From an early age, Lou Sullivan was drawn to masculine activities and clothing, despite being born female. His parents supported their “tomboy.” For his fourth birthday, they got him a coveted Davy Crockett hat.

But by his teenage years, Sullivan knew his boyishness was more than a phase. He began dressing as a male and felt a growing disconnect between his innermost self and the female body in which he lived. He wrote: “I hate being a girl, really. I have to be sheltered, I can’t walk in the dark, I have to be meek and humble. I hate that. I wish I were a boy. … They can walk down a dark street like they were its king. … They have freedom and know what life is really like.”

This seems like the beginning of a female-to-male trans story, which was shocking enough in 1950s Wauwatosa, where Sullivan was born into a Catholic family. But his story has a twist that challenged — and ultimately shattered — long-held beliefs about the intersection of gender and sexual orientation.

Sullivan’s masculine ideal was not a brawny guy’s guy, but rather an androgynous gay male. He was attracted to men, which led “experts” to dismiss him as heterosexual because of his female body. But he was not attracted to men in the same way that cisgender women are. His earliest sexual fantasies were of having sex with men as a man.

By 1975, Sullivan began to understand that “she” was actually a gay “he.”

In the newly released biography Lou Sullivan: Daring to be a Man Among Men (Transgress Press), Milwaukee author and scholar Brice D. Smith chronicles Sullivan’s struggle for acceptance at a time when trans men were not only missing from the radar of the world at large but largely shunned by the gay community that he longed to join.

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Lou Sullivan - PHOTO: Ashley Altadonna

Smith’s impeccably researched, intimate and absorbing biography follows Sullivan’s faltering evolution from a suburban Catholic schoolgirl to a gay man living in the heyday of sexual liberation in San Francisco — and ultimately to a casualty of the AIDS epidemic at its height.

“(They) said I couldn’t live as a gay man, but it looks like I’m going to die like one,” he wrote, with ironic pride.

While Sullivan had the support of his family, his journey sometimes bewildered him and his lovers as much as it did the psychologists and doctors whom he battled for recognition. In the process of staking out a place for himself in uncharted psychosexual terrain, Sullivan became an avid writer, researcher and activist. By the time of his death in 1991 at the age of 39, he had spurred the creation of an FTM community and become the leader of the then-emerging transgender movement as a whole.

Absent from history

While Sullivan is an icon among transgender scholars, he’s been largely absent from LGBT history — and Smith set out to change that. He was mildly obsessed with the project, which he researched for 10 years and spent two years writing. He went so far as to obtain a PhD in history from UWM to make his work acceptable on a scholarly level so it would stand as a reliable resource for gender researchers and historians.

“A third of all available books on trans people referenced him, and yet a biography didn’t exist,” Smith says. “It seems like a lot of books about trans people are memoirs. But this one is a biography. … What I appreciate about that is the perspective and context that one can provide to a biography.”

Smith wrestled with the abundance of source materials available to him. Sullivan donated his journals — in which he began writing regularly in 1961, his correspondence, and all of his research to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Sullivan’s family allowed Smith to copy Sullivan’s journals for the book, and, when Smith graduated with his PhD, the family gave him an ID bracelet that Sullivan wore.

“He was writing to understand who he was and to document his experience,” Smith says. “He was so concerned about the lack of documentation of gay female-to-male trans people.”

Sometimes the abundance of source material felt like a case of too much information for the author.

“There was so much, it made it harder for me to put my own voice in there,” Smith says. “I walked the tightrope between factual accuracy and a good story.”

Smith says that one of his goals was “to feel like I was allowing him to tell the story.” And he wanted to make the story relevant to everyone. That meant allowing the reader to get to know Sullivan not just intimately, but at that deep level of humanity where everyone connects — and, readers of all stripes will appreciate how well Smith succeeded.

“If you can care about him, then you can understand what it’s like to be trans and you can experience all these sociocultural experiences in the 20th century, because he was involved in so many things,” Smith says.

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Brice D. Smith discussing his biography of Lou Sullivan at the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center. 

Looking back at Sullivan’s life as a whole, Smith is struck by how much his subject was able to accomplish in such a short life and at such a challenging time. “He had a couple of dark moments, but on the whole, he did as much as he could to help educate folks,” he says, sounding like a son glowing about his father.

Smith’s one regret for Sullivan is that he died single after searching so hard all his life for a lasting connection.

Now Smith is looking forward to publishing Sullivan’s journals and watching his book make its way into the world.

He says: “Now it’s a really fun time because I spent so many years in isolation, and now it’s so exciting to be able to share this with everybody and to talk to folks about it — to see what a life it has taken on and places it will go that I never will.”

Meet the author

Brice D. Smith is reading and discussing his biography of trans pioneer Lou Sullivan at 5 p.m. June 24 at Outwords Books, 2710 N. Murray Ave., in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee connections

Gay trans activist Lou Sullivan was a native Milwaukeean. That made the story hit literally close to home for his biographer, Brice D. Smith, who moved here in 2002 and proudly calls Milwaukee home.

While the crux of Sullivan’s activism occurred in San Francisco, his early years in Milwaukee’s LGBT community shaped the contours of his narrative.

The roots of Sullivan’s activism can be traced back to the early 1970s and to the Milwaukee’s Gay People’s Union, which Smith describes as “one of the hundreds of gay liberation organizations that sprang up around the country” in the wake of the Stonewall Riots. The organization became known internationally, in part because of its monthly magazine, GPU News, Smith writes. It also hosted a radio show called Gay Perspective.

Sullivan’s earliest published writing was for GPU News, and he focused on gender identity and expression. His pieces in the publication served as his first steps toward publicly coming out.

Smith writes that Milwaukee was unusual in that it was large enough to support a thriving gay scene, but small enough to be inclusive. The term “gay” included everyone, thanks largely to GPU’s leaders and members. Having a supportive community propelled Sullivan’s development as a trans man and an activist.

In contrast, Sullivan’s first experience in San Francisco was a disappointment. The city had such a large gay community that it was divided into silos of identity — and Sullivan didn’t fit into any of them.

San Francisco was more like the nation’s other gay communities during the early years of the LGBT liberation movement. The national community in the early and mid-1970s was fractured along lines of gender and sexual behavior, often in hostile ways.

Milwaukee’s openness during the movement’s fumbling first years served Sullivan well.

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