The Lou Interviews #5: Ellis Martin & Zach Ozma
Hi all,
At last, my final installment of Lou Sullivan content! This is the fifth of five interviews, and has been delayed by a move - I’m reporting now from south of the park in Kensington, Brooklyn.
The context: In early June, I published an overdue obituary for trans activist and writer Lou Sullivan as part of The New York Times’ Overlooked series. Through interviews I gathered a treasure trove of insights, historical context, and stories from sources, much of which didn’t make it into the final piece. I’ve been posting excerpts from my interviews here.
First was my phone interview with Lou’s older brother Flame Sullivan. Next, I posted an email exchange with trans historian Susan Stryker followed by my virtual interviews with Lou’s contemporary Jamison Green and with Lou’s biographer Brice D. Smith.
This last installment is a joint interview with the editors of We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, published by Nightboat in 2019. Ellis Martin works with digital derivatives in the interstice of art and archive. His short films have screened at San Francisco Transgender Film Festival and Trans Stellar Film Festival, and he has generated large-scale digitization projects at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, Letterform Archive, Mills College Art Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California. Zach Ozma is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is informed by archival research, ancient artifacts, and neo-classically gay imagery. He is the author of BLACK DOG DRINKING FROM AN OUTDOOR POOL (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019).
We spoke in June 2022 over Zoom.
Megan Milks: How did you two first learn about Lou and the diaries?
Zach Ozma: I first meaningfully learned who Lou Sullivan was from a professor I had in college named Rebecca Edwards. I had taken a class with her at CCA and I was like, Oh, she's amazing. So I cross registered for a class that she was teaching at Mills called Trans Poetics. One week she assigned us Susan Stryker’s essay, “Portrait of a Trans Fag Drag Hag: The Activist Life of Lou Sullivan.” And also "Embracing Transition: Dancing in the Fullness of Time" by Julian Carter. [I started to see Lou as] not only an interesting person, but as one of the people that kind of stands in for a certain cultural turning point.
That was the fall of 2013. At the time, the diaries and certain other parts of his collection were on loan from the GLBT Historical Society to the San Francisco Public Library History Reading Room, at the Civic Center branch. When I figured out that it was actually really easy to go look at them, I went for my own interest.
Ellis Martin: I had a vague cultural awareness of Lou as a person and then my introduction came in tandem with this project. I was about to take the same class with Rebecca Edwards at Mills, that Zach mentioned. I went up to introduce myself to her and she said, “You know, I think there's somebody that you'd really like to meet, working on this project related to Lou Sullivan.”
I was just starting to get really, really involved in digitization. I was also working with Mills in the art museum with their institutional archive. My interest in archives was growing and I was on my own journey with my understanding of my gender. It was a perfect moment to meet Zach.
ZO: It was really obvious as soon as we started talking that I didn't need to interview anybody else. He had the other half of the skill set that we needed to do this. My background is in community arts, social practice, the writing and sculpture kind of zone. I had an idea of what kind of vibe I wanted the book to have and what some of my ideas for editorial constraints were. But as far as getting it from archive to book, I needed Ellis's skill set and temperament.
MM: I love that you included a photograph of one spread in the book. What was it like to interact with these journals as material objects?
EM: It really felt like Lou was there with us. We were at the History Center in SFPL, and there was a hair in one of the journals. He would sometimes tape in his little chin hairs. But then there was also just hair that was accidentally included, or maybe intentionally included, maybe from somebody else, or maybe also Lou’s hair. I remember Zach and I had a moment where we totally freaked out.
It became clear in my mind that the physicality of the journals was a part of why Lou felt so alive in the present. His words are incredibly captivating and provocative, but also there was the tangible—touching this thing, the actual material, this hair.
ZO: He was near the end of a diary when he got a diagnosis. And the next diary he buys after that is really slim. After that year, he goes back to the normal-size diaries for the rest of his life, but that first one after he found out why he was sick, is just like this tiny, tiny—like a couple-notes-a-day-size diary, which really stands out. The other ones are fairly thick. His one little slim diagnosis book is really heavy.
And then, all the empty pages at the end of the last diary, when he went back to normal-size books. Because he had long outlived the prognosis he was given by that time.
EM: And the sign out. He actually signs off. It was the very end of February 1991. He actually says goodbye—that's probably at least four days before he actually passed. The choice to not return.
The diaries are 365-page diaries. Most of them, there's a space dedicated to each day. That those that are already delineated in the future are not going to be accessed—I don't know, there's something about that.
ZO: He wasn't writing exactly one page entry every single day. Sometimes he'll skip a few days. And then this thing that made me feel absolutely cross-eyed and confused when we were transcribing was he sometimes would—say it's May 15th. And he has a lot to say as he finishes up May 15th. He finishes up May 16th. Then he starts to get kind of worried he's going too far, but he's like "well, I didn't write anything on March 2.” So he goes “continued on March 2,” flips back, fills March 2nd, runs out of room again. And then skips around to another place sometimes.
Some dates in handwriting match up with the printed date and sometimes they're completely off in a non-chronological manner.
EM: There's a queer temporality element to that. I love seeing other people imposing their own structures on top of the pre-existing structures and making it work. Seeing him rearranging his understanding of time to make this physical object fit his needs.
[Whereas] I get so lost in the structure, I could see myself being like, well, “there's a day for May 15, I guess I should write in it.”
ZO: Or I would just buy a blank line book. Right? I think maybe one or two years he had one without dates.
EM: Yeah. [Mostly] he insisted on the dates, but he also insisted on defying the dates.
MM: What in your words was so special about Lou? Why do you think so many of us respond so strongly to his voice and his contributions?
ZO: For one thing, I think he was probably just a likable guy. I have the sense from his own writing, where he describes a situation and also how other people respond to him, that he was a good listener and was funny and interesting. A guy you would want to go get a burrito with. I think that's part of it.
What I kept thinking about when we were working on the diaries was Lou's historical work: his biography of Jack Bee Garland, all the work he did to try to find models in history. It was such a mirroring moment. One of the lines we selected for a chapter epigraph was “I gather these little pieces of him as if I'm learning about someone with whom I'm in love.” That was a perfect mirror of how it felt, like another generation out, to work on Lou's materials.
He was someone who had this orientation towards history and towards the storytelling and sharing of this niche, hidden, transmasculine history. He set up his life to make this [book] much easier for us. For Ellis and I to be working on a project where there's explicit permission multiple times in the diaries to publish the diaries, that makes it really different and allows us to edit in a richer way and more generous way—because Lou Sullivan set up the preservation of his own life in his diaries and in his archive with the intention, or at least with the hope, that somebody would come along and give him the treatment that he gave Jack Garland.
EM: There’s also the interpersonal [aspects]—I think this speaks to likability. There's how he he speaks to the diary and speaks of other people. It sort of radiates in this way where you can tell that his whole life is external in a certain way—it's very interior in the moment, but the physicality of the moments of the things that he cares about, his interactions with other people, are so wrapped up in the dynamic and the actual bodies and the presence that happens in connection.
ZO: In a moment where my friends who are going to SF or NY pride are like, “hope there isn't a mass shooting while I'm here” —there's this way that Lou, in also extremely terrifying times to be a swishy gay transsexual, moved through the world with a certain kind of fearlessness and audacity. He moved through gay sexual spaces with like a fearlessness and audacity that I think a lot of us would like to dial up in our personalities.
I think him being a big flirt and pretty extroverted, and pretty comfortable talking about being a big flirt and being extroverted—who doesn't want to dial that up like just a little bit in their social life?
MM: Is there anything else you’d like to add about what Lou his life and work has meant to you?
ZO: I'm loving the Lou Sullivan cultural production boom that's happening right now. Every time I see that someone's done a little Lou illustration or there's an NPR Tiny Desk song about Lou Sullivan or—somebody sent me experimental softcore porn that involves these guys reading the book to each other or, you know, some We Both Laugh in Pleasure memes on Twitter that will pop up—I just love it.
Because I think, like Lou Sullivan, there was a long time where I was like, where's the cultural proliferation of me? The guy who is kind of doing a similar sort of thing to me?
Lou would have gotten like a real kick out of how much work people are making about him.
EM: I just keep thinking back to the event that we did at The Kitchen, where I probably shook hands with or hugged at least 100 people that night. That was in November 2019. I don't think that would probably ever happen again, just to have all these trans people together.
I'm forever grateful to Lou Sullivan for how he has exploded my life with trans people forever. That is the greatest gift and feels like exactly what he was doing. It’s the living legacy of Lou existing in all of us—and proof of the power of archives.