“Playing the Game”
Clara Bradbury-Rance (Kings College London)
“I grew up playing the game, and I played it very well.”
– Diana Merry-Shapiro
We are first shown a newsreel. Four women, sitting side by side, are interviewed by an off-screen male voice. He invites them to introduce themselves, then asks what they each do for a living, before posing a series of prying questions: “are those your own eyelashes? … and Sonia, is that your own hair?” He comments on one woman’s “lovely dress … where did you buy it?” His tone is paternalistic and patronizing. We sense that these women are not being interviewed on their own terms. Cut to the face of the interviewer, whose eyes are gleeful, as he looks directly at the camera and tells his viewers, with a voice of intrigue, that “each of [the interviewees] is breaking the law. You see … each of our contestants … is a man.” Cut to black.
So begins this celebratory, mournful, curious, moving, and wistful documentary by filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz. The film tells the story of the eponymous Casa Susanna, a retreat in upstate New York for trans women during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Casa Susanna was set up as a rural getaway by Susanna Valenti and her wife Maria, who first met when Susanna came to try on a wig at Maria’s shop in Manhattan. As Ms. Bob Davis writes in an article about the original photographic archive on which Lifshitz’s film is based, visitors to Casa Susanna were “networking, making personal contacts, and constructing a femme identity.” Just as Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht’s Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution celebrates the creation of community outside the strictures of normative society, Casa Susanna conjures something of a utopia, a place for trans women, cross-dressers and transvestites (I’ll say more about terminology later) to “dress,” to be together and, in the words of one interviewee, to make the most of “the total chance to be themselves for a change.”
As indicated by the archival “news” footage with which the film begins, however, the often-dystopian reality of trans existence in mid-century America is never far away. Diana Merry-Shapiro, one of the two visitors to Casa Susanna interviewed at length for the film, recalls doing a paper route as a young teenager and reading the headlines about Christine Jorgensen, the first American woman whose transition was made “public.” Diana longed to talk to someone about what she’d read. But even then, she knew that Jorgensen’s story would be greeted by most people in her neighborhood not with admiration but with disgust. Diana kept her longing to herself.
As we know all too well, trans people are still frequently the objects of an interrogating public gaze, perceived with scorn, incredulity, and bewilderment if not hatred. What Dean Spade calls “administrative violence,” aimed at making trans life unliveable if not illegal, haunts Casa Susanna. This is no period detail; “freedom is at risk,” says Lifshitz. And so, we have the paradox of representation that haunts this film. The representational violence of invisibility is set against the risk of violence that comes with visibility, as explored in books such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton and in films like Chase Joynt’s experimental documentary Framing Agnes.
In Casa Susanna, visibility is presented as both a personal and a political question, revealing of course that the personal and the political can hardly be separated at all. Reminding viewers of the broader social context of Susanna’s retreat (or indeed introducing them to it), archival footage recalls the so-called “screaming queens,” trans women who defied the police’s attempts to expel them from Compton’s cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966. (This was three years before Stonewall, another twentieth-century LGBTQ+ milestone whose narrators frequently erase the role of trans people, and particularly the trans people of color, in this event and the broader movement.) In the 2019 Netflix reboot of the fictional show Tales of the City, it is the contemporary discovery of a photograph of fictional matriarch Anna Madrigal taking part in the Compton’s riot, sent to her by an anonymous troll, that threatens to out her as trans. The stakes of visibility were then – and are now – high. We think we recognize progress and then find it to be a mirage. Two things can be true at the same time; sometimes things really do get better, but rarely for everyone, everywhere. Sometimes, we long for pride and find instead shame. Describing her second long-term partner, Diana remarks that “Carol is actually pretty proud of me,” betraying not just joy but surprise – and creating an on-screen moment at once heart-warming and heart-breaking.
The film’s use of what many will think of as dated terminology reflects the Casa Susanna archive as a “time capsule,” in the words of critic Jude Dry. The insistent use of male pronouns by interviewee Betsy to describe her father, for instance – including when she is looking at photos of “him” in women’s clothes – feels stubbornly territorial. But largely, the film meets its trans and cross-dressing characters on their own terms. And those terms have always been – and continue to be – mutable. As Jacob Hale wrote in a widely circulated 2009 essay entitled “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans ____”: “Don’t imagine that there is only one trope of transsexuality, only one figure of ‘the’ transsexual, or only one transsexual discourse at any one temporal and cultural location.” The same goes for the ways in which Casa Susanna confronts the slippages of gender and sexuality, at the heart of queer and trans debates then as now: as interviewee Katherine (Kate) Cummings recalls the questions she would ask of and with other members of the Casa Susanna community during their weekends together: “How was [being trans] different from being gay? … and how was [cross-dressing] different from being a transgender person? … it was a very difficult situation to try and sort out these different classifications of people.”
In his Docalogue essay on Sam Feder’s documentary Disclosure, Slava Greenberg writes of the need not just to correct the under-representation of trans voices in front of and behind the camera, but also to facilitate a sense of “communal trans spectatorship.” Lifshitz, who was awarded the Queer Lion Award for Career Achievement at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, is not trans, but in Casa Susanna as in his other films, one gets the sense that he is led by the voices of those he interviews, letting their recollections guide the momentum of the film long after the soundbite has been captured.
Casa Susanna has the same quality that I found when I wrote an introduction for a screening of Lifshitz’s film Les Invisibles in 2012: a combination of pleasure and despair as the film drifts between macro and micro, from intimate details to broad strokes. The archive of photographs of weekends at Susanna and Maria’s home invokes memory’s materiality. Watching Kate, aged 87 (and since sadly passed away), as she grasps these photographs in her hands is like watching her reconcile herself to the past and present of her relationship to her body, her gender, her identity. Looking at photo after photo, Diana ambivalently asks: “is that really me?” She is delighted and horrified. “Oh god, I can’t stand it,” she says. Elsewhere, she reminisces about the “thrilling” pleasures, however small, of being among women and having her hair curled or her dress fitted. Maybe it’s silly, she admits – but maybe it’s poignant too. Surely, the film demonstrates to us that is both.
” Trans Diachronicity”
Marc Francis (Film Quarterly)
Trans documentary of late has taken what might be considered an historical turn. Its previous phase was concerned more with the present tense of trans experience. Consider here The Brandon Teena Story (1998), Southern Comfort (2001), TransGeneration (2005), and later, Caitlyn Jenner’s E! TV show I am Cait (2015-16) (though some may wish to expunge it from the record). The most recent wave of documentary films which include Chase Joynt’s No Ordinary Man (2020) and Framing Agnes (2022), however, take stock of a trans past, unearthing historical evidence not only of trans existence, but trans peoples’ ability to find communities and their own happiness, and even sporadic and complicated institutional recognition from the fields of medicine, psychology, and sociology.
Making its way through the 2022 world festival circuit (Venice and TIFF, just to name two), Sébastien Lifshitz‘s Casa Susanna joins this wave of films but as a rather sparse model compared to Joynt’s work, with fewer interviewees or subjects, flashy graphics, and layered framing devices. Centered on a 1960s couple’s upstate New York cabin that became a temporary sanctuary for “cross-dressers” (some of whom would later become trans women) and their families, Casa Susanna is at first glance deceptively straightforward—traditional even. In actuality, the film, though quiet and wistful, audaciously pushes through the noisiness of the here and now of trans representation and its politics: first, by employing an intergenerational and relational approach to the topic; and second, by engaging with the history of trans in its multiplicity, calling into question present-day homogenizing pressures to pass and fully transition. What might be thought of as enacting a form of trans diachronicity, the film makes space for viewers to reflect on today’s constructions of trans identities and their incommensurability with trans pasts that cannot and should not just be either willed away or assimilated to the present.
Perhaps surprising to some, the ladies of Casa Susanna actually played a part in queer theory’s seminal years, even gracing the cover of Michael Warner’s landmark 2002 book Publics and Counterpublics in poses of pretend paparazzi frenzy. (The same image was used for the documentary’s poster). As a “counterpublic” tucked away in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York (and, importantly, accessible from the city by car), Casa Susanna started as a drag show for the local community that then morphed into a “bed and breakfast for the cross-dressing community,” as one the film’s subjects explains. By description alone, the place sounds almost mythic, especially in the context of the McCarthy Era. But more extraordinary and worthy of attention than the fact of its mere existence is that family members—wives and even grandchildren—were part of the Casa Susanna community, a surrounding context that drifts into the film’s focus.
To escape to Casa Susanna, the film tells its audience, was to live out multiple lives simultaneously: the humdrum hetero conformity of postwar American life juxtaposed to the modest (and intermittent) moments of liberation offered at the “resort.” Rather than profile the Casa’s many guests, the film zeroes in on a small group of social actors who together assemble in the present at the Casa’s old grounds to reminisce and commemorate. Among them are former frequenters Kate and Diana, now elderly trans women, as well as two descendants of the Casa’s members, including Gregory, the step-grandson of Susanna herself. The film rotates between accounts of the personalities that came through the property, stories of the two trans women’s self-realizations and coming out experiences, and observations from the relatives’ perspectives of witnessing trans life, both up close and from afar. By balancing these multiple perspectives, the film illuminates the ways the Casa’s impact rippled into relationships beyond its walls. Rather than facilely characterize the refuge as an isolated utopia of freeing trans expression, the film keeps its viewer cognizant that being trans is not solely about the relationship of the trans individual to their body but also trans peoples’ relationships to family and the wider community of non-trans people who inevitably populate their lives.
For Gregory, these experiences have a tender redolence; he recalls the matter-of-fact explanation he received as a child of Tito/Susanna’s transness and his joy in witnessing Susanna’s fully out life as a trans woman for a short period before she passed away. Gregory is counterposed to Betsy, the daughter of a paperback science-fiction writer named Donald whose wife drove him up to Casa Susanna every summer weekend for almost a decade. Betsy’s relationship to her father was far more vexed, including instances of verbal abuse in which he shamed her for her looks.
By giving space to these divergent stories, the film offers a desperately needed counterpoint to the crowded mediascape of trans TikTok and Instagram. On these platforms, users commonly post about trans oppression and critique cis privilege by way of highly confessional modes. As opposed to the self-representation and self-focus of the social media post, the documentary viewer is offered instead a narrative that distributes the trans experience across webbed family and community relations that include non-trans people. In this sense, the film is insightfully and productively out-of-joint with the current climate of prevailing trans activisms on online platforms. Undoubtedly, Casa Susanna seeks to combat transphobia against the backdrop of today’s widespread anti-trans violence and state legislation, but it does so by mobilizing a nuanced activism that does not hinge upon the immediacy of likes and views to drive its effectiveness.
Breaking through the bubble of the trans here and now, the film implicitly poses the question of how one might frame or identify these historical subjects without a presentist arrogance – that might, for instance, elevate full transition with surgery over other expressions of transness. This is one dilemma of trans diachronicity. In contrast with the widespread scrubbing of so-called outdated terms such as “cross-dresser” and “transvestite” in popular discourse, which attempts to assert transness as an objective category of identity, the definition of trans here is put in scare quotes with a tentative ontological status. The variations of trans in the film are tacit reminders that, as Cael Keegan explains, today’s “good” trans politics (aiming for visibility and equality) join codes of social respectability with the “intelligibility of preexisting gender identifications.” Many of the Casa Susanna ladies remain unassimilable to the current schema of mainstream trans politics and their concomitant forms of “good” embodiment.
The film engages with this issue of trans diachronicity by way of Kate and Diana’s stories as well. It does so by diverging from current conventions within the trans community of disavowing and thereby erasing one’s pre-trans past. By including photos of Kate and Diana pre-transition (taboo because it might be read as “deadnaming” in visual form), alongside their autobiographical testimonies about their lives before, during, and after their time in the Catskills, the documentary allows Kate and Diana to live out what trans theorist Sandy Stone (as early as 1992) has called a life of “intertextual possibilities”—that is, the many mismatched pieces that comprise someone’s personal history.
Casa Susanna avoids extrapolating into the past, instead leaning into the discomfort that comes with acknowledging gender and sexuality as a social construction, meaning that what is thinkable and desirable exists within the epistemic limits of a particular time and place. Instead of grafting onto historical subjects possibilities not yet available to them, the film asks its viewer if the idea of cross-dressing is inherently a backwards “safety-valve” practice; though it has been for some, we cannot say that for all. There are others for whom cross-dressing has existed and still exists outside the telos of transition. Casa Susanna also takes a step back from the isolated experience of a trans person’s self-realizations and coming out processes to show the extent to which these paths are collectively and communally shared by and affect others. Throughout the course of the film, four people of different gender and generational persuasions gather on transhistorically consecrated ground to conjure up specters of trans pasts irreducible to today’s social codes. The film thus quietly refuses to retrofit a variegated past to the clamorous present.
DOCALOGUE 