A unique first-hand account of a historical trans person's whole life, which reads like a jubilant coming-of-age novel.Lou kept intimate diaries from the age of 10 until his tragic death at 39. Through these candid extracts, we hear Lou's life in his own words: from tween crushes on the Beatles, to first trips to San Francisco's gay bars cruising for 'youngmen' (handsome gays); from first hearing about gender non-conforming communities, to becoming a beloved trans-rights activist. This selection foregrounds Lou's exuberant love of life, men, and sex.He navigated his identity without role models and was perhaps the first publicly gay transgender man. In campaigning for the separation of heterosexual attraction from the medical requirements for transgender affirming surgery, Lou's activism is credited for our modern understanding of sexual and gender identity as distinct identities. Dying from AIDS complications, he quipped: 'They told me at the gender clinic that I could not live as a gay man, but it looks like I will die as one.' The winner of the 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD and a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award when first published in the USA, Lou Sullivan's diary will join the ranks of the most significant LGBTQ chroniclers, such as Anne Lister, Oscar Wilde, and Derek Jarman.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN STRYKER'Chatty and tender, casually poetic and voraciously sexual-Sullivan workshopped his identity and his relationships, committing to the page an interior monologue of self-discovery that paralleled the gay-liberation movement, the burgeoning transgender-rights movement, and the aids crisis... Given how many contemporary trans narratives are rooted in trauma, their choice to foreground trans pleasure and sensuality is celebratory, even radical' The New Yorker