Never Missed Again: Lou Sullivan, Author and Transgender Activist

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

“I was walking down Market Street,” Lou Sullivan wrote in his June 1981 diary of his participation in the San Francisco gay pride parade. “The first time I can say, I really felt I was ‘marching in the parade’. My open shirt blew in the wind – the sun colored my stomach – felt slim and alive and beautiful – said I’m a man – said I liked men.

Sullivan had long sought a sense of belonging in gay spaces. As he was assigned female at birth, he had also long sought gender-affirming care – and had been denied it because of his sexual orientation. This was the first time he had celebrated Pride after undergoing top surgery or breast reconstruction, and the experience was one of confirmation.

At the time, the medical model of transsexuality assumed that the purpose of gender reassignment was to live a heterosexual life. As a gay transgender person, Sullivan confused this model and spent much of his life actively challenging that thinking. His activism ultimately helped make queer trans masculinity readable to the medical profession.

While Sullivan was many things—a secretary, typesetter, educator, activist, historian, community organizer, and fun-seeker—he is best remembered as a writer and activist. Its main goal: to provide resources to those who identified as female-to-male, or FTM, then the dominant term for transgender people who were assigned female at birth.

Information on trans experience, especially FTM, was sparse, and Sullivan had not encountered any precedents for his identity during his early adulthood.

In 24 diaries he kept over three decades, he documented his own journey and created a historically significant archive of trans experiences that he hoped to publish one day. He also produced newsletters; corresponded with researchers, medical professionals and other transgender people; published a biography; and wrote a widely distributed pamphlet. His adamantness about the validity of desire echoes throughout his writings.

Louis Graydon Sullivan was born on June 16, 1951 in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, one of six children born to John Eugene Sullivan, who owned a trucking business, and Nancy Louise Sullivan, a homemaker.

Growing up during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, he understood the value of political activism early on and participated in civil rights and anti-war protests as a teenager. In 1973, he joined Milwaukee’s Gay People’s Union, a human rights organization, where he served as secretary. He also published his first article, “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” in the group’s newsletter—a sort 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 LGBTQ community much larger and more diffuse than Milwaukee’s, and his relationship collapsed amid tensions surrounding his desire to transition medically.

In 1979, Sullivan ended his 11-year relationship and sought medical help for menopause — pursuits thwarted by therapists and doctors who determined his sexual orientation toward men made him an “atypical candidate.” In a strongly worded response to a denial letter he received from Stanford University’s Gender Dysphoria Clinic, Sullivan wrote, “The general human population is made up of many sexual beliefs — it is incredible that your program requires all transsexuals to be of one substance.”

With the help of 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 spoke regularly on FTM issues.

Sullivan later volunteered at the Janus Information Facility, a transgender counseling and education resource, where he befriended psychotherapist Paul Walker, who had helped create the first international standards of care for the treatment of transgender patients. Walker came to rely on Sullivan’s knowledge, often sending clients to him for peer advice.

In an interview, Sullivan’s brother Flame Sullivan recalled Lou’s records of attending medical conferences. Everyone else had multiple degrees behind 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 everyone away,” Flame Sullivan said. “He knew what he was talking about. More than some of these doctors did.”

Many in the FTM community, including author and activist Jamison Green, became acquainted with Sullivan through his booklet “Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” first published in 1980 and revised and updated twice. The booklet, edited and distributed by Janus, was notable for its acknowledgment of sexual diversity and brought a younger, more queer-oriented perspective than that of other transgender activists at the time. Although written for other trans men, it also piqued the interest of researchers, many of whom involved Sullivan in correspondence.

“Lou was the one who pushed the boundaries around sexuality and gender,” Green said in an interview, adding that Sullivan was particularly interested in making sure people had the information they needed. “That’s all he cared about.”

In 1986, Sullivan began holding quarterly FTM meetings, reporting on the meetings in a newsletter called FTM that reached subscribers as far away as New Zealand.

Sullivan discovered he had AIDS in 1987 and, according to his biographer, Brice D. Smith, was the first transgender man known to have lived with the disease. He was perversely proud of this status: “They told me at the gender clinic that I couldn’t live gay,” he wrote, “but it looks like I’ll die gay.”

Before his death, he planned to complete two major projects: his biography of transvestite journalist Jack Bee Garland (1869-1936), which he saw as a precedent for his own queer trans masculinity, and an edited version of the diaries he had kept since the age of 10.

“His work was more important to him than death,” said Flame Sullivan. 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 diary project weighed on him.

“He was so afraid he was going to die and the medical profession would again deny the existence of gay trans men once he did,” Smith, who wrote the biography “Lou Sullivan: Daring to Be a Man Among Men” ( 2017), said in an interview. “At the time, he felt like the sole spokesperson 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 tender 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 Ernsts ‘Dear Lou Sullivan’ 2014). And since the diaries were published, there has been an outpouring of Sullivan-related content through songs, illustrations, memes, and other mediums, which Ozma described in an interview as “Lou Sullivan’s cultural production boom.”

“Lou would have really gotten a kick out of how much work people make for him,” he said.

Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories.