Lou Sullivan

Louis Graydon Sullivan (June 16, 1951 – March 2, 1991) was an American author and activist known for his work on behalf of transgender men. He was the first trans man known to publicly identify as gay, and is largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct, unrelated concepts.

Sullivan was a pioneer of the grassroots female-to-male (FTM) advocacy movement and was instrumental in helping individuals obtain peer-support, counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive surgery outside of gender dysphoria clinics. He founded FTM International, one of the first organizations specifically for FTM individuals, and his activism and community work was a significant contributor to the rapid growth of the FTM community during the late 1980s. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Early life

Sullivan was born on June 16, 1951, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin to John Eugene Sullivan, who owned a trucking company, and Nancy Louise Sullivan, a homemaker. He grew up in Milwaukee, the third child of six in a devout Catholic family and attended Catholic primary and secondary school. Sullivan first started keeping a journal at the age of 10, describing his early childhood thoughts of being a boy, confusing adolescence, sexual fantasies of being a gay man, and his involvement in the Milwaukee music scene. During his adolescence he expressed continued confusion about his identity, writing at age 15 in 1966 that "I want to look like what I am but don't know what some one 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."

Sullivan was attracted to the idea of playing different gender roles, and his attraction for male roles was outlined in his writings. Specifically in his short stories, poems and diaries, he often explored the ideas of male homosexuality and gender identity. At the age of seventeen he began a relationship with a self-described "feminine" male lover, and together they would play with gender roles and gender-bending.

Transition and adulthood

In 1973, Sullivan was working as a secretary in the Slavic Languages department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He joined the Gay People's Union, which was hosted at the university, and first identified himself as a "female transvestite" by publishing an article in the group's newsletter. By 1975, Sullivan identified as a "female-to-male transsexual" and it "became apparent" that he needed to leave Milwaukee for somewhere where he could find "more understanding" and access hormones for his transition. He moved to San Francisco in 1975 with his longtime partner, a cisgender man. His family was supportive of the move and gave him "a handsome man's suit and [his] grandfather's pocket watch" as going-away presents.

Upon arrival in San Francisco, Sullivan began working as a secretary at the Wilson Sporting Good Company, where he was employed as a woman but cross-dressed as a man much of the time. In his personal life, Sullivan lived as an out gay man, but he was repeatedly denied sex reassignment surgery (SRS) because of his sexual orientation and the expectation of the time that transgender people should adopt stereotypical heterosexual opposite-sex gender roles. This rejection led Sullivan to start a campaign to remove homosexuality from the list of contraindications for SRS.

In 1976, Sullivan suffered a severe crisis of gender identity and continued living as a feminine heterosexual woman for the next three years after being rejected by a gender dysphoria program at Stanford University on the basis of Sullivan's self-declaration of being a gay man. As Sullivan tried to go through life masking and presenting effeminately, he came across the hardships of transgender teacher Steve Dain, published in newspaper spreads in 1976. In 1978, he was shaken by the death of his youngest brother.

Dain and Sullivan were able to meet in 1979, Dain encouraging Sullivan to proceed with transitioning. In 1979, Sullivan found doctors and therapists at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality who would accept his sexuality regardless of prior university-based guidelines which prioritized declared sexual orientation over diagnostic criteria. Sullivan began taking testosterone, and had a double mastectomy surgery a year later. He then left his previous job to work as an engineering technician at the Atlantic-Ritchfield Company so that he could fully embrace his new identity as a man with new co-workers.

In 1986, Sullivan obtained genital reconstruction surgery. He was diagnosed as HIV positive shortly after his surgery, and told he only had 10 months to live. Sullivan was the first known case of a trans man developing AIDS. It is likely that Sullivan was HIV- infected in 1980, just after his chest surgery. He wrote, "I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one." Sullivan died of AIDS-related complications on March 2, 1991.