Casa Susanna brings together photographs and publications created by and for a community of cross-dressers who met regularly in New York City and the Catskill Mountains throughout the 1960s. Two modest resorts run by Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie Tornell, provided safe spaces for guests to freely cross-dress en femme during an era of strictly defined gender roles. They used the camera to create and affirm their femme identities, exchanging photographs at gatherings or sharing them by mail. These snapshots—some candid, others playfully performative—were rediscovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004 and have come to be known as the Casa Susanna photographs. The exhibition also features issues of Transvestia, an underground magazine that published the photographs along with fiction, poetry, makeup and clothing advice, and autobiographical essays by members of the community.
During this period, most cross-dressers lived in isolation and shame. The exhibition presents new research into the double lives cross-dressers led as married men with established careers. The photographs also bring to light the type of woman they aimed to embody—such as the “girl next door,” the respectable housewife, the matron—a middle-class ideal of femininity that was both liberating and limiting. Casa Susanna offers insight into a significant pre-Stonewell cross-dressing scene, inviting visitors to understand this world and its connection to the lives of transgender people today.
The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Les Rencontres d’Arles in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.