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Reviews tagging 'Rape'
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan by Lou Sullivan
2 reviews
woweewhoa's review
emotional
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Terminal illness, Sexual content, and Medical content
Moderate: Homophobia, Death, Transphobia, Death of parent, and Animal death
Minor: Rape and Toxic relationship
brnineworms's review
dark
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
“They told me at the gender clinic that I could not live as a gay man, but it looks like I will die as one.”
I’m not sure how to review a book of diary entries – it feels so wrong rating somebody’s life. I know it would be cliché to call this book inspiring, but it really is. I don’t mean that in a cis “wow, you’re so brave” way. Lou Sullivan himself is inspiring, not only as a gay trans man or even as a queer activist, but as a human being.
It’s also really interesting to see how trans terminology and, more than that, our very understanding of what it means to be trans has changed over the decades. Sullivan describes transness as “a sexual minority (TV/TS) within a sexual minority (homosexual)” and as a disability (due to him being born without a penis), and though this isn’t how I or most other trans people would think of transness today, it’s an honest expression of how Sullivan felt about his own identity.
Another passage I want to highlight is this:
“I can never be a man until my body is whole and I can use it freely and without shame. I may appear in all outward ways to be a man and I may feel in my heart all that a man feels, yet my spirit is hampered and my dreams of being a whole man will always be just dreams... I will always have to back down...my shortcomings will always be a factor. I do not mean that I am not a man, that my living as a man is a lie. I mean that I cannot even fool myself when I stand face-to-face with another man and he is full of pride + privilege + confidence that has been his birthright.”
Again the phrasing is a little clumsy, but his attempt to express abstract thoughts and feelings of otherness comes from the heart.
This book reminded me to be tolerant (though I dislike that word) and to engage with curiosity instead of the impulse to police and to “correct.” Honestly, it’s foolish to think the way we view transness today is somehow the “right” way, to think the vocabulary we use now is the vocabulary that will be used ten, twenty, fifty years from now. It’s all fluid and socially constructed.
We Both Laughed In Pleasure is an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish. Tragedy is punctuated with humour, and vice versa. There’s a lot of sex. A lot of death. And it has a great deal of value as a piece of queer history. An important read.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deadnaming, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Homophobia, Sexual content, Grief, Medical content, Death of parent, Drug use, Car accident, Cursing, Death, and Terminal illness
Moderate: Alcoholism, Ableism, Acephobia/Arophobia, Sexual violence, Incest, Misogyny, Rape, Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, and Police brutality
Minor: Abortion, Lesbophobia, Mental illness, Vomit, Addiction, Blood, Cancer, Murder, Suicide, and Violence
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