The other day I wrote about a PBS documentary about Casa Susanna.
Several readers let me know a few more things about this remarkable place that I would like to share. Although the documentary doesn’t air until June 27th, if you have a TPR Passport membership you can stream it now.
Barbara Jean, the Queen of the online group and magazine, Pretty T-Girls, wrote about Casa Susanna in her newsletter a few years back and with her blessing I am sharing the article (written by Katie Daubs) below.
And finally I mused about writing a book or doing a documentary about the history of the gender non-conforming community in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. Someone pointed me in the direction of an invaluable resource about notable transgender and non-binary people over the years. This is fascinating and I spent a long time exploring this.
Thank you to everyone who shared these writings! I really appreciate everyone who reads this site and everyone who shares resources that are helpful and interesting and relevant to our community.
Love, Hannah
Casa Susanna, a 1960s resort where cross-dressing was safe
In the1960s, Casa Susanna was a haven for cross-dressers, away from a world that didn’t understand the peace that came from trading in masculine clothing for bouffant hairdos and simple day dresses.
Many guests were heterosexual men who identified as transvestites, a term often considered derogatory today. Later in life, some would identify as transwomen.
In 2003, collectors Robert Swope and Michel Hurst found a box of photo albums and loose snapshots of 1960s cross-dressers, taken in a bucolic country setting, in a cardboard box at a New York City flea market. “I was electrified. I realized instantly that
these photographs were extraordinary and something that no one, outside of the group, was ever meant to see,” Swope says. A business card was attached: “Susanna Valenti. Spanish Dancing and Female Impersonation.”
Swope and Hurst published the photos in a book in 2005, and the AGO acquired the collection last year. The photos mostly showed life at two resorts in upstate New York that catered to the cross-dressing community back in the 1960s: Chevalier d’Eon and Casa Susanna, both run by Susanna Valenti and wife Marie. Some pictures had notes scrawled on the back — “Do you like my hair like this or like that?”
That the photos escaped the dustbin of history is “wonderful” to think about, says Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s associate curator of photography. “They are an amazing record of trans community in the becoming,” she says. “They are typical snapshots on the one
hand — there they are on the front porch, there they are at a picnic, or at the diving board. But then you kind of realize how exceptional they are as well, just for the subject matter alone.”
Virginia Prince, far left in the above photo, was a pioneer in the trans movement. A guest at Chevalier d’Eon for the first time in 1961, she wrote about it in Transvestia magazine, hoping to reach out to the fearful: “Here we were, 15 otherwise normal active men living and dressing like women, and very happy and comfortable we were too. It wasn’t a ‘show,’ a special ‘situation’ or even a ‘party.’ We were like any bunch of women who had gone on a weekend trip to some resort.”
Swope, one of the collectors who found the photos, was touched by the courage of the
people they portrayed, who risked their families and livelihoods if anyone found out. “These photos are not pictures of drag queens exaggerating femininity but men who longed to experience what it would be like to be a woman,” he says. The resort was not just for the Zsa Zsa Gabors and Marilyn Monroes, Prince wrote in her 1961 article. “The cost is nominal; the value in acceptance, sociability, freedom of expression, conviviality and satisfaction is tremendous.”
Many of the photos in the AGO’s collection are attributed to “Unknown American.” There are several linked to Andrea Susan. Michael Gilbert, a York University professor who researches gender theory, says his late friend, who cross-dressed as Andrea Susan, took photos at the resort and developed them on site in a darkroom, because of the paranoia and fear that would come from handing them over to a stranger. “You can almost feel their pleasure at being who they are,” says Gilbert, 70, noting how it felt the first time he went to a gender diversity conference, dressed in a skirt and top, and walked outside in 1995. “I had to sit down on the bench and breathe deeply to keep from bursting into tears. Then of course, the next question is why can’t I do this whenever I want to? Who does it
hurt? It doesn’t hurt anybody, and that’s the sadness.”
Susanna Valenti, the co-owner of the resort, wrote an advice column for Transvestia
magazine. In 1969, she wrote that she had lost the “fabulous thrill” of the two identities
and was going to live as Susanna full-time. It was one of her final columns, after which “we lose track of Susanna altogether,” curator Sophie Hackett says. The AGO suspects this collection was hers — perhaps something she tossed out or, if she died, something that was taken to a flea market.
Virginia Prince founded Transvestia magazine in 1960, and was prosecuted in 1961 for distributing obscene materials in the mail. In the late 1960s, she began living as a woman full-time. Michael Gilbert, the York professor and a lifelong cross-dresser who has the alter ego of Miqqi Alicia, calls her “the grandmother of us all.” Prince was very encouraging to others, but as she got older, she became very opinionated and alienated some people, he says. “In those days she was the only game in town.” Prince died in 2009.
In 1966, Darrell Raynor published A Year Among the Girls, which describes Raynor’s
time at the inn. “If there was a place where transvestite friendships were made and
sealed it was at this resort,” Raynor wrote in the book, which the AGO used, along with
several other books and academic papers, to help create the exhibit.
“He shared an apartment with two other men, neither of whom has any suspicion of
his transvestism,” Raynor wrote. “I was curious how he could share an apartment
and get away with it. He explained that he kept his feminine clothing in a locked bureau. He slept in satin nightgowns, kept his bedroom locked, and managed to attend to
his special laundering without any one ever spotting it.”
Katherine Cummings is a transgender rights advocate from Australia. She visited Casa Susanna as a 28-year old student, then living in Toronto. Like several of the cross-dressing community who went to the resort, she later had gender-confirming surgery. In an article for Polare magazine, she called it “the first place where I could walk around openly in daylight, confident that any one I met could be engaged in conversation
without the need for subterfuge about my underlying sex …”
Gloria was a Midwestern steel magnate who owned a Polaroid camera, a prized possession because “the results are instantaneous and transvestites cannot wait one minute longer than necessary to be shown just how beautiful they are,” Cummings writes in Katherine’s Diary. “The other reason for their popularity is the need to hide one’s
oddness from the world.”
Hannah McKnight 