Milwaukee author Tim Clausen
Whether on the beach, in the comfortable confines of your backyard lanai or curled up in front of an air conditioner, summer offers that rare moment to relax and read. This season’s summer reading suggestions range from familiar titles to a new one and they’re all by local LGBTQ authors.
A good romance novel is, of course, standard fare for your beach bag. I’ll recommend Cuffed (again) by gay black cop Jermel Wilder. It’s not your cookie cutter Brad-meets-Bruce romance by any means. Set in the some of the seedier streets of Cream City, Cuffed is a thriller cum romance with characters fueled by testosterone, adrenaline and shots of Hennessey. The action-packed page-turner’s cast of bad cop/gay cop, thugs, drug lords and unlikely lovers are thrown into a twisting plot of raw emotion and raw energy. Have a box of tissues handy.
For more introspective and thought-provoking fare, Tim Clausen’s Not the Son He Expected: Gay Men Talk Candidly About Their Relationship with Their Father is a collection of two dozen personal essays around the dynamics of gay sons and their dads.
Lou Sullivan: Daring to be a Man Among Men by Brice D. Smith is a rare biography and a must-read. The author, who is also trans, presents the life and personal and political struggles of the title’s namesake, a Milwaukee activist, in compelling detail. Lou Sullivan became a civil rights and gay trans leader at the time when merely coming out of the closet and going to a gay bar were major acts of defiance. The good Irish Catholic girl from Milwaukee would migrate to San Francisco where he would realize his gay male transgender identity. He would also die there of AIDS in 1991, the first recorded trans man to suffer the fate of so many of his gay brothers. He was also the first trans man to be memorialized with a panel of the Names Project AIDS Quilt.
Lou Sullivan has remained essentially unknown in the pantheon of LGBTQ counterculture activists. Thanks to a wealth of archival material, the author has written an in-depth yet accessible history. It’s a heavier but obligatory read for anyone seeking an understanding of the early struggle for gay rights. At the same time, Sullivan’s conflicts and eventual achievement of his gay trans identity gives the reader emotionally wrenching insight into a complex personal struggle. As a courageous pioneer of trans activism, Sullivan’s journey toward self-realization impacted not only him, but also the LGBTQ community as well as the medical establishment. His process towards transition taught the greater community about its trans members while making trans individuals aware of themselves.
Simply put, Sullivan was instrumental in establishing the trans community and motivated its self-discovery as an empowered entity. That, in turn, has led to extraordinary progress in legal, political, medical and social aspects of trans life.
Given today’s discussion of trans issues, this book offers a timely opportunity for soul searching. For most of us Ls and Gs, discovering Sullivan allows recognition of a previously unheralded gay Milwaukeean. More importantly, perhaps, it opens our eyes to just how much we owe to those whose personal struggles have ultimately contributed to our greater good.
Happy reading!
