by A new show on the MET demonstrates the permanent power of photography, transferring trans identities and building transgreements. With the title Simply Casa Susanna, it reveals a treasury of photographs of a community of self-identified “cross-dr.
According to the show curator Mia Fineman, these photos were resting for decades until two antique dealers discovered them at a flea market in 2004. “They did not wear extravagant clothing, it was a very conservative style of the mid -century.”
The photos were taken over by the ontario art gallery, a book of the photos was published, and then trans -scholars began to bring Casa Susanna into the history of the queer. The original flea market collection of photos was also reinforced by collections by the artist Cindy Sherman and Betsy Wollheim, a daughter of one of the members of the original Casa Susanna community, and a formal exhibition of the photos in winter 2024.
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Now The Met shares its own version of this show with 160 photos and material from Transvestia, a Zine of the Casa Susanna community, which published six editions a year. It is a tender and necessary look at the trans identity of over half a century.
Casa Susanna was the idea of two women: Transfrau Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie Tornell. According to Fineman, the two came through a meeting for the age group: One day a nervous Valenti-as man disguised-in Tornell’s Manhattan wig shop, supposedly a wig for her sister, but the durable shopkeeper had nothing. “Marie clocked Susanna, said I know that it is for her, it’s okay, let me find something that makes you look beautiful. After that, the two fell in love quickly.”
The couple later decided to create a committed place where others, like Valenti, could have the room to be their true self. “The two as a couple were so unusual and unique for their time,” said Fineman. “I really wish I could have met her, they seem to be so incredible people.”
In the 1960s, very few people who wanted to award the history of their own gender were able to have freedom. McCarthyism was widespread, and most of the Casa Susanna community supported families as married men – when others found that they like to dress as women, they stood to lose everything.
“Most of these people were married, were specialists, doctors, lawyers and mechanics,” said Fineman. “They were mainly men with women with women and families. They had a lot to lose if their cross-dressing was to be exposed. They lived in isolation and ashamed.” The participants of the Casa Susanna went so far to process and print color films to avoid that their photos are seen by consumer laboratories.
Despite this intensive pressure – or perhaps because of this – the photos shown in the Casa Susanna photos intensive ease and happiness. “There is a real feeling of joy, a feeling of feeling so comfortable in her skin,” said Fineman. “When they were in women’s clothing and in the safe room in which these resorts put them, they had a feeling of freedom that they could not have in their daily life.”
These photos are striking about how exactly they are similar, the photographs are shared decades later by trans women in the early stage in internet -based communities. There is a similar strenuous desire, an ideal of bourgeois, white femininity and a feeling of playful, stolen moments, an too short break of freedom, self -portrayal and community, against a suffocating life of the forced conformity to a gender that you know is wrong.
They warmly cordially set up that these photos show a phase of the Arrest development, a time when so many closed trans women could not stop leading a double life as heterosexual men. Behind all the smile and casual poses can be felt that people long for being free to be free but do not feel able to cross the obstacles imposed by society.
“It was deeply important for these people to see photos of themselves dressed,” said Fineman. “You talked about it in the magazine and in other places. A picture of yourself was seen as a woman who reflected her desired identity with you.”
It is important that Casa Susanna has the frequent myth that trans women has something new, as well as the lying, who recently committed the judicial court, Amy Coney Barrett that the United States does not have a significant history of discrimination against trans people. “At the time there was masquerade laws so that these people could be arrested in public for cross-dressing,” said Fineman. “They had to be very careful to go outside of their houses. There are reports in the magazine that they were arrested, which contained terrible humiliation and abuse by the police. They could even be sent to mental institutions for an essentially converted therapy.”
Many in the Casa Susanna community had supporting women who often joined them in the Catskills, and sometimes even columns in transvestia in their view. In 1965 a woman named Avis wrote a warm column about her fights to understand the identity of her spouse and gave an impression of the depth of the commitment of those who took part there.
“Women would come to these retreats with them and help them create their appearance,” said Fineman. “A picture that I really love that shows a couple wearing the right dress that they had obviously made. It was really surprising.”
Some members of the Casa Susanna community, such as Virginia Prince, founder and editor of Transvestia, finally switched to a woman – she lived open from 1968 until her death in 2009. Some of these women still survive today, and some will be present for a panel in September. The museum will also organize a demonstration of the 2022 PBS documentation Casa Susanna directed by Sébastien Lifshitz.
Fineman sees this exhibition as a gesture of inclusion in the trans community and a way to use the lost history. Museums have a special role to play, especially now when so many other sectors in society actively delete translations. “I hope that this trans person offers a greater feeling of confirmation and understanding,” she said. “We have a role to make these pictures and history visible.”
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Casa Susanna is exhibited in the MET in New York until January 25, 2026
