air in New York. He quit his job at Joseph Patelson Music House, cashed out his retirement, and set out on the next phase of his life. On July 2, Sullivan recorded the raw video he hoped to edit into the first episode of his TV show, centering the camera on himself as he walked from his neighborhood to Sheridan Square and the Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 Stonewall Inn bar riot. His mood was darkened by the death of his friend Christina, a transgender woman who only recently had welcomed him and his camera into her bizarre rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. “I miss her terribly now and I always will,” Sullivan said into his camcorder. “I would like for my first cable show to be a memorial to my friend Christina.” Late in the afternoon on July 3, Sullivan recorded a video in which he and artist Bill Moye walked Blackout along the Westside Piers. As Moye and the dog jogged out ahead, Sullivan commented, “They’re running all the way out there to the end of the pier, but I don’t feel like running today. It’s July the third, and it’s the last day that I’m going to have, not to be running.” Less than 12 hours later in the early morning hours of July 4, Sullivan was dead, the victim of an apparent heart attack. He was 41 years old. Richards said he was told that because Sullivan was still alive when he reached the hospital, an autopsy was not required, and none was performed. “One of Nelson’s grandfathers died from a sudden heart attack at the exact same age: perhaps the cause was a genetic disorder,” Richards said. Sullivan’s body was returned to Kershaw, South Carolina, where he was buried at Kershaw City Cemetery following a Presbyterian graveside service. Shortly after the funeral, in accordance with their joint artistic agreement, Richards flew to New York and retrieved Sullivan’s archive, shipping the more than 600 videotapes to the Atlanta house he shared with business partner Ted Rubenstein and life partner David Goldman. For the next several years, Richards watched and cataloged the 1,100+ hours of footage, which had been carefully labelled by Sullivan. On a 1993 trip to Chicago, Richards and Goldman met Robert Coddington, a 23-year-old queer historian and archivist who was intrigued upon learning of Sullivan’s body of work. “As a young gay man