“There’s pictures of them holding Vogue magazine and things like that, so we know that they’re looking for notions of what femininity was, and they were playing with those guises”
In the late 1950s and early 60s, Tito Valenti, a court translator, and his wife Marie, who had a wig shop in Manhattan, transformed a property they had purchased with land deep in the Catskills near Hunter, New York, into a welcoming, non-judgemental resort for gender-nonconforming individuals. The couple named the hideaway, using the name Tito went by when he dressed as a woman.
Pardo points out that since relatively little is known about this community, it’s difficult today to attribute any label to its members. “They referred to themselves at the time as transvestites but you wouldn’t necessarily use that term now,” she explains. “We would call it gender non-conforming, because we don’t know whether they were men who dressed as women sometimes or whether they became transgender or did undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Pardo continues: “This is the time where portable cameras are becoming more commonplace and a lot more people can begin to record these private moments. [At Casa Susanna] they’re obviously playing with that and performing to camera – it was about solidifying their existence as women and presenting themselves to the world.
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