Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett, Susan Stryker – Casa Susanna
Arnold Lane had a strange hobby
Collecting clothes
Moonshine washing line
They suit him fine
Pink Floyd, Arnold Lane
Given that Casa Susanna, a new book from Thames & Hudson, tells the story of a secret community of transvestites, I want to start with a confession of my own, something only a couple of people know about me. There was a short stretch, for about 15-months starting shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown, during which I wrote blog posts and advertising copy for a fetish designer based in London, one that specialized in making very “feminine” underwear for men. Their primary clients were largely middle-aged, heterosexual men, using the site to buy satin, lace, bodysuits, and thongs, things like that, designed specifically for male bodies. The site often posed men and women together to advertise their products, a couple together wearing matching lace underwear. It was fun work, especially writing the blogs. I wrote things about the history of satin, why men should try wearing thongs, and for my most popular post, I called on my audience to rethink the word panties, not to think of it as representing something about gender but more signifying cuts or styles of undies. I also like to think that I was one of the first people to publish a piece on facemasks as a new sexual fetish, an accessory many underwear designers started to produce during the early days of the COVID pandemic, now sold alongside matching lace lingerie sets.
… strictly binary understandings of masculine and feminine are too reductive … most of us fall on a spectrum, embodying some dialectic between the two.
It was a great experience for someone newly committed to making writing part of my career; I was expected to produce new content quickly and was encouraged to be playful, but I also had to fulfill assignments and draft advertising copy, not necessarily representing my own ideas or beliefs. There were lots of other lessons, too, like really learning that a lot more people are into this kind of thing than you’d imagine (the designer has been actively pursuing this kind of work since the 1980s and claims to be one of the first clothing designers to use the internet). It also became very clear to me how powerful playing with gender codes can be, in ways that can be meaningful for both men and women. I ultimately came to the conclusion that strictly binary understandings of masculine and feminine are too reductive and that most of us fall on a spectrum, embodying some dialectic between the two.
Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968 is a new publication of photographs made by a community of crossdressers that gathered in the Catskills, a mountainous region not far from New York City. The pictures first came to light in 2005, when two furniture dealers named Robert Swope and Michel Hurst published a book revealing a collection of photographs they recovered at a flea market on 26th Street in New York the year before. Not long after Swope and Hurst found these pictures, influential American artist Cindy Sherman bought a similar trove of photographs, presumably from the same flea market. Apparently, Sherman found the photographs a fascinating expression of gender. Today, the collection purchased by Swope and Hurst is held at the Art Gallery of Ontario.This new publication was developed in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Ontario December 2023-April 2024.
Casa Susanna was a resort conceived by Susanna Valenti, an oasis in harsh world that offered the transvestites and crossdressers (or as Susan Stryker, one of the essayists featured in the book, terms them, “gendernauts” – explorers of the great gender unknown) freedom to explore their gender identities.
Casa Susanna was a resort conceived by Susanna Valenti, an oasis in harsh world that offered the transvestites and crossdressers (or as Susan Stryker, one of the essayists featured in the book, terms them, “gendernauts” – explorers of the great gender unknown) freedom to explore their gender identities. More to the point, it was a sanctuary for men who needed to use “women’s” clothing to express their deepest sense of self. Many of these men, too, were married with children. In the 2022 documentary directed by Sebasien Lifshitz, Casa Susanna, there is an interview with Betsy Wollheim, the daughter of one of the crossdressers depicted in these photographs (her father, Donald Wollheim, published a book about crossdressing called A Year Among the Girls in 1966, assuming the name Darrell Raynor). She recounts that every summer she was sent away to a sleepover camp for two months, only later learning it was so her father could attend weekend gatherings at Casa Susanna, her mother driving him up every week to support his profound need to express taboo parts of himself (her parents were together for 25 years and raised three children). In another interview with an aging member of the community named Kate, we learn about a Halloween party held at the resort in 1962, when s/he describes the house as a support network nestled in the Catskills, a refuge for the men in attendance: “They just loved it, being here because they had total freedom. A total chance to be themselves for a change.”
Casa Susanna was originally called Chevalier d’Eon Resort (named after a French spy famous for dressing as women for undercover assignments) and functioned as a bed and breakfast for transvestites and crossdressers. It was a small property with several free-standing cottages, providing both privacy and community. One could stay a weekend for only $25, a fee that included meals, and all were encouraged to acknowledge and share their deeply felt desires to be women. Susanna, born in Argentina as Tito, immigrated to the United States and pursued her own life as a transvestite. She met her wife Maria in a wig store in Manhattan; many of Marie’s clientele were men wanting to appear as women, so she was open to and supportive of Susanna’s life. Susanna wrote a column for a magazine called Transvestia, and the idea for the resort emerged there, citing the need for a community and support network for people interested in crossdressing. Casa Susanna attracted a large and loyal patronage from all over the United States and Canada.
The book provides a provocative and insightful history of Casa Susanna and the lives it supported.
The book provides a provocative and insightful history of Casa Susanna and the lives it supported. It opens with reproductions from Transvestia, the magazine edited by Virginia Prince that brought Susanna Valenti to public attention. Transvestia was published from 1961-1986, and served as a lifestyle magazine for transvestites and crossdressers, offering helpful advice on clothes and make-up, poems and stories written by subscribers, and photo spreads of men dressed in women’s clothing. The book reproduces covers and interior pages from issues printed in the early 1960s. The majority of illustrations in Casa Susanna, however, are vernacular – family snapshots of the people who attended the resort, originally discovered by Swope and Hurst. I think it’s important to stress that all these photographs do read as family snapshots and have little connection to the glitz and glamour often associated with drag shows. The people in the photographs look like middle-aged, suburban American women from the 1950s, appearing happily alongside their cottages in the mountains. There are also three supporting essays in the book, by Isabelle Bonnet, a Paris educated photo historian with a keen interest in crime scene photography; Sophie Hackett, Curator of Photography at the Ontario Gallery of Art; and Susan Stryker, a Gender Studies specialist at the University of Arizona.
The histories found in Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968 are remarkable, and I recommend both the book and Sebasien Lifshitz’s 2022 documentary Casa Susanna; between the two we can get a much fuller picture of the lives depicted in these photographs. Both offer convincing evidence that all the people on these pages were truly artists, by necessity when living on such remote fringes of society. Unfortunately, there was also trauma and tragedy associated with Casa Susanna; the subjects interviewed in Lifshitz’s documentary talk openly about broken families, deep feelings of alienation and betrayal, suicide, and addiction.
To provide a bit more context about the book and its significance, I want to circle back to my experience writing the fetish blog while also taking note of some contemporary cultural conflicts we still witness around gender expression. I do believe that looking at these will reveal something about the need for a book like Casa Susanna. While researching and writing for the designer, I learned that Fresh Pair, one of the largest online underwear retailers in the United States, has a page devoted to styles of women’s panties recommended for men. I also found interesting information and statistics on other underwear blogs, like recent surveys of the number of men who wear thongs; I’ve seen polls that claim 12-15% of men regularly wear thong underwear, and retailers and bloggers on the subject note that men’s thongs are a rapidly developing industry. Interestingly, I also found dozens of discussion boards with conversations about men wearing women’s underwear, with a surprising number of men admitting to trying them at least once. I even connected with a podcast, Brief Talk, that hosts discussions and interviews with men about their underwear, often focusing on their choice to break from normal codes and expectations and the importance of underwear in creating a full sense of self.
On the other side of that coin, look at the remarkable legislation happening in America that is specifically targeting drag queens and limiting women’s rights. The Supreme Court of the United States shocked the world in overturning Roe v. Wade and made it clear that discussions about gender roles and identities are far from resolved. In April 2023, The Guardian reported on a state agency in Texas that mandated gender specific dress codes, insisting that employees wear clothing “consistent with their biological gender,” so coats and ties for men and dresses and skirts for the ladies. The state of Kentucky recently passed laws placing severe restrictions on drag shows, and many Americans feel drag queens are a greater threat to our society than gun violence.
To me, this all makes Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968 feel like an important and timely publication, showing an intriguing and unacknowledged history of gender expression in 20th century American culture. I do believe that all of us negotiate gender identity and expression in some form or another, and usually in ways much more nuanced than binary reductions. Gendernauts, indeed.
Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett, Susan Stryker
Thames & Hudson 2024
