But We Both Laughed in Pleasure is better than the sterile document I had imagined: It gave me the rare, uncanny experience of reliving my youth through his, of cataloging his moments of idiocy and bliss as though they were my own, with a specificity I didn’t know was possible.
I thought of him as heroic, almost inhuman. I imagined him alive today, nearly 70-maybe patchily maintaining an Instagram account, maybe turning up to speak on a panel now and then, maybe cohabiting with the lifelong partner he always wanted-and I mourned him.īefore I read the diaries, when I only knew about the major bullet points of his life, I was astonished by the idea that anyone could parse his own mysterious needs so clearly with no template. Like a lot of transmasculine people who have encountered his story, especially those of us who are attracted to men, I have a rabid affection toward him. I will save the details of his deteriorating health for those who read the collection in full, but suffice it to say I got through them tearfully. He covets them-that night, he worries that when he wakes up the next morning they won’t be there. At a Penney’s with his mother, who has just bought him a guitar, he asks her if the store also sells “those ‘unmentionables’ meanin the cowboy boots.” He slips a pair on “just outa curiosity” and takes a strut in them, and she offers to buy them. For a phase, he commits to a Bob Dylan persona, affecting his folksy speech patterns. Model yourself on them + you’ll have no worries.” He sees Tiny Tim on television and finds him “beautiful.” His mother scolds him for waving at a man on a motorcycle. “Paul-Ringo-Paul-Ringo they keep bouncing around in my head,” he writes during a fit of Beatlemania. “I love it!” (“Menstruation isn’t such a big, hairy thrill to me anymore,” he notes immediately afterward.) His future boyfriend, he fantasizes, “will be very thin and irresponsible, but he will love me deeply, and I him.” His attractions often blend joyfully and unselfconsciously with his aspirations.
“My second day of menstruation,” he writes in an early entry. He exhibits not a distaste so much as an ambivalence toward the usual trappings of womanhood. From his earliest entries, he shows an acute sensitivity to his own cravings and preferences. As a kid, Sullivan is exuberant, eccentric, and horny.
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