I got lost several times on my way to Casa Susanna, the exhibition I had set out to write about. It was a sticky Friday night in July—“date night” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Met advertises it—and I wove through couples clutching crumpled museum maps, gazing up at Sargents and Seurats. I joined the small crowd clustered around the beguiling Madame X (1883–84), originally mired in scandal and rejected by the art world, only to later be acquired by the Met. Remembering the purpose for my visit, I asked a guard for directions. They had never heard of Casa Susanna. I found another guard, and she gave a jumbled series of instructions. Finally, a third guard pulled out a pen and drew a squiggly guide on the back of a crumpled receipt.
As I entered the low-ceilinged, dusty-rose-hued galleries dotted with photographs of corseted figures flaunting elbow-length gloves and midcentury florals, my footsteps grew muffled; I wondered if the carpet had always been there. The goosebumps that had speckled my skin in the cold limestone halls subsided. Only two other visitors inhabited the space: one in head-to-toe black, the other perched on the most glorious olive-green, McQueen-esque platforms I had ever seen. I realized I was comfortable, a foreign sensation in a gallery.
Casa Susanna, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (where it opened last year) and Les Rencontres d’Arles in collaboration with the Met, reflects on two resorts run by Susanna (Tito) Valenti and her wife, Marie Tornell, in the Catskills in the 1960s, which provided a safe, secluded space for a community of cross-dressers (to use the language of the period) to freely present en femme. Through deep digging into formal and informal archives, the curators pieced together a narrative from photographs—many of which draw on the conventions of fashion photography as well as family snapshots—and copies of Transvestia, an underground magazine of fiction, poetry, essays, and style advice led by Los Angeles–based writer and editor Virginia Prince, who herself was a guest at Casa Susanna. A curatorial note near the entrance to the galleries articulates that, while members of the community called themselves “transvestites,” or “TVs” for short, the exhibition uses the term cross-dressing, as the former is considered pejorative. Today, many of the members would likely identify as trans women, and some do. The wall labels gingerly sidestep the prickly questions latent in the terminology’s evolution: What historical conditions gave rise to the emergence of “TVs” in the cultural lexicon? Who dictated the terms of acceptable gender performance? How did this understanding of transness as a fetish—to be acted on only in private—affect future generations of trans women?
Transvestia vol II, no 8, March 1961. Collection of Betsy Wollheim. Photo © AGO.
I happened to be in the Catskills with my then-girlfriend when I first read of Casa Susanna, so the image of the place that crystallized in my mind was one of unencumbered bliss: its guests existing beyond the periphery of the gaze, among the trees, performing only for each other. The occasion for the resort’s resurgence in the media was this then-forthcoming, eponymously titled exhibition at the Met. The press lauded the “discovery”—wording that is unironically echoed in the exhibition’s wall text—of the photographic negatives depicting the remote community, first by collectors Robert Swope and Michael Hurst at a Manhattan flea market in 2004, and, separately, by photographer Cindy Sherman the following year. Yet even before I set out to immerse myself in the history of this resort and its guests, a question nagged at the margins of my thoughts: Did they want to be found?
I was from the outset skeptical of the Met’s suitability as a site for this particular trove of photographs and ephemera. On a practical level, queer people—a term I use here to encompass cross-dressers as well as gay, trans, and genderqueer people, although it was not part of the lexicon of the period—are historically the only caretakers of our archives. What, then, does it mean for this role to be handed over to a mainstream institution with so much violence embedded in its bones? My skepticism had been partly diffused as soon as I stepped onto the carpeting, feeling more like I was in the intimate, secluded Victorian house out of which Marie and Susanna operated than in the cold grandeur typical of the Met. However, through its laudatory tone and lack of contextualization, the exhibition exudes the sense that Casa Susanna was an anomaly, a quaint one-off—that even trans people were ignorant to their own transness during this period, and that the cross-dressers were content with their secluded hideaway in which to play house. While the introductory text claims that the exhibition “offers insight into a significant pre-Stonewall cross-dressing scene, inviting visitors to understand this world and its connection to the lives of transgender people today,” both the precursors and the legacy of the resort are unexplored.
Marie, who owned a wig store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and Susanna, a court translator and radio announcer, first bought a property in Hunter, New York, in the 1950s. They named this house Chevalier d’Eon, after a prominent transgender spy. There, they began hosting dinners and “female impersonator shows,” which locals frequently attended. These events gave the place a patina of social propriety: Marie’s grandson Gregory Bagarozy explains in Sébastien Lifshitz’s 2022 documentary, Casa Susanna, “They had the club/cabaret, which the mayor of the town came to see, and then the chief of police came there, and that’s sort of how they skated around and made it legitimate. They’re part of the show. That’s what the mindset was. It’s the performance.” Implicit in Bagarozy’s words was the danger Susanna and Marie were evading—hiding in plain sight, convincing the authorities, and perhaps themselves, that it was all in good fun.
In the late 1950s, Susanna and Marie sold the estate and bought a Victorian house in Jewett, an adjacent Catskills town, and turned it into the bed-and-breakfast that became known as Casa Susanna. They began hosting more intimate events, for both the local queer community and those who found them through Transvestia.
Andrea Susan, Susanna by the Casa Susanna sign, Hunter, NY, 1964–1968. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo © AGO.
The images that line the walls of the exhibition alternate between individually framed snapshots and carefully arranged collages of photographs, intermixed with covers of Transvestia sandwiched between Plexiglas. On one cover, framed by kelly-green text, a perfectly poised figure with a cinched waist and coiffed curls glides down a stone stairwell in a sleek white dress, à la Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. A quartet of images shows posed figures watering the garden, sweeping the floor, drying the dishes, and serving tea. In a different context, the mundane uncanniness of the photographs might more readily come to the surface; but situated within the country’s largest cultural repository—whose patriarchal overtures are neither new nor controversial—the images fall in line with the visual taxonomy perpetuated within its walls. Highlighting only moments of domestic bliss, glossing over the cracks in the tenuous foundation of make-believe propriety, the exhibition presents the community as yet another vignette of the American dream (albeit an anomalous one) echoed across the Hoppers and Homers in the galleries beyond.
The glorious extravagance and choreographed insouciance of the posed photographs hold an undeniable allure—my mind wanders once again to Madame X—but it was those taken in moments of stillness, after the subjects broke formation, that ensnared my glance. The image that imprinted itself on my mind depicts Susanna holding a long-stemmed rose against her cheek, her gaze sliding away from the camera. The stark loneliness of the image broke the curated coziness of my surroundings. I had a sudden desire to pluck it off the wall, wrap it in my jacket, and take it home. “It belongs over a mantlepiece, surrounded by carefully tended flowers,” I scribbled in my notes. I wondered if the figures in the candid photos had ever even seen the images, never mind approved of their dissemination. The pink walls suddenly started to feel tacky.
I also couldn’t help but compare the Sargent exhibition’s luscious descriptions of its feminine subjects—“Her twisted posture and the exaggerated pallor of her skin elicited comparisons to sculpture,” or “Lady Meux’s black dress and shadowy background set off the dazzling whiteness of her powdered skin”—to the detached, anthropological accounts of the appearances of Casa Susanna’s guests—“Their ideal was a well-put-together, ‘ladylike’ version of femininity,” or “subjects . . . [tried] on a range of clothing, wigs, accessories, and poses as they playfully explored the possibilities of femme selfhood.” I understand the curators’ hesitance to eroticize the exhibition’s subjects, but such clinical observations of queerness tacitly draw a line in the sand between normal and divergent forms of femininity. It is as if Sargent’s subjects are beautiful, while the crossdressers are merely “beautiful.”
Andrea Susan, Carlene playing scrabble, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY, 1960–1963. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo © AGO.
When I first read about Casa Susanna, the seclusion of the place had struck me as the ultimate utopia, but this fantasy wavered slightly upon my first visit to the exhibition, as the fear and pain embedded in the images began to emerge. The fantasy fell away in September, when I attended a conversation at the Met between writer Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby (Penguin Random House, 2021), and Diana Merry-Shapiro, a retired computer programmer who was a guest at Casa Susanna (the conversation was moderated by cocurator Mia Fineman). Their reflections underscored the contradictions inherent in the place’s very existence—though, despite its potency, the event did not make up for the lack of cultural and historical context present in the exhibition itself.
The notion of trans womanhood as a costume to put on in secret rather than an embodied reality—which lay at the core of Casa Susanna’s operation—has on the one hand served as a coping mechanism to navigate compulsory (cis) heterosexuality, and on the other hand invalidated and suppressed generations of trans women. As Merry-Shapiro pointed out, Prince herself is by no means the patron saint of trans liberation. Staunchly insistent that “transvestitism” was a fetish rather than an identity, Prince built her editorial career and cult of personality around “respectable” cross-dressing—“the Betty Friedan of the transvestite world,” Merry-Shapiro wryly remarked. Peters explained this philosophy as the belief that trans women are “not real women turned on by men, but men turned on by themselves looking like women.” Noting that she was (perhaps peripherally) a part of cross-dressing communities in Chicago prior to transitioning, Peters reflected that she would have transitioned sooner, saving herself years of turmoil and alienation, had it not been for the idea perpetuated within these spaces that the only proper way to navigate the world was as a cis man who occasionally moonlighted as a woman.
Unknown photographer, Susanna and Felicity in the kitchen, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY, 1960–1963. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo © AGO.
“The idea that a bunch of trans women today could buy a house upstate to all hang out in? That’s a fantasy,” Peters commented toward the end of her brief conversation with Merry-Shapiro. Queer liberation is framed within the exhibition and in the grand scheme of history as a linear march toward progress, but if that is the case, why are there fewer queer spaces across the US today than in decades past? How is it that 25 percent of the trans population owns a home, compared to 58 percent of cis people? And why is it so dangerous to simply exist as a trans person in America that homeownership is undoubtedly the last thing on many people’s minds? While the scrupulous research and linguistic sensitivity that went into Casa Susanna is evident, the happily-ever-after sheen that overlays the exhibition does a disservice to the contemporary queer communities that it claims to contextualize.
I cannot imagine the acute pain of waking up every day and performing a gender that is not my own. But what I know all too well is the intense revulsion—of both self and other—that comes from Frankensteining together a straight femme existence out of a queer femininity crushed and distorted beyond legibility. What I also know is the blissful abandon of existing in queer femme spaces, heightened by the perpetual awareness of the inevitable return to straight life. The ancestral threads that connect me to Susanna and her kin are therefore tangled and frayed but continuous.
I recently came across Russian American scholar and artist Svetlana Boym’s term diasporic intimacy, which I believe gestures to the potentiality of a queer togetherness that neither rejects history nor repeats its aggressions. Using Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’s complicated friendship as a case study, Boym suggests that intimacy could in fact be constituted by, not opposed to, uprootedness and defamiliarization. In contrast to the utopian image of intimacy as openness and total mutual understanding, diasporic intimacy is dystopic by definition. Reading this, I wondered about the bonds that transcended the staged photographs of Casa Susanna and outlived the brief run of the resort, and the sea of lost connections latent in Transvestia classifieds, destined to remain dormant under the watchful eye of Virginia Prince. The intense sadness that haunts Casa Susanna holds as much wisdom as the moments of joy. Maybe “common ground” is a liberal fantasy that succeeds only in erasing difference; maybe the (often colonial) project of utopia was never aligned with queer and trans liberation in the first place. But maybe, in the estranged tenderness of queer entanglements, there is a dystopia more perfectly imperfect than what the fleeting Catskills community dared dream of.
