“I wanna look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like,” Lou Sullivan wrote in his diary, in the mid-sixties, when he was living as a teen-age girl in suburban Milwaukee. “I mean, when people look at me I want them to think—there’s one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness. That’s what I am.”
Sullivan’s diaries, which he began in 1961, at the age of ten, and continued until his death, from aids-related complications, in 1991, chronicle his quest to exist in the world as he was—and to partake in the happiness that might result when he did. The entries, which the editors Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma have collected in “We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991,” track his evolution from a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl obsessed with the Beatles to a noted transgender writer and activist in San Francisco. Throughout more than twenty volumes—all of them 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.
Sullivan was a gay trans man at a time when his sexuality and gender were seen as contradictory—a dual identity that couldn’t really exist. He wasn’t the first gay trans man, but, through his writing, activism, public speeches, occasional TV appearances, and dogged networking, he became one of the most visible. He lobbied the hidebound medical profession to recognize the existence of gay trans men and to remove sexual orientation from the criteria of gender-identity disorder. He organized support groups, edited newsletters, and, in 1980, wrote a book that billed itself “the handbook to address the needs of the female-to-male.” All the while, he made good on his adolescent vow “to keep a diary as long as I live,” in hopes that one day he would publish it—a record of “a phenomenon such as myself.”
In the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, what today is called gender dysphoria didn’t have a diagnostic label. In 1966, Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist, published “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” a landmark study of transgender identity. (According to Smith, Sullivan read the book obsessively, but was disheartened that it sidelined female-to-male, or F.T.M., cases.) A year later, Christine Jorgensen, a former G.I. who underwent sex-reassignment surgeries in the early nineteen-fifties, published a best-selling autobiography that enshrined her as the public face of what many Americans knew about transgender life.