Lou Sullivan
The first trans man known to identify publicly as gay, he showed that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things.
Lou Sullivan grew up in a Catholic family in Milwaukee and kept a diary from the age of ten. In it he wrote that he wanted to be a man – and that he was attracted to men. At the time medicine had no place for such a person: gender clinics only accepted trans men who wanted to live as heterosexual men.
In the 1970s he moved to San Francisco. Gender clinics repeatedly rejected him because he was gay. He began taking hormones in 1976 and had surgery in 1986. He wrote the first guidebook for trans men, published in 1980, and in 1986 founded a support group that became FTM International, one of the first organisations for trans men.
Sullivan campaigned for medical criteria that would no longer exclude gay trans men from treatment. His argument – that gender identity and sexual orientation are independent of each other – is taken for granted today, largely thanks to him.
In 1986 he learned that he had HIV. He wrote that the doctors had told him he could not live as a gay man, and now he was going to die like one. He died in San Francisco in 1991, aged 39. His diaries were published in 2019 under the title “We Both Laughed in Pleasure”.