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. 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. 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. 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. “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. “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.
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