1960s Trans Get Away

There is a new play out on Broadway from the Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein it is the latest in a series of plays called ‘Casa Valentina,’ Harvey Fierstein wrote plays like Kinky Boots, La Cage aux Folles, and Torch Song Trilogy, and he also acted in Hairspray. In his latest play he writes about a 1960s Catskills resort that had a getaway weekend for trans-people, kind of like a precursor to trans-conferences.

Clothes Make the Man
‘Casa Valentina,’ Fierstein’s Play About ’60s Cross-Dressers
New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY
APRIL 10, 2014

Before rehearsals began for the new Broadway play “Casa Valentina,” the seven men in the cast were asked to come to work a few days early. They arrived to find a huge table covered with ladies’ wigs in ’60s-era hairdos — flips, bobs, French twists. Nearby was a long rack of colorful house dresses and white slips and brassieres. Yet no one made a move. The actors shared small talk, sipped coffee, checked their smartphones and looked around as if the room were empty.

If this was just another Broadway romp starring men in drag — another “Kinky Boots,” another “Hedwig and the Angry Inch*,” another “Twelfth Night” — the mood might have been lighter: Boas, corsets and high heels are fun, familiar staples of theater. But “Casa Valentina” is about a subculture rarely seen onstage — cross-dressers — and mixes masculinity and femininity in ways that daunted the actors at first, and may do the same to audiences. The play, now in previews, is based on a real Catskills resort where husbands and fathers went in the 1960s to dress and act as women. These were white-collar professionals hobbling in heels, not drag queens sashaying in stilettos; men expressing their femininity without compromising their maleness.

Back when I first came out, before I realized that I could truly transition and it wouldn’t be the end of the world I went to conferences like First Event in the Boston area; where I could be myself for four days without a worry. The New York post said,

The real-life inspiration for the show burst into public life in the mid-’00s when furniture dealer Robert Swope and his partner, Michel Hurst, published a book of photographs they’d found at the 26th Street flea market. They were of transvestites hanging out at a resort nicknamed Casa Susanna, after the female alter ego of Tito Valenti, a New York City court stenographer/interpreter who owned it with his wife, Marie.
[…]
“It was this Garden of Eden, this perfect place where they could be themselves and live,” Fierstein says.

As it turns out, some of the pics were taken at Casa Susanna while others dated from its neighboring predecessor, the Chevalier d’Eon — named for an infamous 18th century transvestite spy and owned by the same people.

Time has the photos from Mr. Hurst book, Casa Susanna: Photographs From a 1950s Transvestite Hideaway and photos from the play are on Advocate.com. If you are interested in attend the play you can get tickets here.





*I’m seeing “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” June 8 on Broadway staring Neil Patrick Harris.