“I feel an urgency to have this story told so that I don’t have to feel that I’m going to die and there’s going to be more female-to-males coming to the gender clinics and they’re going to be told that there’s no such thing as a female to male gay man, that it can’t be done and you can’t do it, like what they told me.”
Finding images of Trans+ history makers that are rights-free and easy for a grassroots not-for-profit organisation to use is incredibly difficult.
There are lots of iconic shots of this incredible Trans+ and queer hero - but very few are OK to use without paying large licence fees.
Money should not be a barrier to celebrating our history and remembering our Trans+ and gender-diverse trailblazers.
So QueerAF and Trans+ History Week have set out to fix that.
Building on our commission with artist Sunday Avanti to create a portrait of Marsha P Johnson, we've worked with Andreas Lhotský, to produce this illustration of Lou Sullivan.
It's based on a famous photograph, but also incorprates elements of Sullivan's life, including his parrot.
From today, we’re making it available under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) for any not-for-profit organisation to use for free—see below for commercial licences.
It’s one way we hope to pay back the community for enthusiastically supporting our creatives' history stories, which have been all about learning from Trans+ history so we can apply those lessons to the present.
Commercial uses of this image
Licenses for commercial uses of this image, e.g. in advertising, marketing, or by anyone who would profit from the use of this image, are not yet available
What is Lou Sullivan's legacy?
Lou Sullivan is known to many as a first. One of the first openly gay trans men in public life, widely considered the first known case of a trans man developing AIDS, and later the first trans man known to die of AIDS-related illness.
His story, his legacy, is a complex one, though. A pioneer of history and archiving, as well as on the front lines of HIV advocacy, we look back at his life at a time when we should be only years away from ending the HIV pandemic.
Instead, because of cuts made by the Trump administration, HIV is on the rise in some places for the first time in years.
To bring this illustration to life, we've commissioned a special mini-documentary about Sullivan's Legacy.
It comes as we mark ten years of making podcasts, and we kick off season 7 with an episode from reporter Alex-Parnham Cope - with new episodes out every Monday, all the way through Pride season.
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