Casa Susanna: The Story of America’s First Transgender Network 1959-1968

New York, 2004 : a set of amateur photographs are found at a flea market. They seem to have belonged to Susanna, a transgender woman who opened her door to many people for whom her big house was the favorite place to be. A few days of conviviality where the boundaries of gender are blurred, where these fathers, these senior executives or employees of the upper middle class come to put on make-up, do their hair and strike a pose. It is these photographs that are brought together in a very beautiful book of almost 500 pages published by Textuel : Casa Susanna, The Story of America’s First Transgender Network 1959-1968.

Anita, Gloria and Susanna in Susanna and Marie’s New York apartment, 1960-1963. 9×9cm.
© Collection Cindy Sherman

These are not overtly staged photographs for the purposes of parody or jokes, but vernacular photographs taken by the persons represented therein. Photographs of a daily newspaper, that of Casa Susanna, the property of Susanna and her wife Marie who was the privileged space for a circle of “transvestites” – that’s how they were called then – forming a real community before their time.

Attributed to Andrea Susan, Daphne seated in a garden chair with Ann, Susanna and a friend, Casa Susanna, Hunter, 1964-1968. 8.9×10.8cm.
© Art Gallery of Ontario. 2014/820

You have to see in Susanna House a huge archive of an era, a document of the hidden face of the American dream and its protagonists… “adventurers of the genre”, as the preface writer Susan Stryker calls them. In addition to some 250 photographs, the book presents excerpts from an underground magazine inaugurated in 1960, Transvestiawhich allows them to share their experiences, to correspond and to meet in order to overcome the loneliness and the suffering it engenders.

Susanna and Felicity in the kitchen, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, 1960-1963. 6.4×8.4cm.
© Art Gallery of Ontario. 2014/751

There is no doubt that the publication of this work invites us to reflect on a precise moment in queer american history, as much as it invites us to reinvent the way we see things today. In any case, this is how Susan Stryker formulates it: gender disorder as a starting point for undoing all the categories that regulate the social order.

Photo session with
Lili, Wilma and friends, Casa Susanna,
Hunter, 1964-1967.
8,4 × 10,8 cm.
Art Gallery of Ontario. 2014/724

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An eponymous exhibition is presented at the Rencontres d’Arles 2023, at the Espace Van Gogh. Sébastien Lifshitz also made a documentary on Casa Susanna released in 2022, available on Arte.tv.

Casa Susanna, The Story of America’s First Transgender Network 1959-1968, Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett, with a foreword by Susan Stryker
Publisher: Textual
€45, 480 pages including 250 photographs, paperback format with dust jacket, 18 x 25.5 cm
Buy the book: Textual editions / Fnac