Revisiting a Midcentury Haven for Cross-Dressing Men

[Sandra]

The documentary "Casa Susanna" explores the Catskills boardinghouse community that allowed denizens to express their identity when that was taboo.

Four figures are lined up against a gauzy red curtain and looking at the camera. They're all wearing dresses and high heels.
Guests at Casa Susanna, the subject of a documentary coming to PBS. "The creation of this refuge was something extraordinary," Sébastien Lifshitz, the director, said.Credit...via the Art Gallery of Ontario and Arte
Four figures are lined up against a gauzy red curtain and looking at the camera. They're all wearing dresses and high heels.

Sébastien Lifshitz's documentary "Casa Susanna" remembers a community of cross-dressing men and transgender women who found refuge in the Catskills in the 1950s and '60s. Their gathering place, a Victorian boardinghouse, was christened Casa Susanna after one of its founders, Susanna Valenti, a translator and broadcaster, who was married to Marie Tonell, a New York wig maker. The couple ran Casa Susanna until the late 1960s, but its existence came to broader awareness with the 2005 publication of a book collecting Casa Susanna snapshots that had been found in a New York flea market.

Lifshitz, who is French, has been making movies about gender and identity since the early 2000s. "The story of Casa Susanna wasn't supposed to be visible, or 'out,' so it is still a miracle that we are able to know the whole story today," he said. He interviewed two alumnae, Katherine Cummings and Diana Merry-Shapiro, who shared their journeys and struggles, and revisited their stomping grounds in the Catskills. (A version of the house's story was portrayed in "Casa Valentina," a 2014 play by Harvey Fierstein.)

I spoke with Lifshitz about making this documentary, which airs on PBS on Tuesday as part of "American Experience." at a moment of increased visibility and turmoil around issues of identity. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

How did you first encounter Casa Susanna?

The first time I heard of it was the publication of the book in 2005. I bought it then because I'm also a photo collector. For many years I've bought snapshots at flea markets and garage sales in France. I've been into queer pictures and all these invisible people since I was a kid. In 2015, I did a big exhibition with the photographs I was collecting on cross-dressing, and I talked with a historian of photography, Isabelle Bonnet, who had made a memoir about Casa Susanna. I said we should do a film about it [the documentary credits her as a collaborator], because it is a very important story about pre-queer culture, this underground network of cross-dressing.

What struck you as special about Casa Susanna?

The creation of this refuge was something extraordinary. If you had the desire to cross-dress, nothing around you could help you to understand it at the time. These very intimate questions were impossible to talk about with anybody else. Most of the men in the Casa Susanna community were white people from the middle class that had good jobs and a bit of money, and were married, some with kids. What is also fascinating is that this community was created with certain rules. For example, homosexuals or transsexuals were forbidden. They only accepted people who presented themselves as men who cross-dress. So it's weird to think that, in a way, they had re-created conservative rules within this setup, probably because they were afraid.

What was it like for Katherine and Diana to talk about their memories?

It was very important to them because, as they say, it's a part of who they were. For Diana, it was the first time that she was outing herself. She's 82, but this is the first time that she could say to everyone, "This is my life. This is who I am." Probably because she is this very mature age, she felt the need to be true with herself and all the people that are still around her. She also wanted to pay tribute to all the pioneers she met. And she should be proud, because she was very brave. What is also fascinating about Diana is that she had [gender confirmation surgery] when she was young, and from that moment, she became an invisible woman in American society. We were so lucky to find her and Kate. Kate died just a few months after the filming. That's why all these invisible stories are so precious.

For Betsy [Wollheim], it was the first time that she could tell the story of her father, Donald Wollheim. He was a science-fiction writer and publisher, but people didn't know his secret story. I thought it was interesting to understand through Betsy what it was for a traditional American family to have a father as a cross-dresser and probably a transgender person. And through Gregory [Bagarozy], we see how he understood his grandma, Marie, and Susanna.

The Casa Susanna guests followed a code of female representation that aimed for a "woman next door" feel.

Where did you get the colorful Kodachrome photographs in the film?

I had the pictures from the book, of course, which are now in the Art Gallery of Ontario. But a second part comes from the collection of Cindy Sherman. I knew that Cindy had pictures of Casa Susanna because she found an album in a flea market in New York. So I contacted her and she was really into it and said, of course you can use them. Cindy's work is about Americana and stereotypes of representation in America, and she was fascinated by the way people are staging themselves in the pictures, because she stages herself. The way the men at Casa Susanna used female representation and respected a code in terms of clothes, they didn't want to look like a pinup or a Hollywood queen. Most of them probably wanted to look like their mothers, sisters or wives. Like the woman next door, in a bourgeois way.

A third source was the pictures that Betsy's father had, because he was completely obsessed with questions of identity. He had all the documentation he could find at that time, and Betsy kept everything from his archives.

How do you view this slice of American history in light of new anti-trans laws in this country?

I am shocked that today you still can hear all these words against the transgender community. These are attitudes and words from another time, and I thought that it could never happen. We used to think that the civil rights that were won are for forever, but they are not. We need to be the guardians of these rights. Films, books, exhibitions and all these things are a way to educate and make people understand that identity is diverse, and this diversity is so important. In French we say richesse. It's a treasure you need to protect. I love to see what makes you who you are.