Lou Sullivan: A Life That Was Never Planned

Louis Graydon Sullivan (Mariette Pathy Allen, wikipedia)

Lou Sullivan spent his life searching for words to describe a reality that was not supposed to exist within the ideas of his time. He was a trans man and he was gay. To him, there was no contradiction. To many doctors and therapists whose approval his medical transition depended on, however, there was.

In the 1970s and 1980s, medical care for trans people was often based on an extremely narrow model. A trans man was expected to behave as unmistakably masculine as possible, be attracted to women, and live an inconspicuous heterosexual life after transition. Anyone who did not fit this narrative risked being denied hormones and surgery. 1 Sullivan did not fit. Instead of adapting his own existence to the medical model, he began to challenge the model itself.

But his legacy extends far beyond that struggle. Sullivan wrote letters, kept diaries for decades, advised other trans men, collected medical information, organized meetings, and published newsletters. He helped turn isolated individuals into a visible and capable community.

Searching for an Image of Himself

Louis Graydon Sullivan was born on June 16, 1951, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, the third of six children in a strict Catholic family, and grew up in Milwaukee. 2 Even as a child, he preferred to take on male roles while playing. In his diaries, he later called this “playing boys.” 2 At the age of ten, he began keeping a diary regularly. These records accompanied him almost until his death and document not only his transition, but also his desires, relationships, fears, sexuality, and search for a way of understanding himself that he could live with.

What is especially remarkable about these diaries is how early they begin. Sullivan was writing long before he knew the terms with which he might have described himself. As a result, they are not a retrospectively polished life story in which every earlier experience inevitably leads toward a goal already known. Instead, his entries show a person in the process of becoming. They preserve uncertainty and realization, longing and contradiction side by side.

As a teenager, Sullivan was attracted to men and interested in male role models. At seventeen, he began a long-term relationship with a male partner who described himself as “feminine,” and the two played with gender roles. 2 Rock musicians, the Beatles, unconventional young men, and gay subculture became points of reference. But he found hardly anyone in whom he could fully recognize himself. Trans men were almost invisible in public life. Gay trans men did not appear even in much of the medical literature of the time.

This absence was not merely a lack of representation. It had practical consequences. Anyone who cannot find words for their own experience has difficulty seeking support. Anyone who does not appear in professional literature risks being declared impossible by professionals.

Early Writing From Milwaukee’s Queer Movement

After school, Sullivan worked as a secretary and became a member of the Gay People’s Union in Milwaukee. In the early 1970s, he initially used terms for himself that today seem historical or inappropriate. In 1973, he published the article “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist” in GPU News. A year later, “Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation” followed, a text that was widely reprinted in the gay and lesbian press. 2,3

These early texts emerged at a time when the language around trans identity that is common today had not yet been established. Sullivan used the vocabulary available to him while simultaneously beginning to push against its limits. He connected questions of gender self-determination with the ideas of Gay Liberation. Gender norms were not presented as private peculiarities of individual people, but as a social order that either enables or restricts freedom.

By 1975, Sullivan described himself using the term then commonly used, “female-to-male transsexual.” That same year, he moved to San Francisco with his partner at the time. There, he hoped to find greater understanding, connections with other trans people, and access to medical care. But even in San Francisco, he encountered a boundary that appeared on no map.

A Gay Trans Man in the Medical System

The gender clinics of the time did not merely decide which medical treatments were offered. They also decided whose story was considered credible. Trans people were often expected to present a standardized biography. This included rejecting the sex assigned at birth as early and unambiguously as possible, displaying stereotypically masculine or feminine interests, and above all having a sexuality that would appear heterosexual after transition. 1

Sullivan was attracted to men. That meant he did not fit the image of a trans man assumed by many providers. His sexual orientation was not treated as an independent part of his personality, but as evidence against his gender identity. As early as 1976, he applied for help from Stanford University’s Gender Dysphoria Program and was rejected solely because he openly stated that he was gay. 1,4 In the years that followed, he temporarily returned to living as a supposedly heterosexual woman before applying again in 1979, encouraged by contact with the trans teacher Steve Dain. 4 On October 17, 1979, he submitted his full application, and on March 12, 1980, the written rejection arrived. 14 The surviving records and his diaries show just how much access to care depended on a willingness to tell the story that providers expected to hear.

Sullivan knew that honesty could cost him medical support. At times, he considered changing the way he presented himself to doctors and suggesting an interest in women. 1 This is where the power of gatekeeping becomes especially visible. The system was not simply testing a truth that already existed. It produced narratives that trans people had to learn strategically in order to receive care.

Eventually, still in 1979, Sullivan found doctors outside the major gender clinics who were willing to support him. In November 1979, at the age of 28, he began taking testosterone, and a year later he underwent a mastectomy. 10,2 Further medical steps followed through 1986. His own access to care, however, did not solve the underlying problem. Other gay trans men could still encounter the same closed doors.

Sullivan therefore did not settle for demanding acceptance as an individual exception. He argued that gender identity and sexual orientation had to be distinguished from one another. In conversations, letters, and lectures, he addressed doctors and professional organizations. Between 1988 and 1990, he took part in several recorded conversations with psychiatrist Ira B. Pauly under the title Female to Gay Male Transsexualism. 10 In them, Sullivan used his own biography as experiential knowledge. He appeared not only as a patient being discussed, but as a participant who corrected medical knowledge itself.

It would be too simple to attribute the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation that is now widely accepted to a single person. Sullivan did, however, make the consequences of confusing the two extraordinarily visible through his persistence. His existence disproved the very model that had been used to deny him care.

From Personal Experience to Shared Knowledge

Sullivan’s activism did not begin before professional committees. Much of his work took place in apartments, envelopes, small groups, and self-produced publications. There, he encountered a problem that shaped many early trans networks: information was difficult to find, medical contacts were passed along by word of mouth, and many people believed they were alone in their experiences.

Through the Golden Gate Girls/Guys group and his work at the Janus Information Facility, Sullivan came into contact with other trans people. 6 Beginning in 1980, he advised trans men and people who were still exploring their gender identity there, becoming one of the facility’s first FTM peer counselors. As a peer counselor, he brought something the medical profession often could not provide: knowledge from lived experience combined with practical advice and the feeling of actually being understood.

He collected information about clothing, coming out, hormones, surgery, medical contacts, and everyday life during transition. This became his handbook Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual. The first version appeared in 1980, followed by revised editions, including a second edition in 1985. 4 The book was not an abstract medical text. It brought together accessible knowledge for people who often had no access to competent counseling and remained the only practical guide for FTM people for more than a decade. 10

His approach was fundamental: knowledge about trans lives should not exist exclusively inside clinics. It should belong to the people who needed it.

Letters as an Early Network

Long before email, forums, and social media, letters were a central tool of trans self-organization. Sullivan corresponded with trans people, activists, doctors, therapists, and editors. Among his important contacts was Canadian trans activist Rupert Raj, who also created connections among trans men in Toronto through his newsletter Metamorphosis, founded in 1982, and who likely served as one of Sullivan’s models when he developed his own newsletter. 5,6

These correspondences served several purposes at once. They passed along medical contacts and publications. They enabled counseling across great distances. They helped organize meetings and created personal relationships among people whose local surroundings often offered no comparable connections. Sometimes, simply receiving a reply from another trans man carried a crucial message: You are not the only one. Your experience exists beyond your own room.

The letters also show that an early trans men’s community did not suddenly emerge from one organization. It grew through many connections. People read newsletters, forwarded articles, recommended doctors, reported on surgeries, and introduced one another to new contacts. Community was less a fixed place than a network that became denser with every reply.

From Meetings to FTM

In 1986, Sullivan began organizing regular meetings for trans men in San Francisco. Out of this work grew the group that later became known as FTM International. 6 The meetings offered a protected space for exchange, information, and mutual support. They were not only about medical transition. They were about relationships, sexuality, work, social visibility, and the question of what a life as a trans man could look like at all.

In 1987, the first issue of the simple newsletter FTM appeared. What began as only a few pages developed over a total of 67 issues into one of the best-known connections among transmasculine people far beyond San Francisco. 6 The newsletter included articles, references to books and films, reports from everyday life, and a letters section where readers could send in their questions.

Its production was highly practical and improvised. Early issues were copied on an office photocopier and mailed from Sullivan’s apartment. Plain envelopes protected recipients’ privacy. Sullivan covered part of the costs himself. People who could not afford a subscription were still not supposed to be excluded from information.

These seemingly unremarkable details say a great deal about self-organization. A community is not created only through major speeches. It is also created because someone pays for paper, manages addresses, answers letters, organizes rooms, and makes sure a mailing does not accidentally out the person receiving it.

After Sullivan’s death, Jamison Green continued the meetings and newsletter, transformed the group into a nonprofit organization, and expanded its name by adding “International” to reflect its growing worldwide reach. 6 FTM continued until 2008, with a total of 67 issues. Under later leadership, the publication at times reached up to 1,500 people in 17 countries. 6 A small, locally organized group had become an international network.

Preserving History Before It Disappears Again

Sullivan did not only want to make contemporary information accessible. He also searched for trans history. After attending a lecture by historian Allan Bérubé, he began researching Jack Bee Garland intensively. Garland had lived as a man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was part of San Francisco history. In 1990, Sullivan published the biography From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. 2

His work on Garland was more than a historical side project. Sullivan knew what it felt like to search libraries for people like himself and find nothing. By making Garland visible, he created a past that others could draw on. He preserved a predecessor from disappearing from history again.

Sullivan was also involved in founding what is now the GLBT Historical Society as one of its founding members. 15 He helped edit the newsletter and catalog the early periodical collection. Collecting, organizing, and preserving were political activities for him. A movement that loses its documents has to begin writing its history from scratch again and again.

At the same time, Sullivan archived his own life. The materials he left behind include diaries, letters, photographs, poems, essays, medical documents, research materials, and audio and video recordings. 2 The archive preserves more than the history of a well-known activist. It also documents the everyday work from which a movement emerges.

In 2019, Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma published selections from 24 diaries under the title We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991. 11 In them, Sullivan appears not only as a historical symbol. He becomes visible as a humorous, sensual, sometimes desperate, and often intensely life-hungry person. His writing deals with bodies and desire, loneliness, relationships, clothing, music, and the joy of finally being seen as the man he was.

That matters because trans history is often reduced to violence, medicine, and legal struggles. Sullivan’s diaries contain all of those conflicts. But they also preserve pleasure, intimacy, vanity, hope, and happiness. That too is historical knowledge.

Activism in the Midst of the AIDS Crisis

In 1986, Sullivan was diagnosed with HIV following gender-affirming surgery. 2 At the time, he was given a very limited life expectancy of around ten months. He lived for another five years and intensified his work during that period. He continued publishing, maintained the FTM network, worked on his biography of Jack Bee Garland, and advocated with medical professionals for recognition of gay and lesbian trans people.

The AIDS crisis was not only part of his personal medical history. Within the trans men’s community, information about HIV, safer sex, and healthcare also had to be distributed. In 1990, an FTM meeting was devoted specifically to AIDS prevention. This addressed an issue in which trans men could easily be overlooked both by general HIV services and by research at the time.

Lou Sullivan died on March 2, 1991, at the age of 39 from complications of AIDS. 2 The fact that his network survived him was no accident. It was the result of years of work designed to ensure that knowledge did not remain tied to one individual. Others could take over because meetings, mailing lists, publications, contacts, and a shared sense of community already existed.

What Remains of Lou Sullivan

Lou Sullivan’s story is often reduced to one concise sentence: He proved that a trans man could be gay. But this never actually needed to be proven. Gay trans men existed regardless of whether doctors understood them or medical categories gave them a place.

Sullivan’s achievement was to draw consequences from that existence. If a medical model excluded real people, it was not the person who needed correcting, but the model. If information was missing, those affected could collect it and share it with one another. If no community was visible, letters, meetings, and newsletters could help create one. If history seemed to contain no role models, it was worth looking more closely in the archives and leaving an archive behind.

He did not create a trans men’s community on his own. His work was part of a larger network that included Rupert Raj, Jamison Green, and many letter writers, helpers, and readers who are less well known today. But Sullivan connected personal openness, practical care, political demands, and historical work in a particularly powerful way.

Perhaps that is his most important legacy. Visibility did not mean only being seen himself. It meant creating the conditions under which others could find one another, pass on knowledge, and no longer have to believe that their own lives were impossible.

Note on Language

Historical sources use terms such as “transsexual,” “transvestite,” “female-to-male,” and the abbreviation “FTM.” Some of these are used less often today or are rejected by many trans people. In this article, they appear where they are important to Sullivan’s own self-description, the medical categories of the time, or the names of his publications and organizations. They should not be applied uncritically to trans people today.

Yours, Lizbeth

Sources

1. GLBT Historical Society: Primary Source Set: Lou Sullivan

2. Online Archive of California und GLBT Historical Society: Louis Graydon Sullivan papers, 1755–1991

3. Digital Transgender Archive: Lou Sullivan Collection

4. Lou Sullivan: Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, 2. Auflage, 1985

5. Digital Transgender Archive: Correspondence from Lou Sullivan to Rupert Raj

6. University of Victoria Libraries: The FTM Newsletters

7. Megan M. Rohrer und GLBT Historical Society: Man-i-fest: FTM Mentorship in San Francisco, 1976–2009

8. K. J. Rawson: Living and Dying as a Gay Trans Man: Lou Sullivan's Rhetorical Legacy, Peitho, Band 22, Ausgabe 4, 2020

9. Anna Wiegand: Barred from Transition: The Gatekeeping of Gender-Affirming Care during the Gender Clinic Era, Intersect, Band 15, Ausgabe 1, 2021

10. Ira B. Pauly und Lou Sullivan: Female to Gay Male Transsexualism, aufgezeichnete Interviews ab 1988

11. Lou Sullivan, herausgegeben von Ellis Martin und Zach Ozma: We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, Nightboat Books, 2019

12. Francisco J. González: Writing Gender with Sexuality: Reflections on the Diaries of Lou Sullivan, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Band 67, Ausgabe 1, 2019, S. 59–82

13. Brice Smith: Lou Sullivan: Daring to Be a Man Among Men, Transgress Press, 2017

14. Digital Transgender Archive: Lou Sullivan's Rejection Letter from Stanford University's Gender Dysphoria Program, 12. März 1980

15. GLBT Historical Society: Following Lou: Searching the Archives for Our Queer Past