The images seen here were discovered about a decade ago at a Manhattan flea market by an antiques dealer, Robert Swope, and the collection was later published in the book, Casa Susanna (powerHouse, 2005). Today, the photographs are all that remain of Susanna – once called the Chevalier d’Eon, after an 18th-century crossdresser and spy. The photos document the secret lives of men dressing as women and who are, perhaps, in flight from conforming to roles traditionally considered “manly — breadwinning for their families, making repairs around the house — even if just for a weekend. In these striking, weathered, vintage snapshots, we see them playing bridge, having cocktails and – in modern parlance — vamping for the camera.
“I believe these are ‘witness’ pictures,” Swope writes in the book’s introduction, “a way of validating an identity, a part–time life that was perhaps more real than their lives away from Casa Susanna.” Then it was said: “Women have fashion, bubble baths, daytime dramas, bridge clubs and weddings. What do men get? Work, war, and oil changes. It’s the curse of the Y chromosome and it’s punishable by dearth. A male would have to be certifiable not to want to be female at least part-time.” These ideas were far more radical in the 1950s, when gender roles were so narrowly defined, than they are today, in our marginally more “enlightened” era. “It’s all the pleasures and none of the pain [of being a woman], because it’s a fantasy,” Fierstein notes. “It has nothing to do with being a real woman — except that some of these men went on to become women.”
“The most interesting thing I learned in all of this, and what really became fascinating to me, is that there is no ‘normal’ to heterosexual. I already knew that there is more than one idea of homosexual, but there is no such thing as heterosexual. It’s all, as Kinsey said, a ‘sliding scale.’
In the end, in Casa Valentina and the photos made at Casa Susanna, gender is a quality that’s so undefined and personal for everyone, gay or straight. When speaking about pursuing ones own happiness and his own sexuality Fierstein says, “Why would you deny yourself anything possible!”
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