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… the wall between the binary of the sexes has succumbed to the same fate as that of the Berlin Wall. We are still picking up its pieces and examining them. (Gherovici, p. 29)
In 1966, Lou Sullivan surely could not yet see the life of pioneering activism he would lead nor the reach of his influence, and though he did not yet have the language to call himself a gay trans man, he had other, more immediate and poignant language to convey the animating impulse of the activism to come, which he assiduously penned in notebooks and diaries for 30 years. At the age of 15, he wrote:
I want to look like what I am but don't know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think — there's one of those people that has their own interpretation of happiness. That's what I am.1
Susan Stryker, the trans activist and historian who wrote the introduction to the now (finally!) published selected diaries (Sullivan, 2019), writes of falling in love with Lou, a feeling I shared with her when I spent a happy summer some years ago reading the entirety of Sullivan's handwritten diaries, held in an archive at the San Francisco Public Library's Historical Collection. It's easy to fall in love with Lou, whose passion for living pours through the pages that document the 1960s music scene (he named himself for his love of Lou Reed), a burgeoning underground queer culture, loves gained and lost, and a prospective account of transitioning via hormone