Lou's Men

Abstract

This article proposes that the personal writing of gay trans activist and diarist Lou Sullivan represents an erotic theoretical project akin to Leo Bersani's “homo-ness,” which Bersani describes as gayness's capacity to “manifest not the limits but the inestimable value of relations of sameness.” Sullivan's rigorous interlacing of gender and sexuality is founded on a desire for sameness, an eroticized recognition of his developing selfhood in the men he loves. In framing Sullivan's work with Bersani, this article argues that Bersani's framework of homo-ness is limited by its conceptual basis in genital parallel, creating an inability to speak to trans sexuality. Sullivan's writing, on the other hand, founds relations of sameness between himself and the gay men he desired in a conceptual architecture that understands gayness as an already trans position. In close reading Sullivan's diaries and personal correspondence, alongside artifacts of their reception by contemporary gay trans artists, this article substantiates a sense of Sullivan as a kind of sex symbol for the enfolding of gay and trans erotic worlds in the desire for sameness. Such an analysis allows gay and trans studies to speak to each other anew on the question, What is this same in same-sex sexuality?