to finish two major projects: his biography of the cross-dressing journalist Jack Bee Garland (1869-1936), whom he saw as a precedent for his own queer trans masculinity, and an edited version of the diaries he had kept since age 10.
“His work was more important to him than death,” Flame Sullivan said. Though he lived to see “From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland,” published in 1990, the realization that he might not complete the diaries project weighed on him.
“He was so afraid that he was going to die and the medical profession was going to deny the existence of gay trans men again once he did,” Smith, who wrote the biography “Lou Sullivan: Daring to Be a Man Among Men” (2017), said in an interview. “He felt at the time that he was the only spokesman for gay trans men and their existence.”
Sullivan died on March 2, 1991, in San Francisco. He was 39.
It wasn’t until 2019 that his personal writings were published in “We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1951-1991.” Edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, the book presents an intimate and candid portrait of a tenderhearted seeker of knowledge and pleasure, and has introduced Sullivan’s life and work to younger generations.
His story inspired a dance suite (Sean Dorsey’s “Lou,” 2008) and a short film (Rhys Ernst’s “Dear Lou Sullivan,” 2014). And since the diaries were published, there has been an outpouring of Sullivan-related content via songs, illustrations, memes and other media, which Ozma described in an interview as “the Lou Sullivan cultural production boom.”
“Lou would have gotten a real kick out of how much work people are making about him,” he said.
Megan Milks is the author of “Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body” and “Slug and Other Stories.”
