ABSTRACT
Lou Sullivan was a gay trans man who became a founding figure for the transmasculine community that took shape in the United States in the 1980s, before his untimely death from an AIDS-related illness in 1991. Sullivan has become an icon for a new generation of trans people in the 21st century through the publication of his remarkable journals, a biography, and frequent representation in various works of trans cultural production. In his own day, Sullivan helped recover the history of transmasculine people in Western history. He played an important role in convincing the psycho-medical gatekeepers who controlled access to medicalized gender transition that trans people could have a homosexual orientation in their self-perceived gender. Unlike many trans men, Sullivan never had a significant pre-transition history in lesbian communities. Before coming out as a gay trans man, he called himself a “heterosexual female transvestite” and identified strongly with male drag queens. In “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” written before his social and medical transition, Sullivan provides one of the first published critiques of the new style of feminist transphobia that emerged in the early 1970s and found its canonical expression in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. Written in response to a co-worker in the Slavic Languages Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where Sullivan worked as a secretary before moving to San Francisco in 1975, it was first published in Gay Community News.
