How can a younger generation connect to Lou’s story? Susan says in her gorgeous intro, “It’s hard to convey to those who have come of age since the retroviral cocktails appeared in the mid-90s just how devastating the AIDS epidemic was before that…” The impossibility of working in a history before your time - something is inevitably lost in translation, emotionally and linguistically. Through his work, he brought thousands of trans people together across the country and helped create and preserve trans history for generations to come. He fought the medical system to officially recognize “female-to-gay males,” and in 1986 founded FTM, one of the first organizations for the FTM community he was also a founding member of San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, now host to one of the largest queer historical archives in the United States. He was an activist whose writing, public speaking, and community leadership helped establish sexual and gender identity as two distinct concepts in the public mind and rallied the female-to-male community at a time when it didn’t yet exist. Lou Sullivan was many things: a typesetter, historian, bird lover, cruising connoisseur, and arguably one of the first publicly gay trans men. It’s ironic that much of the work Lou Sullivan did for the trans male community is often lost to an endless scroll of shirtless selfies from his modern contemporaries.
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