Nostalgia is Better than it used to be!

by Katherine Cummings

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Back when the world was young and I had persuaded myself that I was a transvestite rather than being transgendered, I travelled to North America to do a postgraduate degree. Not all of my motivation was professional. I also wanted to meet some of the people like myself with whom I had been corresponding ever since I discovered the magazine Transvestia, edited by Virginia Prince, a.k.a. Charles Prince, a.k.a. Arnold Lowman. This was a rather poorly printed monthly magazine with sometimes almost indecipherable photos, but it was the only game in town when it came to reading wish-fulf1lment fiction or contacting others in the cross-dressing community.

I was lucky enough to first see Transvestia at edition number 5, which was also the first to carry a photo of a tv as cover girl. I joined in enthusiastically and by the time number 8 came along, I was on the cover. I also made contact with a number of the people who provided code numbers by which they could be contacted through the magazine. Some of these became lasting friends and when I went to Canada to study in 1962-63 and later to the United States work from 1967-1973, I met many of the people I had first met through Transvestia and even shared an apartment with one of them (Ernie / Irene). Almost the first outing I had with Irene was to a resort called Casa Susanna, run for the benefit of cross-dressers by a transvestite called Susanna Valenti. It also catered to other groups and sometimes they overlapped. On one memorable occasion a group of us found ourselves chatting with some hairy men who had come to the Catskills to shoot deer. They were surprised to find that we knew about guns and hunting and other macho pursuits and we got on very well.

I went back to Australia and by the time I returned to the United States in 1967 the resort had disappeared. I remembered it fondly as the first place where I could walk around openly in daylight, confident that anyone I met could be engaged in conversation without the need for subterfuge about my underlying sex and with an understanding of our common need to present in the "other" gender role. When I wrote my autobiography in 1992 I devoted a chapter to Casa Susanna and paid tribute to Susanna and my friends from that period of my life.

Recently I was contacted by a Michigan University PhD student named Robert Hill, who had been given my name by Susan Stryker in San Francisco. Robert had been browsing the archives at the Kinsey Institute, looking for a PhD topic when he came across a file of Transvestia and decided to write about "transvestism in the United States in the Cold War period", i.e. the '50s and '60s. His attention was drawn to a book, Casa Susanna, which had been published in 2005, containing hundreds of photographs of cross-dressed men and, to his excitement, realised that many of the images in the book were the same as those from his file of Transvestia, so that he could give them names.

The book had come about in an odd way. Antique dealers Robert Swope and Michel Hurst had found a box of loose photos and some photo albums in a flea market in New York and had been so taken with the images that they published the book with 156 pages of the best they could select. Robert Hill told me about the book and I bought a copy from Amazon. To my pleasure and surprise I found the images of many of my former (and some of my current) friends, and recognised the background of many of the images as being from the resort I had visited and from Susanna's Manhattan apartment. I emailed Robert Swope to thank him and he told me the New York Times was about to do an article on his book and on Casa Susanna, with the theme "Habitat as Refuge". He asked if I would be willing to be interviewed and if I knew anyone else who might be willing to talk to Penelope Green, the N.Y.T. writer. I agreed and had a long phone interview with Penelope as well as exchanging a number of emails. I contacted two friends from that time and he agreed to be interviewed anonymously while the other declined. I started looking for other friends of the time still alive and found two, Felicity, intellectually alert and physically active at 101 and Marilyn, still practicing law in Seattle although well into her eighties. The New York Times article came out on 6 September 2006 and took a reasoned and reasonable approach to the subject as well as being well-written. As a result of the article another of my cross-dressing friends from the sixties found me and we have been catching up by email ever since!

Although more meaningful to a person who knew Susanna and her Casa first hand, Casa Susanna will appeal to anyone with even a peripheral interest in cross-dressing. It is a well-made hardcover book, inexpensive at US$20.67 (A$26.50) and the images presented are of people who were eagerly living their innermost truth in an environment of peace and friendship. I recommend it highly.

A footnote of interest. Even within that hidden society there was an enclave of even more hidden individuals. We were all supposed to be transvestites interested in cross-dressing and scoffing at the idea of going further, yet, of my circle of close friends (say a dozen or so), no fewer than four of us went on to gender reassignment. How many more lurkers were there? Think about it!

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.