About Lou Sullivan
Source: Susan
Stryker PhD
Guide to the Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers, 1955-1991
Louis Graydon Sullivan, a female-to-male transsexual gay man, was born
Sheila Jean Sullivan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 16, 1951, the
daughter of John Eugene Sullivan, who owned a small hauling and moving
company, and Nancy Louise Sullivan, a homemaker and sales clerk in a
stationary store. Sullivan was the third child of six: Kathleen Marie
(1948), John Eugene, Jr. (1949), Bridgit Therese (1953), Maryellen
(1955), and Patrick Rory (1957). Sullivan grew up in an emotionally
close-knit Catholic family in suburban Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, in modest
economic circumstances. Extremely religious as a child, Sullivan
attended Catholic primary and secondary schools, where he compiled an
above-average academic record. Following high school graduation in
1970, Sullivan began working as a secretary in the Slavic Languages
Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Sullivan's intense, life-long, concern with male
gender identity and male same-sex relationships began to take on
greater definition in the early 1970s. Sullivan recalled that as a
child he had always enjoyed "playing boys" and realized even then that
it "meant more to me than it did to the other kids." By his early
teens, Sullivan's diaries, poems and short stories reflected an
interest in male homosexuality and questions about gender identity. At
age seventeen, Sullivan began a long-term relationship with a
self-described "feminine" male lover, and play with gender roles
figured in the relationship from the beginning. Both Sullivan and his
partner were attracted to the gay liberation movement, and to the
gender-bending aesthetic then evident in much of popular culture.
By 1973, Sullivan identified as a "female transvestite" and began a
career of transgender community activism with the publication of " A
Transvestite Answers a Feminist," an article which appeared in the Gay
People's Union [GPU] News. Another article, "Looking Towards
Transvestite Liberation," published the next year in the same
periodical and widely reprinted in the gay and lesbian press, remains a
landmark article for its early investigation of the question of gender
identity in homosexual culture. Sullivan continued to contribute
articles and reviews to the GPU News through 1980, and donated valuable
type setting and copy editing services as well.
Sullivan identified as a female-to-male transsexual by 1975, when he
moved to San Francisco and found work as a secretary for the Wilson
Sporting Goods Company. Although still employed as a female, Sullivan
spent approximately 75% of his time cross-dressed and living as a gay
man. In 1976 Sullivan began seeking sex-reassignment surgery, which was
routinely denied him on the basis of his openly declared homosexual
orientation. Female-to-gay male transsexuality was not recognized by
the medical/psychotherapeutic establishment as a legitimate form of
gender dysphoria at that time. As a result of his own frustrations,
Sullivan became involved in an eventually successful campaign to remove
homosexual orientation from the list of contraindications for
sex-reassignment. He pioneered methods of obtaining peer-support,
professional counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive
surgery outside the institution of the gender dysphoria clinics, and
disseminated this information at the grass-roots level through his
booklet Information for the Female to Male Cross-Dresser and
Transsexual, which is now in its third edition and is still the only
practical guide for FTMs. As a consequence of his efforts, Sullivan
became one of the founders of the female-to-male transsexual community,
and is responsible to a significant degree for the rapid growth of the
FTM population during the late 1980s.
Sullivan began taking testosterone in 1979, at which time he also
became a volunteer at the Janus Information Facility (now J2CP), a
gender dysphoria clearinghouse and referral service in San Francisco.
He also became involved in Golden Gate Girls [and successfully
petitioned to have "Guys" added to their name], one of the first
social/educational transgender organizations to offer support to FTM
transsexuals. In 1980 he underwent a double mastectomy and began living
full time as a gay man. Sullivan also changed jobs at this time,
becoming an associate engineering technician at the Atlantic-Ritchfield
Company, so that coworkers would have no knowledge of his previous
female life history. That same year he published the first edition of
his Information for the FTM. Throughout the decade, Sullivan continued
to write about female-to-male issues in the gay and transgender press,
and became a popular public speaker on the topic in the San Francisco
Bay area. He [was a founder of] the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society,
whose newsletter he helped edit and publish. In 1984 Sullivan started
his own typesetting and word-processing business. He also began work on
a biography of Jack B. Garland, a female who lived as a man for forty
years at the turn of the century. The book was published to favorable
reviews by Alyson Press in 1990.
In 1986, Sullivan finally obtained genital reconstruction surgery; he
also organized FTM, the first peer-support group devoted entirely to
female-to-male [transsexual and transvestite] individuals. Later that
year Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS. In his last years Sullivan
devoted himself to work on behalf of FTMs, as well as the broader
transgender and homosexual communities. He died of an AIDS-related
illness on March 2, 1991, at the age of 39.