kiestan

A while ago I wrote a media roundup for November. When I got to the part about novels I'd read that month, I started typing and typing and it got a little long. When I decided to split it into its own post, my comments per book got a tad long too. So I'm just going to dedicate a small post to each book instead!

We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan

This is an edited collection of personal diaries by a gay ftm activist born in Wisconsin, who moved to San Francisco. He started writing his diaries when he was 11 in 1961, and he kept up with it until he died from AIDs in his late 30s, in 1991.

Lou wrote with incredible clarity for a horny, depressed teenager.

The 70s and 80s were also such a different time, like wow. I don't know if this was because he lived in the US or what but the guy was out there doing casual drugs, having wild gay sex (back when he still thought of himself as a woman... idk how he did it, but whatever he had going on with his male partners was not heterosexual), and his lovers could walk in and out of each other's unlocked houses? His parents let him run around? The time and setting are so different from my childhood that I struggled to comprehend it, LOL.

It was fascinating to see him self-actualize into a gay trans man back when there wasn't the same degree of medical support or public awareness of people like him. Gender clinics often turned him away because the medical world thought you had to transition into a straight man or straight woman. He advocated for that requirement to change and he did see that change happen while he was still alive.

His entire family had a rough life - they experienced a series of tragedies in the 80s and 90s, not least aided by his death. I cried a bit at the end of the book because his diaries started featuring reflective entries about how he's lived his life so far, the physical and emotional toll of living with a stigmatized disease, as well as vivid dreams about him passing on. At the start of every year, he was so surprised to have made it.

But the entries were also full of joy about the mundane and satisfaction about his achievements. By the end of his life he seemed to have come to terms with it. Idk, it's just sobering to think about how much someone can live and experience in less than four decades... how short and expansive a human life can be.

Lou's so funny too, he has lines like "I'm still nursing my precarious left ball" (he got bottom surgery but his left testicle had complications) and "That guy was Mr. Straight-o. Said no one had ever asked him to do anything like [Lou asking him to wear a sexy garter belt]. I told him he had to expand his horizons."

I highlighted a bunch of quotes from his diaries, but I really liked this one, written 3 years after receiving his AIDs diagnosis, which he spent anxious that he wouldn't be able to publish his books/diaries in time:

So here I am, forty-two minutes into 1990, and "thankful" is not really what I am feeling. What I am feeling is amazed, inspired, relieved, amused. Here I am, long after I ever imagined. I remember telling Sasha Alyson that I could wait to be placed on his publication schedule, because there was no way I would be around in 1989. And now I've left 1989 behind! How funny! I feel such a sense of power and control over the future... that, a word I've hardly dared to utter these past three years.

He died a year after writing this entry. Memoirs and diary collections like his made me think about how non-linear the progression of your life is, how unpredictable and indifferent fate can be, and how there isn't a grand plan to follow, just a narrative you create when you reflect on and make meaning out of your personal history.