A Clippings Scrapbook: Lou Sullivan, Jack Garland, and the Search For Trans Liberation in the Writings of Those Before Us

Sep 4

In the 1970s, a young trans man dug through newspapers and history to unearth the life and times of Jack Bee Garland, Thirty years later, a team of archivists did the same with his own story.

by Piper Bly

The year is 1984. A young man in San Francisco named Lou Sullivan gushes in slanted cursive into a diary-and-memos book, ecstatically writing about the subject of his research. “I gather each tidbit, each lead I pursue as tho / I am finding someon

Jack Bee Garland, or “Babe Bean”, as he was known during his brief time as a newspaperman living in a house-boat off Stockton, California, was one of the many folk who were assigned female at birth but chose to live as a man during the turn of the c

It’s fitting that Lou was the one to write Jack’s biography, because Lou Sullivan was someone who knew what it was to not have words for who you are. One of the earliest advocates for gay trans men in a time when sexual orientation was explicitly pa

Making folk like him–trans men, especially those attracted to other men–feel less alone was something Lou turned his life towards. He published prolifically, editing The Gateway from July 1979 to October 1980, and 1 founding FTM International and sp

Not too long after, however, a young Susan Stryker arrived at a meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, wanting to contribute to the society’s archives and work. As she later put it in the introduction to We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The

(A 4th wall breaking image of me at my drawing board, drawing the previous panel. The text is in my own hand-lettering, rather than typewritten.) You know, every time I write these strips, that one Aesop Rock verse echoes in my head. “We’re all

Sources:

The Lou Sullivan Collection at the Digital Transgender Archive. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/col/j6731380t

A Gender Variance Who’s Who. https://zagria.blogspot.com

From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. Lou Sullivan, 1990

We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991.

Lou Sullivan; edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, 2019

Aesop Rock - “Dorks”, from the album “The Impossible Kid”

Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at piperbly.com.

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