Sullivan’s diaries cover his inner thoughts from age 10 until his death from AIDS-related illnesses at 40, revealing the early development, searching, and ultimate self-realization of a trans person. A recently published collection by the late trans male activist Lou Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991, offers something different. Articulating something as deeply personal and individual as gender dysphoria can be difficult when a non-trans audience may be reading about it for the first time, and many memoirs rely on past-tense reflection.

Relaying trans stories primarily through memoir comes with some risks, such as repeating familiar and well-trotted discussions of transition, as well as disclosures, coming out, and one’s past. Decades later, trans figures like Kate Bornstein and Janet Mock gained major media attention for their memoirs. Such books were nonfiction in a pulp package, which gradually led to more first-person accounts and memoirs by trans people in that format. Trans scholar Susan Stryker noted in her book Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback that many of the most famous publishers of LGBTQ literature in post-World War II America - most of them producing pulp fiction dime-store paperbacks - did not stray from topics of gender reassignment operations and cross-dressing. Famous travel writer Jan Morris has written several memoirs with 1974’s Conundrum still believed to be the greatest trans memoir written. Christine Jorgensen wrote and published her memoir prior to the Stonewall Uprising. Trans memoirs have long been the main outlet for trans people to articulate their narratives and journeys of gender and self-discovery. We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991 (image courtesy of Nightboat Books)

We both laughed in pleasure