a portrait of lou sullivan
buda kunstcentrum, 2023, kortrijk
A portrait of Lou Sullivan
was a performance/powerpoint/invitation to collectively read fragments of We Both Laughed in Pleasure: the Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (1661-1991). As part of an assembly organised by the artistic research project Aids, Archives and Assemblies in Belgium, I proposed to (re)visit this book, taking part in the specific and situated relation to HIV and Aids that unfold along the text.Louis Graydon Sullivan was an American author and activist known as perhaps the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay, and to pursue gender transition while battling medical homophobia and insistance on heterosexual behavior as a requirement for living as a man. His selected diaries (which contains a tiny fraction of the 2m2 of archives left by Lou after his death) give insight into his struggle for self-determination, his activism and support to other trans men, the ups and downs of his medical transition, his romantic and sexual life, his friendships, his love for birds, and eventually his HIV diagnosis and death from related illness.
While the publication of We Both Laughed in Pleasure has posthumously revived Lou’s memory and elevated him to a certain icon status in transmasc, and specifically transgay history and culture, he remains quite absent of HIV and Aids historical narratives. The performance/powerpoint/invitation to collectively read fragments of his diaries insisted on carving him a place there; or rather acknowledging his existing inprint. It also proposed to lead with Lou’s words rather than applying a general preconception of what this kind of narrative might bring up: indeed, as Lou’s relation to his gender and sexuality solidifies into a fully gay life in the San Francisco of the eighties, the HIV diagnosis, which usually rang like a death sentence, deploys another set of possibilities and meanings. This is illustrated by one of the most famous line from his diaries: I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one.
The collective reading was structured by a powerpoint, itself following the division of the book chapters. From each chapter, I extracted a sentence, which when read altogether form a kind of poem, a new reading of the book, and a different view of the epidemic, a peak from the sidelines that offers a possibility for self-inventation, renewal and even bliss. It doesn’t negate the horrors of the epidemic, nor aims to soothe it by the spell of liberal positivity. It proposes to complicate, to hold contradictions, and to view Lou’s trajectory as a decisive component of HIV and Aids histories.
A portrait of Lou Sullivan
is, simply, a reading of a reading of a reading... that only asks to keep on being read.No pictures were taken during the performance/powerpoint/reading to respect the anonymity of participants/public.
Edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, and published in 2019 by Nightboat Books, We Both Laughed in Pleasure is the first (and so far only) book on Lou’s life. TransFagTrad is currently working on a collective, self-organised, French translation of the book.