Casa Susanna 

was a popular weekend destination in Jewett, New York in the United States, for cross-dressing men and transgender women in the early 1960s. The bungalow camp was run by Susanna Valenti and her wife Maria, who also ran a wig store in town.

Maria purchased the 150 acre property in the mid-1950s; originally, the Valentis had dubbed it Chevalier D'Eon** Resort. They charged $25 for a weekend's stay, which included food, lodging, and lessons in makeup.

Hidden away in the rural Catskills, Casa Susanna provided much needed privacy to its guests, in a time when public cross-dressing was a criminal offense across most of America*. However, guests occasionally visited the town of Hunter to shop, where they were met by a range of reactions. Some were negative, but many locals saw them as reliable customers. Casa Susanna was a haven for its guests to celebrate their "inner girl" without persecution, and acted as an important space within which guests were allowed to comfortably and happily participate in activities such as gardening and board games whilst expressing their gender identity or inner desire to cross-dress.

Most guests at Casa Susanna were married, and considered themselves heterosexual men who enjoyed cross-dressing, but many others later identified as transgender and lived out their lives as women, including Virginia Prince and Susanna herself.

 

 

Casa Susanna also offered photography, having appointed one of their guests, Andrea Susan, as their official photographer. In doing so, the Valentis avoided the possibility of sending the negatives to a professional developer who might later call the police, and allowed for affirming photographs of their guests to be taken as a souvenir and as a source of affirmation for their gender expression.

Andrea took many photographs of her fellow guests and developed them at home; though Polaroid cameras were available at the time, Andrea used a film camera that required the use of negatives instead, and put the negatives in the possession of her photography mentor Dick, who had gifted her her photography equipment. However, when Dick later married, these negatives were thrown away, eventually making their way to a Manhattan flea market in the mid-2000s. There, they were found by Robert Swope, "a gentle punk rocker turned furniture dealer", who bought every photograph he could find and published them in a book with his partner Michel Hurst. The release of the book Casa Susanna, fifty years after many of the photographs themselves were taken, led to many former attendees of Casa Susanna coming forward to share their experiences, allowing Casa Susanna to be documented.

*This 'criminal offence' was challenged in the courts through the 1960s and 70s but in the 50s and 60s, New York and other cities enforced a "three-item rule" where a person had to wear three items of gender-appropriate clothing to avoid arrest for public disguise. 

 

** Chevalier d'Eon was a French diplomat and spy whose androgynous looks meant that he could pass himself off as a man or a woman, a handy trait in espionage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below we have a selection of the Casa Susanna clientele in 'public disguise'!

 

Indoors and stylish

 

Outside at play

 

and back indoors for a Happy Christmas

 

 

 

 

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Transvestia

 

Virginia Prince was born on November 23, 1912, in Los Angeles, California.

In 1961 Prince started the first cross-dressing organization, the Hose & Heels Club, which in 1962 became the Alpha Chapter of the Foundation for Full Personality Expression (FPE or Phi Pi Epsilon), later the Society for the Second Self (Tri Ess or Tri Sigma) in 1975. Membership was restricted to heterosexual male cross-dressers.

Prince's career in transgender education activism began in 1961 when she was prosecuted for distributing obscene materials through the US Mail because she had exchanged sexually explicit letters with another cross-dresser. She was given probation and was forbidden to cross-dress. Prince's lawyer requested permission for her to cross-dress for the purpose of educational presentations.

Prince began living full-time as a woman in 1968, at the age of 55. Prince published a number of important works on cross-dressing, amongst them The Transvestite and His Wife (1967) and How To Be a Woman Though Male (1971). Prince died in 2009.

 

Dr. Virginia Prince (1992)

Price became very controversial because of her determination to exclude homosexuals from her heterosexual coterie.

In 1960, Virginia Prince founded Transvestia magazine. Published six times a year in Los Angeles by Chevalier Publications, 1960-1986, it was edited by Prince until 1980, and then sold to Carol Beecroft, who acted as editor until 1986. Transvestia was the first widely-distributed magazine focused on the cross-dressing community. In time, it expanded to include content about the larger trans community. In an era before the internet, the publication became a major life-line for its readers. In Transvestia, trans people could openly write about their experiences, challenges, and successes. Subscribers to the publication were able to network and connect with each other by way of articles, ads, and by personally writing to the editors.