'Chatty and tender, casually poetic and voraciously sexual-Sullivan 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. This selection shows Lou's joyous love of life, men, and sex. After he was diagnosed with HIV in 1986, he remarked that he had been told by clinics that 'it was impossible for me to live as a gay man, but it looks like I'm gonna die like one.' In this excerpt we hear Ellis Martin read several passages from Lou Sullivans diaries. Successfully campaigning to remove heterosexuality from the medical requirements for gender affirming surgery, Lou was pivotal in our modern understanding of gender and sexuality as distinct identities. This is the inaugural episode of the WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE: A LITQB reading series. Lou navigated his identity with few role models and was perhaps the first publicly gay transgender man. Through these extracts, we hear Lou's life in his own words: from 'playing boys' in his childhood in Wisconsin, to cruising San Francisco's gay bars for handsome 'youngmen' from first hearing about gender non-conforming communities, to becoming a vital part of them as an activist, author, and archivist. Lou kept candid diaries from the age of 10. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivans self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure. A unique first-hand account of a historical gay trans man's whole life, which reads like a celebratory coming-of-age novel.

The diaries of lou sullivan