Lou Sullivan Society San Francisco Bay Area

The Lou Sullivan Society

The Lou Sullivan Society strives to keep the life and spirit of Louis Graydon Sullivan, our founder, alive in the hearts and minds of transgender, transsexual and genderqueer men through providing information, support, community building, education and advocacy for Female to Male persons and their loved ones.

Building on our 21 year history of volunteer driven peer support started by Louis G. Sullivan, in Dec 1986, the Lou Sullivan Society has expanded the programming to include: Support for trans men and SOFFAs of all genders through our monthly support groups, Bridge Building with the various communities through BABN, TGSF, SF TEAM, TRANS: THRIVE and other non FTM focused groups and Education & Advocacy with the FTM Voices project interjecting the FTM POV into the conversation.

The San Francisco support group, known as FTM from 1986 - 1991, FTM International from 1992-2006, and FTM International San Francisco Lou Sullivan Chapter in early 2006, has come full circle with a new name that honors our founder and a new mission and vision to serve the San Francisco Bay Area community in all its diversity.

Mission

The Lou Sullivan Society exists to provide information, education, support, community building and advocacy for transgender, transsexual and genderqueer people assigned female at birth and their loved ones.

Vision

"To build on our 21 year history of volunteer driven peer support started by Louis G. Sullivan by expanding our projects to include: Support for Transmen and SOFFAs of all genders, Bridge Building with the various communities through TGSF, SF TEAM and other MTF focused groups and Education & Advocacy with the FTM Voices project interjecting the FTM POV into the conversation."

Support Project

Meetings and Support Groups are held on the third Saturday of each month from 2-5pm at the Eureka Valley Rec Center, 100 Collingwood Street - Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 94114.

Informational meetings odd months are (open), centered around a topic to focus discussion, provide time for networking/social gathering and are open to all genders. Support meetings even months are (closed) or limited to self-identified FTMs at any stage of the process and those who are exploring trans identity.

Schedule 2008: 1/ 19 (Open), 2/16 (Closed), 3/15 (O), 4/19 (C), 5/17 (O), 6/21 (C), 7/19 (O), 8/16 (C), 9/20 (O), 10/18 (C), 11/15 (O), 12/20 (C).

Bridge Project

The Lou Sullivan Society, currently known as FTM San Francisco, has outreach workers that go to regular meetings around the Bay Area and try to bring equity to community planning processes, while bridging the traditional gap of understanding that exists between the MTF and FTM communities.

FTM VOICES Project

Lou Sullivan's pioneering work of inserting the FTM voice into the broader mainstream society and growing national transgender community provided the opportunity for individuals, professionals, media outlets, organizations, schools and many others to learn about FTM lives through personal stories and advocacy.

The FTM VOICES Project serves as a resource for Bay Area medical providers, schools, universities, families, community organizations, media outlets, mental health workers, GLBT organizations and places of worship by offering FTM educators to participate in the design, implementation, development and auditing of programs.

About Lou

"Louis Graydon Sullivan, a female-to-male transsexual gay man, was born Sheila Jean Sullivan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 16, 1951, the daughter of John Eugene Sullivan, who owned a small hauling and moving company, and Nancy Louise Sullivan, a homemaker and sales clerk in a stationary store. Sullivan was the third child of six: Kathleen Marie (1948), John Eugene, Jr. (1949), Bridgit Therese (1953), Maryellen (1955), and Patrick Rory (1957). Sullivan grew up in an emotionally close-knit Catholic family in suburban Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, in modest economic circumstances. Extremely religious as a child, Sullivan attended Catholic primary and secondary schools, where he compiled an above-average academic record. Following high school graduation in 1970, Sullivan began working as a secretary in the Slavic Languages Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Sullivan's intense, life-long, but rather unfocused concern with male gender identity and male same-sex relationships began to take on greater definition in the early 1970s. Sullivan recalled that as a child he had always enjoyed "playing boys" and realized even then that it "meant more to me than it did to the other kids." By his early teens, Sullivan's diaries, poems and short stories reflected an interest in male homosexuality and questions about gender identity. At age seventeen, Sullivan began a long-term relationship with a self-described "feminine" male lover, and play with gender roles figured in the relationship from the beginning. Both Sullivan and his companion were attracted to the gay liberation movement, and to the gender-bending aesthetic then evident in much of popular culture.

By 1973, Sullivan identified as a "female transvestite" and began a career of transgender community activism with the publication of " A Transvestite Answers a Feminist," an article which appeared in the Gay People's Union [GPU] News. Another article, "Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation," published the next year in the same periodical and widely reprinted in the gay and lesbian press, remains a landmark article for its early investigation of the question of gender identity in homosexual culture. Sullivan continued to contribute articles and reviews to the GPU News through 1980, and donated valuable type setting and copy editing services as well.

Sullivan identified as a female-to-male transsexual by 1975, when he moved to San Francisco and found work as a secretary for the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. Although still employed as a female, Sullivan spent approximately 75% of his time cross-dressed and living as a gay man. In 1976 Sullivan began seeking sex-reassignment surgery, which was routinely denied him on the basis of his openly declared homosexual orientation. Female-to-gay male transsexuality was not recognized by the medical/psychotherapeutic establishment as a legitimate form of gender dysphoria at that time. As a result of his own frustrations, Sullivan became involved in an eventually successful campaign to remove homosexual orientation from the list of contraindications for sex-reassignment. He pioneered methods of obtaining peer-support, professional counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive surgery outside the institution of the gender dysphoria clinics, and disseminated this information at the grass-roots level through his booklet Information for the Female to Male Cross-Dresser and Transsexual, which is now in its third edition and is still the only practical guide for FTMs. As a consequence of his efforts, Sullivan became one of the founders of the female-to-male transsexual community, and is responsible to a significant degree for the rapid growth of the FTM population during the late 1980s.

Sullivan began taking testosterone in 1979, at which time he also became a volunteer at the Janus Information Facility (now J2CP), a gender dysphoria clearinghouse and referral service in San Francisco. He also became involved in Golden Gate Girls [and successfully petitioned to have "Guys" added to their name], one of the first social/educational transgender organizations to offer support to FTM transsexuals. In 1980 he underwent a double mastectomy and began living full time as a gay man. Sullivan also changed jobs at this time, becoming an associate engineering technician at the Atlantic-Ritchfield Company, so that coworkers would have no knowledge of his previous female life history. That same year he published the first edition of his Information for the FTM. Throughout the decade, Sullivan continued to write about female-to-male issues in the gay and transgender press, and became a popular public speaker on the topic in the San Francisco Bay area. He [was a founder of] the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, whose newsletter he helped edit and publish. In 1984 Sullivan started his own typesetting and word-processing business. He also began work on a biography of Jack B. Garland, a female who lived as a man for forty years at the turn of the century. The book was published to favorable reviews by Alyson Press in 1990.

In 1986, Sullivan finally obtained genital reconstruction surgery; he also organized FTM, the first peer-support group devoted entirely to female-to-male [transsexual and transvestite] individuals. Later that year Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS. In his last years Sullivan devoted himself to work on behalf of FTMs, as well as the broader transgender and homosexual communities. He died of an AIDS-related illness on March 6, 1991, at the age of 39." (Source:Susan Stryker PhD, Guide to the Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers, 1755-1991 (bulk 1961-1991),California Digital Library