American writer and activist Lou Sullivan was BOTD in 1951. Born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin to a working-class family, he was assigned female at birth. He kept a diary from the age of 10, recording his early identification as female, fantasies of becoming a man and his teenaged relationship with a “feminine” male lover. After completing his education, he worked as a secretary at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, joining the student gay organisation and publicly identifying as transsexual. He moved to San Francisco in 1975, taking another secretarial job where he presented as female, and presenting as a gay man in his personal life. He was repeatedly denied gender reassignment surgery, due to medical expectations that he present as a heterosexual man. In 1979, he convinced doctors and therapists at the Institute for Advances Study of Human Sexuality to give him gender-affirming treatment. He became heavily involved in San Francisco’s trans community, working as a counsellor, editing trans journal The Gateway and co-founding San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society. In 1986, after completing genital reconstruction surgery, he was diagnosed with HIV, at the time considered a death sentence. He later wrote “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.” He lived for a further five years, participating in HIV/AIDS drug trials, and publishing a biography of trans activist Jack Garland. Sullivan. He also advocated for changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to drop “homosexual orientation” as a contradiction to the criteria for “gender identity disorder”, and recognise the existence of gay and lesbian trans identity. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, aged 39. In 2019, he was posthumously inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991 were published later in 2019, edited by Susan Stryker.