Lou Sullivan - We Both Laughed In Pleasure

Lou Sullivan was a visionary, a leader, and clearly one of the most significant trans figures of the late 20th century. He had a rare capaciousness of mind and spirit: he savored complexity and the many facets of people, ideas, and practices. He was generous, courageous, and his own struggles opened up new worlds and forged pathways that others eagerly followed. He helped dismantle the rigid gatekeeping of the gender clinics, creating new ways for trans folks to lead their own transitions. He was a voracious intellect: eagerly absorbing, producing, preserving, and disseminating trans knowledge. His most important legacy was FTM, the Bay Area group he founded in 1986 that revolutionized the social and medical terrains for trans men.

Gayle Rubin

Lou Sullivans diaries are an incredible look into the life of one of queer historys most crucial players. A delight to read and so incredible that this work is available to us all!

Michelle Tea

Here is your chance to meet Lou Sullivan in his own words, as he experienced himself in the process of becoming. Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma have done a beautiful job curating passages that preserve all the voyeuristic pleasure of reading someones diaryminus the boring minutiae of everyday life. The Lou who emerges is contemplative and bold, despairing and determined, promiscuous and romantic, and powerfully aroused by men wearing jewelry. Bring him home with you.

Julian Carter

This collection of Lou Sullivans journals, edited with great care by Martin and Ozma, details a profound personal metamorphosis alongside a political and cultural one. Lous intimate writing reveals a fantastic voyage of a late 20th-century trans explorer, pioneering forging his way from the hippie coffee houses that Lou came of age in, to the gay male convergence of the Castro, to early trans liberation movements, AIDS activism and beyond. The intimate details of Lous life shared in his journals lay bare just how human he was. Lou transgressed the limited thinking of his era, the restrictions of his body, and even a terminal diagnosis to leave a legacy of self-determination that resounds beyond the transmasculine community he sought to empower. This collection continues Lous legacy of knowledge sharing and brings an oft-overlooked revolutionary into sharp focus.

Rhys Ernst

We Both Laughed In Pleasure brings to vivid life the many journals left behind by queer transcestor Lou Sullivan. This finely edited collection pulls out threads like gender self-determination, illicit queer sexual desire, and relationship woes that span his entire life. The volume reads like an open letter written for future queer trans people longing to understand their identities and experiences across time and space.

Chris Vargas

THE SELECTED DIARIES OF
LOU SULLIVAN 1961 1991

Edited by
Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma

* / Nightboat

* / Nightboat

Copyright 2019 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender

Historical Society | Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers

Editors Note and Editing Copyright 2019 Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma

Introduction Copyright 2019 Susan Stryker

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

ISBN: 978-1-64362-017-6

First Edition, Second Printing

Developmental Editors: Lauren Levin and Emji Saint Spero

Cover Design and Layout: Joel Gregory

Text set in: Adobe Caslon and GT Walsheim

Back Cover Illustration: Mars Hobrecker

Author Photo: Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers, Courtesy of Gay,

Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society

Lou Sullivan Diaries: Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers, Courtesy of the

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society

Edited and Designed by Timeless, Infinite Light in Oakland, CA 2019

Published by Nightboat Books in New York, NY 2019

Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

Nightboat Books

New York

www.nightboat.org

by Susan Stryker

by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma

West Bluemound Road
Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

East Albion Street and North Franklin Place
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

East Albion Street
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

North Warren Avenue
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Leavenworth Street
San Francisco, California

Post Street
San Francisco, California

Hyde Street
San Francisco, California

17th Street
San Francisco, California

Page Street
San Francisco, California

Albion Street
San Francisco, California

by Susan Stryker

Words cannot adequately express how excited (excited!) I am that Lou Sullivans journals are finally being published.

I never met Lou in the flesh, but for nearly 30 years hes occupied a huge place in my life, both as a fellow trans person as well as an historian of LGBTQ+ experience and a theorist of gender. I have been gratified to see how many other people have been similarly inspired by the life Lou led and the legacy he left. Im over the moon that Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma have finally brought his wordsin all their vitality, humor, earnestness, heartache, sexiness, fierceness, and unflinching honestyto an audience that is sure to appreciate them as much as I (and they) clearly do.

Id seen Lous book, Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, back in the day, circa 1990, on the same bookstore shelves in San Franciscos Castro and Mission neighborhoods where I was cruising for less-medical, more-community-based 411 on what was then called male-to-female transsexualism. Lous book wasnt the one I was personally looking for as I plotted my own social gender transition, but I was glad it was out there for all the former-butches-becoming-guys I had met through the Bay Areas leather community. There was a groundswell of attention to FTM and transmasculine issues in the circles I was moving in around that timesome of it gorgeously documented in the photographer Catherine Opies still-magnificent Being and Having portrait seriesbut a real dearth of information about how the trans experience was different for guys at the dawn of the contemporary transgender scene. Lou was ahead of that curve, by more than a decade, in pulling together informational resources for what was then a tiny community of self-identified trans men.

I remember chatting with a guy named Shane at a play party in a dungeon on 14th Street who told me how a bunch of trans men were taking care of Lou, who was pretty sickcommon code words for being in the terminal stages of AIDSand me saying that Id like to meet him if there was a chance. Shane said Lou wasnt meeting new people anymore, that it was just too much for him to deal with. I shrugged. Oh, well. So it goes.

Its hard to convey to those who have come of age since the retroviral cocktails appeared in the mid-90s just how devastating the AIDS epidemic was before that, how shell-shocked we were, how inured we had become to the steady drumbeat of premature death as people dropped, seemingly daily, around those of us who would survive. To get some sense of scale, read the obituaries for these years in the Bay Area Reporter, which are available online. Back then, if you wanted to mourn somebody you needed to take a number and get in line. Losing Lou so early was a tragedy, but a routine one. Its appalling what one can get used to and come to consider normal.