Queens of the Catskills

Casa Susanna

by Jay Blotcher, March 29, 2007

All photographs from Michael Hurst’s and Robert Swope’s book, Casa Susanna.

The 1990s belonged to the drag queen. RuPaul became a media star and two drag films, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, grabbed heartland America by the short hairs. Their plots are similar: A trio of transvestites ventures into a rural area and shakes up country folk who never saw a man tottering on high heels. By the final scene, the interlopers have provided not only makeup tips, but also a lesson in compassion. Roll credits.
Pure Hollywood fiction? Guess again. Four decades before Patrick Swayze donned a wig and eyeliner in To Wong Foo, rural Greene County was home to a sorority of male cross-dressers.
Silver Springs was a vacation colony located in tiny Jewett, five miles south of Hunter. It attracted urbanites seeking respite from punishing city summers in the era before air conditioning. Sited on a picturesque but isolated 150-acre patch of land, it offered snug, unheated bungalows that stood adjacent to a barn and main house. When the property changed hands in the mid-1950s, it was renamed Casa Susanna and repurposed drastically: as a refuge for men eager to make contact with their inner woman.

For $25 per weekend, visitors—mostly Manhattan businessmen—were fed three squares and taught the finer points of “passing”; that is, developing a feminine masquerade that escaped detection. This included navigating a sidewalk in pumps, grasping a cigarette between polished nails, and applying foundation to obscure a five o’clock shadow.
The headmaster of this finishing school was Tito Valenti. A New York court translator, he preferred the name Susanna when wearing wigs and evening frocks, which did little to soften his gangster-like mug. While director Ed Wood was wrapping himself in angora, Valenti was at the vanguard of an underground American cross-dressing movement. He penned a regular column for a tranny magazine and offered charm lessons for the novice in his city apartment, which he shared with his wife Marie, the proprietor of a Fifth Avenue wig shop. As his clientele grew, Valenti needed more room. Marie purchased the acreage with her wig-store profits and the place thrived as both a safe harbor and a playground for more than a decade.