Casa Susanna (WGBH Educational Foundation, Agat Films & Cie, Arte, PBS, 2022, released 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 4) my husband Charles and I got to watch a fascinating documentary on PBS called Casa Susanna, an “American Experience” episode about a special resort in the Catskills in upstate New York in the 1950’s and 1960’s that catered almost exclusively to cross-dressers. Casa Susanna was the brainchild of a cisgender, heterosexual woman named Maria Valenti and her husband Tito, a straight cross-dresser who adopted the name “Susanna” for his female identity. He was born in Valparaiso, Chile and had emigrated to the U.S.; she was from a traditional Italian family which had enough money to buy the property. At first Susanna and Maria aimed the resort exclusively for people like themselves – straight couples in which the man was a cross-dresser – and often the straight male cross-dresser would be driven to the resort by his wife. But as awareness grew the clientele included more and more people who by today’s standards would be called Transgender, men who not only dressed as women but wanted to live 24/7 as women and ultimately become them. The film dramatizes how the news coverage of Christine Jorgensen’s gender-confirmation surgery in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1952 galvanized the nascent Trans community and taught many men who identified more or less as women that they weren’t alone: there were others like them and their status had a recognizable pattern, including a potential medical solution. One of the “regulars” at Casa Susanna recalled another of the guests who had told them how grossed out they were at the thought of going through surgical gender reassignment, only to receive a letter from them two years later that began, “Sit down when you read this,” and told of their own gender-confirmation surgery.

PBS followed up Casa Susanna, which ran about 95 minutes, with a mini-documentary about Christine Jorgensen, who made her transition in her mid-20’s (the rule of thumb in the Trans community now is that the younger you are when you go through the change, the better the results in terms of physical attractiveness, which is why the current push to start people on hormone blockers and ultimately prepare them for surgery in their teens – which in turn attracts the ire of the anti-Trans community) and was quite good-looking as both a man and a woman. Diana, a Transwoman interviewed for the movie, recalled, “I was a paperboy, and I carried the paper. And when I went down to pick up the papers, there was Christine Jorgensen on the front page. And I think I sat down, and I read the story. I read it avidly. And that was it! There was nobody I could talk to about it. If I were to talk to [anyone] about it, [they would have said,] ‘Oh, this is horrible,’ that would be that, this horrible, sinful thing that this person did to themselves and they will be damned to hell. All my friends would just make fun of it. Talking to my parents would be a disaster. It was illegal in this country! So almost everybody in the country thought it was wrong. All the doctors thought it was wrong, it was all wrong! It was just barely beginning to be contemplated as something that was possible and might be conceivable.”

The film, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, brought back some of the original Casa Susanna regulars to revisit the place as it looks today – which is not good, since after medical bills forced Susanna and Maria to sell the property nothing much was done with it and both the common buildings and the cabins have visibly deteriorated – and offered recollections not only from the visitors themselves but also from family members. One Transwoman named Katherine said, “Visiting Casa Susanna was almost a necessity for me. I had to leave my family in Australia and come to America because I needed to know more about myself, I needed to know what it would be like to live as a woman for an extended period. And In the back of my mind, I thought If I go to Casa Susanna resort and I find that I’m more woman inside that I am man, that might be the point where my new life starts.” One name that startled me because I’d heard it before in a quite different context was the science-fiction author and editor Donald A. Wollheim, who was a straight cross-dresser who visited Casa Susanna regularly and who was quite a bit better-looking as a woman than a man. Wollheim wrote and published a book called A Year Among the Girls under a pseudonym, Darrell G. Raynor, and it became a sort of guide for other cross-dressers and Trans people to navigate the lifestyle and its challenges. Wollheim died in 1990 but his daughter Betsy was interviewed for the film and visited the remnants of Casa Susanna to talk about her experiences with her parents, including a mother, Elsie, who accepted Wollheim’s cross-dressing.

Wollheim is ironically both one of the best loved and most hated figures in the history of science fiction and fantasy literature. He helped organize the world’s first science-fiction convention in Philadelphia in 1936 and, as a member of the New York Science Fiction League, organized a campaign to force editor-publisher Hugo Gernsback to pay writers the fees he had promised them. (That got him blacklisted from Gernsback’s publications for a year or so.) Wollheim also pioneered publication of paperback editions of science-fiction novels, including creating the so-called “Ace Doubles” while working for A. A. Wyn at Ace Publishing. The “Ace Doubles” were paperbacks that contained two novels each, printed back-to-back so each book would have its own front cover. Once you were done reading one book, you flipped over the volume to read the other. Wollheim got embroiled in a controversy over J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels. He had made Tolkien an offer to publish paperback editions of them, and Tolkien reportedly replied that he would never allow his great trilogy to appear in so “degenerate a form” as a paperback novel. Then Wollheim did an investigation and found that Tolkien’s American hardback publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had neglected to secure the paperback rights, so Wollheim published his own edition of The Lord of the Rings as a series of three mass-market paperbacks. According to a 1990 obituary for Wollheim in the science-fiction magazine Locus, “Houghton Mifflin had imported sheets instead of printing their own edition, but they didn't want to sell paperback rights. Ace printed the first paperback edition and caused such a furor that Tolkien rewrote the books enough to get a new copyright, then sold them to Ballantine. The rest is history. Although Ace and Wollheim have become the villains in the Tolkien publishing gospel, it's probable that the whole Tolkien boom would not have happened if Ace hadn't published them.”

Wollheim’s Wikipedia page mentions his cross-dressing only in passing at the end of their entry, but it still surprised me to hear a name I’d heard before only in other contexts come up in this one. Talking about her father in the Casa Susanna movie, Betsy Wollheim said, “I’m certain that [my mother] realized very early all about his cross-dressing, for the simple reason that when I was seven, eight, nine, my girlfriends and I would play in the house when my mother was out and we would all put on her negligées. And there was one negligée that was six feet long. It was the prettiest one, six feet long, and it had a kind of drawstring at the chest so you could expand the chest. We all wanted to wear that one. Of course, this was my father's nightgown. One year, my father said he was going to have a dress rehearsal because he was going to dress up as his sister for Hallowe’en the next day. I was 12. And my father was in the bathroom for five hours! Even at 12, I realized that wasn't usual for somebody just getting ready for a Hallowe’en party. When he came out, I was really quite frightened because he looked very ghoulish to me. He had shaved his arms, his legs, his chest. He had taped up his face. I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door because I was momentarily shocked. I knew pretty immediately that he was really into this. I just did not know the extent.”

Casa Susanna is a fascinating movie as well as a timely reminder of the harm anti-Trans prejudices do to real people. I’ve often heard the phrase, “I just don’t understand Transgender people,” usually said with a sneer that communicates the unspoken message, “And I don’t want to understand them.” I’ve had a number of Trans friends over the years, some of them quite close, but I must say I don’t fully “understand” it either. I can’t imagine how it would feel to grow up with the knowledge and awareness that the physical gender of your body doesn’t match your sense of who you are psychologically – compared to that, being Gay or Lesbian is the proverbial piece of cake – but I don’t feel I really have to “understand” it. I just accept it as part of who my Trans friends are and as part of the wonderful variety of the world and the human race, just as I don’t fully understand how the computer I’m writing this on works but I accept it for what it is and what I can do with it as a tool.