Talk to me about historical nuance in Lou’s writing.
Zach: Working with Lou helped me let go of a certain kind of rigidity that makes it really hard to work with people older than you. We’re just speaking different dialects, but close enough to communicate if we adjust our expectations. In our editorial process, Ellis and I said that we have a smart audience and we trust them.
Susan [Stryker] 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.
How can a younger generation connect to Lou’s story?
Zach: Lou would’ve had a great time on Craigslist personals, Grindr, Scruff… I think he is one of many our generation missed out on who would’ve been our mentors, teachers and support group leaders. They’re all dead. And Lou was a rare person in that he kept this incredibly, generously intimate record of his life with this intention to carry his presence as a person, but also his at the time extremely unusual subject position, into a future where he was keenly aware that he would be absent from the community.
Ellis: Part of the reason the book is pink is because we really wanted to highlight the moments Lou falls outside that transitional and banal understanding of trans men as “really butch,” as if that’s the only possible way to be. Lou’s way freakier than that, and more interesting. What he tried to accomplish and the language he had and the history he brought forth, that all feels very much like what he was working with. To bring Lou into the present day, would Lou use he/him pronouns? What would his relationship be to maleness?
What was the process behind going through Lou’s diaries and choosing what made it in?
Ellis: We knew we wanted to start at the very first entry. That was something we had to fight our developmental editors on… it wasn’t the most eye-catching excerpt to start with. We really wanted to acknowledge that we’re making choices within it, but also start at the very beginning, and end at the very end. [Writer’s note: The first entry, written by 11-year-old Lou, is “I made a mistake and ate some Sugar Smacks.”]
First I photographed all the diaries and turned them into PDFs. We would’ve spent years at the archives by the time we got in there, transcribed and left for the day. There was a master spreadsheet. Each diary had a tab. We’d read through the diary, make selections. We generated a huge list of our favorite picks. We had this skeleton for a while, then moved into transcription. Then edited down from there, added a glossary and footnotes.
You intentionally ran just one photo of Lou, printed at the end of the book.
Ellis: Earlier, we had a photo of Lou at the beginning of every chapter. Beyond being expensive, I think it was you, Zach, who looked at it and said, “This kind of looks like a Facebook memories transition timeline that someone isn’t choosing to create themselves,” which could be a moment of unintended voyeurism from cis people.
Our primary focus for this book was definitely trans people, with an awareness that there would be cis people reading the book too — how to circumvent that moment of voyeurism for people who aren’t in the community who have access to the materials. Yes, cis people will and can look at the diaries in person, but the level of the access of the diaries shifts when we publish this.
Zach: One of my personal goals for the project was to present Lou Sullivan as a writer in his best form, which I strongly believe was his diaries. He wrote some fiction. He wrote some erotica. He wrote some poetry. They’re all pretty rough… but I think he really shines as an author of personal narrative and in this casual day to day form. I think showing his growth through the writing over the course of his life allows you to have a different experience than getting a picture at each point.
A lot of moments read like erotica… I was like, “Woah, Lou!” I had no idea. There’s something so powerful in being able to read about the raw sexual joy he experienced.
Ellis: The positivity feels tied to resilience in [Lou’s] response to how he took people’s responses to him. There’s a great hookup he almost has with this guy that he cruises at a ticker tape queens bar in San Francisco called Sutter’s Mill. He finds the one guy not dressed up and they cruise each other from across the room. As the guy’s leaving, [Lou] touches his arm and says something like, “Can I come with you?” The guy says he can’t, he has a meeting. Someone could take that as a brush-off, but Lou is really excited about the cruise itself. Something that feels particularly striking about him is, you can have how you’re perceived and how this interaction plays out, but he’s so excited about the interaction itself. That feels markedly different from how a lot of people move through the world, and really special. It’s positive, you know? It’s getting to have the experience instead of looking for outcomes of the experience before you’ve even finished the experience itself.
