Crossdressers in a TV show Archive:
TV Host: Now for reasons which will become very clear, we’re going to use first names only. Would you please introduce yourself?
Misty: Misty.
Vicky: Vicky
Sonia: Sonia
Simone: Simone.
TV Host: Misty What You Do?
Misty: I’m Bank Teller
TV Host: And Vicky?
Vicky: Cosmetician
TV Host: Sonia?
Sonia: Hair Dresser
Simone: Window display.
TV Host: Are those your own eyelashes?
Vicky: No.
TV Host: And Sonia is that your own hair?
Sonia: No.
TV Host: That’s a very lovely dress you’re wearing Simone, where did you buy it?
Simone: Oh I made it myself.
TV Host: Ladies and Gentlemen the reasons for using first names only for these very very charming contestants. Is that right now each one of them is breaking the law. You see each of our contestants, is a man.
Katherine: I would think that none of these trees had even started growing when I was last here. The times I was here, were very good times
Katherine: Yes, that’s the house, when I went there. And there was a swing hanging in the end of the veranda. And this was the old barn, where the theatrical took place.
Halloween 1962, I was being Little swan in Swan Lake. Susanna was doing erotic dancing. South American dancing. And three of my friends were being Andrew's sisters. It looks as good as it did then.
Katherine: We all used to have our meals there, and people used to sit out the front. On the veranda, on the lawn. People used to do gardening work. I just loved being here, because they had total freedom. Total chance to be themselves for a change.
The weekend of Halloween 1962 was when Virginia Prince formed a national sorority of cross-dressers called F.P.E. for Full Personality Expression. And It was a very interesting weekend, to say the very least though. There were psychiatrists from the Kinsey Institute, there were people from all over, there were over 100 people there, that weekend. But it's much the same.
Katherine: Visiting Casa Susanna was almost a necessity for me. I had to leave my family in Australia and come to America because I needed to know more about myself, I needed to know what it would be like to live as a woman. for an extended period. And In the back of my mind, I thought If I go to Casa Susanna resort and I find that I’m more woman inside that I am man, that might be the point where my new life starts.
Katherine: I think there are few people like me because I was a white child with a single sibling, living on a coral island in the middle of the Pacific.
Katherine: And I remember as far back as I was five, my sister dressing me in one of her old dresses. The fact that I absolutely adored the feeling and wanted it to go on, wished it could happen every day. Wish that when that my father came home from the sea. I could say: “you got two daughters now!” So, one doesn’t know when these thoughts start.
Katherine: But it wasn’t until lot of years later that I had that experience of joy, a shared joy
Katherine: being able to walk among people and talk to them without hesitation. To know that they understood the person I was, No matter what you look like inside I was a real woman and wanted them to know it and they did know it.
Diana: Between my 3rd grade and 4th grade, I would go to sleep at night praying that I would wake up as a girl. And I would pray hard you know
Diana: It was a secret that I had and mostly because I was very active and I was very social and very out there, it didn’t have much impact in terms of what it appeared. But I knew that it was… There was something down inside of me that was not…Right! That was not who I was. And there was no way to make it right. I think it’s very hard to have an appreciation for the difference, for me isolated in Iowa where, literally you cannot talk to anyone about this at all.
Diana: You have to kind of understand that my mother was very seriously Lutheran which is a very literal Christianity. The Bible, the earth was created in 6 days… So when I began to have feelings about wishing that I were a girl, there was just no way it could possibly be…
Okay! And… I kept thinking I was going to grow out of it
Diana: There was a kind of almost optimism about it in the face of pretty dark frustrations.
That: “Ok, you’ll get through this just go to school, do your school, do your college get married and this will go away!“ And it never did go away.
Diana: That thing was always there, and there was no way to express it. There was nobody, there was no information, there was no library I could go to, there was just no place. And that was the real darkness, that there was kind of nothing to… help me think about it even.
What must this be? What is this that could be going on with me that makes me have these feelings?
TV Reporter: Christine Jorgensen who used to answer to George creates quite a stir as she returns home to New York from Copenhagen. Christine hits the headlines, following the series of operations in Denmark that transformed her from a boy into a girl. all of which made her a celebrity to meet and talk to when she stepped off the plane at the international airport. Gentlemen please, give her a chance to talk!
Christine: I’m very impressed by everyone coming
Reporter: Christine are you happy to be home?
Christine: Yes of course! What American wouldn’t be?
Reporter: Have you been offered a movie contract?
Christine: Yes, but I haven’t accepted it
Reporter: Do you have any plans regarding the theatre?
Christine: No, I don’t think so.
Reporter: Are you go on with your photography?
Christine: I hope so! I’m very happy to be back, and I don’t have any plans at the moment, and I thank you all for coming but I think it’s too much! Fine, thank you very much!
Archive Paper Boy
Diana: I was a paper boy, and I carried the paper. And when I went down to pick up the papers, there was Christine Jorgensen on the front page. And I think I sat down, and I read the story.
Diana: I read it avidly. And that was it! There was nobody I could talk to about it. If I were to talk to about it, "Oh, this is horrible", that would be that, this horrible, sinful thing that this person did to themselves and they will be damned to hell “
Archive Child in His Dark Bedroom
Diana: All my friends would just make fun of it. Talking to my parents would be a disaster.
Diana: It was illegal in this country! So almost everybody in the country thought it was wrong. All the doctors thought it was wrong, it was all wrong! It was just barely beginning to be contemplated as something that was possible and might be conceivable.
Archive Farm Child in The Snow
Diana: I was pretty sure that my mother would try to do something pretty radical if she thought that that was how I was, you know, put me away in an institution or do electroshock or pretty bad things because she sort of believed in how people who have these kinds of thoughts are treated. You know that they must be sick and they must be fixed. I kind of knew that it could be really bad if I exposed myself.
Diana: So by the time I was in high school, I was a good athlete and I was a pretty good student. I played the trumpet and I played football and I played hm... I sang in the choir and I grow up playing the game. And I played it very well.
Diana: When I got a scholarship to Valparaiso university, I got into the theater department and I met Julie.
Diana: And through the years we got closer and closer
Diana: and it became kind of like we should… We should probably get married. I think we thought we loved one another. And I told Julie about that I had this “problem.”
Diana: It was just like: “Oh well, okay, so, you have this little feminine side, sort of thing, it was not anything very substantial about it. But I’m glad you told me.”
Diana: It is very frustrating thing. When people speak as so: This is not a problem; all you have to do is change your mind. And I’d say: Ok, when will my mind change? How does it change? What makes it change? “Well, you just don’t think about it.” None of those things are even close to relevant in my estimation and they certainly didn’t work for me.
Betsy: Around 1994, my mother was going to surgery. There was a 50/50 chance that she might die on the table. That weekend, that Saturday, she started to tell me everything.
Betsy: She brought out boxes of photographs. She brought out the book my father had written: A year among the girls by Darrel G Rayner.
Betsy: A book that nobody realizes he wrote except my mother. I was fascinated
Suddenly everything seemed to snap into place, I suddenly realized that, the church architect in California that I was so fond of, he was so fun:
Betsy: he was one of the cross-dressers. People I had stayed with in Ireland, he was a cross-dresser. Everybody that my parents were most close to was in the transvestite scene. I suddenly realized why.
Betsy: I went to summer camp for two months every single year starting when I was seven, two entire months, away. So, my father could go up to Casa Susanna and dress. My mother drove him there and stayed with him, because he couldn’t drive! A lot of women were up there too, the wives, and I think they hung out together. My mother drove him to Casa Susanna every weekend of the summer. And I know that because that’s why I went to summer camp for 8 years!
Betsy: My father was Donald A. Wollheim, he was one the founders of the entire science fiction industry. He wrote 18 science-fiction novels in a world, where people hadn’t even heard that term.
Betsy: He grew up in Manhattan. My grandparents owned a townhouse on 81st in (New) York. And his childhood was extremely complicated and gothic.
Betsy: My grandfather was a doctor, he graduated from Columbia Medical School in 1903. And he practiced on the second floor of the house. And in a brownstone, you have to walk through an entire floor to get to the next staircase, so his children had to walk through his medical offices to get to their bedrooms. And my grandfather was a specialist, he was a urologist who specialized in venereal diseases: syphilis and gonorrhoea, which at that time was incurable and deadly. So, he was terrified that his children would, running through the second floor, touch a wet doorknob, put their hand in their mouth and get gonorrhoea of the mouth.
So, he filled his children with a terror of the human body, really and of germs. And I think that modelled his personality his whole life. He was a very isolated… introvert, so, you know, he really wasn't a... wasn't really a naturally social creature, he was a shy man.
Betsy: And I'm sure he felt ugly and hm... I think he had no relationship with women at all until he met my mother.
Betsy: Their first date, they met at the Tyrannosaurus rex in the Museum of Natural History. And… She was two hours late. And my father was still sitting there. And when she saw him sitting there, she burst into tears. Because she realized he was really interested, otherwise, he would have left.
Betsy: I think she loved my father I mean, clearly, she loved him unconditionally, otherwise she would never have driven him every single weekend, up to the Catskills. And I’m certain that she realized very early all about his cross dressing.
Betsy: For the simple reason that when I was seven, eight, nine, my girlfriends and I, would play in the house when my mother was out and we would all put on her negligees. And there was one negligee that was six feet long. It was the prettiest one, six feet long, and it had a kind of drawstring at the chest so, you could expand the chest. And we all wanted to wear that one.
Betsy: Of course, this was my father's nightgown. And…One year, my father said he was going to have a dress rehearsal because he was going to dress up as his sister, for Halloween the next day. So, I was 12. And my father was in the bathroom for five hours! And even at 12, I realized that wasn't… Usual. For somebody just getting ready for a Halloween party. And when he came out, I was really quite frightened because he looked very ghoulish to me.
He had shaved his arms, his legs, his chest, he had taped up his face. I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door. Because I was like, momentarily shocked. I knew pretty immediately that he was really into this. I just did not know the extent.
Reading her Father's Book:
My wife and I drove up a Saturday morning.
The weather was clear and cloudless.
There was a sharp chill in the air and it was a three-hour drive upstate.
The last part of the drive took us a long, precipitous, winding roads near the edges of cliffs and higher and higher into the mountains.
Were we nervous? Of course, who would not be?
Were we afraid? No!
From these people, we had nothing to fear. But there's still that thrilling little tang in doing something secretive, something the rest of the world knew nothing about. Something which might have an element of danger about it.
Betsy: -Kate!
Katherine: hello Beautiful!
Betsy: hi! So good to see you again.
Katherine: So good to see friends from so long ago.
Betsy: I know… I love hearing your voice!
Betsy: So how have you been?
Katherine: I take about 7 pills in the morning, 2 in the middle of the day, and one in the afternoon.
Betsy: If that makes you feel any better I take 14 pills every night when I go to bed, so…
Katherine: You seem to be alright.
Betsy: God, I feel like it’s been forever since we’ve seen each other. You were such a good friend.
Katherine: Yes.
Betsy: I remember you, I remember you coming to the house, I remember your eldest when she was 4. What did you think about my dad during this time?
Katherine: I always find him an admirable man. He knew a lot. He spoke very intelligently about any topic you could raise.
Betsy: Yeah.
Katherine: He never talked about sex. Understandable enough between men, they don’t talk about sex. Of course they do! But he never did. So, I never made that link. He did tell me once about the night dress and how he couldn’t really be happy unless he was sleeping in the nightdress. But that’s something that maybe I inferred maybe he implied that this happened, in adulthood. That’s what I assumed. And he said on one occasion that he never even thought of cross-dressing until one time when he was particularly down, and your mother encouraged him to.
Betsy: That's really nice to hear. She was sad when she told me about it but I think she was just a very romantic person and my father was probably the least romantic man that ever drew breath so…Although in his book, he says they were in love, and I'm really surprised to see that he said that... Cause I never experienced, I I knew he loved my mother deeply, but I didn't see the in love part.
Katherine: After I had completed all the possible qualifications for librarianship, which was my profession in Australia, I had to choose a place where I could go to to add to the theory.
Katherine: At that time, I had also made contact with cross-dressers in the United States and Canada mainly; through a magazine called Transvestia. All of my friends that had been corresponding with said: “Yes, do come. Would love to see you, love to know you". And so, I found myself on a ship to Canada, a ship not on the sheeps ! (joke) Yes, I was on a ship to Canada by way of Miami, And I was engaged at the time, so I had the the double confusion as to whether I would go to Canada and come back and be a normal man and just get married and live a normal life. Or whether in fact, I would stay in North America and take the full change I didn’t know myself.
Katherine: And so, when very soon after I arrived in Canada, Irene, my apartment mate said: “Why don’t we go down for the week-end to the Casa Susanna?” I was extremely interested So, we went down and
Katherine: Irene had warned people that I was coming with her and so, there were a select gathering of people at the resort waiting to meet this strange marsupial, trans dresser who was coming so far around the world.
Katherine: When we arrived at the resort, it was dark by then.
Chevalier Memories Pictures
Katherine: Maria was playing a card game with Gale and there was Lee who was a city engineer who I met through the magazine Transvestia And there was of course Susanna.
Maria cooked a huge meal of spaghetti we sat around and talked, played card games and
talked about each other and talked about ourselves and for the very first time in my life I could talk to anyone I want to talk to. I could talk to them about subjects that the average person never even thought of as existing, let alone as a difficulty in society.
Katherine: You could actually react with people on a one to one basis, without there being any misunderstanding, without there being any need to say: "I know I sound like a man and
I probably don’t look much like a woman but deep down inside, I'm a woman and I want you to treat me like a woman." There was no need for any of that.
Katherine: The rest of the weekend a lot of people got into groups and said: “Why me? Why am I like this? What was this thing and why was it us and how is it different from being gay and how is it different from… Well in those days we thought we were just cross-dressers so… How was that different from being a transgender person who really wanted to change… It was a very difficult situation to try and sort out these different classifications of people.
Gregory: The Catskills were a getaway for people from the city to go up to the country enjoy swimming and fishing and boating and you know recreation especially in the fall. The country place that became known at “Casa Susanna” was initially an incredible property called Chevalier d’Eon which had a creek on it, a a pond… As a child, I got to romp through the woods; we had a cornfield, we had cows because my grandmother leased out one of her fields for cows to graze on. It was magical.
Gregory: Maria was my grandmother. An incredibly strong lady. She came over from Italy to bring back her father who had come to America and become successful. And somehow, he got killed and all the money was stolen and Maria was left here as a child of 15. She managed to get a job and worked really hard and finally built this wig shop on 5th avenue called “Maria’s” of course.
Maria was from a very traditional Italian churchgoing family. Always went to church on Sunday.
Every weekend we’d come over to her house and she’d cook a big dinner, and family was very important to her and there’d be three different type of pasta and arancinos and artichokes I remember those meals they were absolute feasts! And the entire family came over and partook of them.
Gregory: And then one day she met Tito, this gentleman who came into the shop and was trying on wigs
Gregory: pretending it was for his sister or his niece or something like that. And hm… She basically outed him and said: “Oh come on, I know this is for you!” He was rather shocked and… But, she did it in a loving way. And he told me later that he was so impressed by her openness and by her acceptance of him that she was the one and special person in his life.
Gregory: Tito was very affable, energetic. He was a radio commentator for the Latin American station in the United States. He used to come up to the country place for us and he used to dress as a woman and become Susanna.
Gregory: We weren’t supposed to know that and…So, one day I was at the porch in the country and Susanna grabbed me and sat down and had a conversation and revealed himself to me.
Gregory: And at the end of the conversation I told him, which he was very touched about that, “If my grand-mother loved you, then you were ok with me” And he was very touched by that.
Gregory: And then we found that they were getting married and went to the wedding and it was…I was very happy for Maria
Gregory: cause she seemed very happy at the time I could see the sparkles in her eyes and I could see that they both cared and loved each other.
Gregory: But on the other hand, my mom Yolanda, Maria’s only child, thought morally it was wrong, she didn’t understand it. No matter how many time Tito-Susanna tried to explain it to her. But then again, she couldn’t avoid it because Maria said: “This is what is going to happen, this is what is going to be, We are going to create
Gregory: a Club, in the Catskills for female impersonators shows. Which she did.
Gregpory: Every Saturday night, they throw a female impersonator show and number and numbers of performers would come in and do different acts. It was actually quite a success up there. Every Saturday night, they’d get 50, 75 people in the Wigwam including the mayor of the local town who would actually come to the show, which we thought was hilarious.
Gregory: And of course, we weren't allowed to be anywhere close to that; but what we did as precocious children would sneak around and stand on soapboxes, and peek in the windows, and then get found out, and dragged back to the house and… 10 minutes later would be back to watch the show again. She wasn't too happy about that but…
Gregory: This was part of Maria's world and it was part of her husband's world, so she embraced it wholeheartedly and was very supportive in any endeavour that he wanted to get into with her. Again, the the property was a beautiful place. It was very private. So, a lot of people could go there and be who they were; and who they are. So, we would have
Gregory: 10, 12, 15 people coming up every weekend to stay at the Bungalow Colony, which is what it was back then. And do a show every week!
Gregory: I had mixed feelings about that because there was peer pressure and there was couple of incidents where some of my local friends would come over and said: "Oh, guess what I saw today?" I said, "what?"; "I saw this big, burly guy in the hardware store wearing a dress and a wig and makeup!”
And I said, "Oh yeah, really!". In the meantime, the gentleman was staying at our house, so
I was somewhat mortified by that. But I came to a resolution of that, that I wasn't going to be ashamed; that this was who they were and who they are and if that's what they wanted to do and be, and it made them happy, who was I to judge them?
Bus Driver: Okay passengers, new stop! Hamptons, New York.
Betsy: Hey!
Diana: Hey! Good to see you
Katherine: Wonderful to see you too.
Diana: Let me give you a hug. God it’s just unbelievable!
Katherine: Did you ever meet Donald Wollheim?
Diana: I’ve met Donald Wollheim once,
Katherine: This is Betsy
Betsy: I’m his daughter Hi,
Diana: Hi,
Betsy: great to meet you
Diana: glad to meet you.
Diana: You remember probably even better than I do!
Katherine: You and I met in 1962
Diana: That was 62, So I must have been 24,23, maybe 25.
Betsy: That’s the year my father wrote about. He said it was absolutely freezing!
Diana: But the cold didn’t even affect me
Katherine: What cold?
Diana: What cold!
Betsy: He said everyone was sleeping with their male clothes and all their female clothes on, that’s how cold it was.
Diana: It was very cold!
Katherine: I got as many blankets as I could find.
Betsy: Absolutely, and he said he believed that that was the greatest group of transvestites that had ever gathered in the history of humanity! Which was absolutely-
Katherine: There were lot of people, but I don't think it was a world record.
Betsy: My father said it was wonderful.
Diana: It was, I mean it was certainly, an incredible experience for me, but it was almost out-of-body experience, it was so… so, powerful!
Katherine: That weekend for the first time an attempt was being made to take all these disparate little groups of cross-dressers and form them into a national sorority and that was the work of Virginia Prince. She was a scientist, she lived on the West Coast. She was a very forceful personality. She was a pain in the neck sometimes... And she, had the drive and she had the organizational skills to contact many of these small groups.
And of course Virginia went on editing the magazine Transvestia. It was partly wish fulfilment fiction. Badly written. And partly stuff stolen from scientific magazines on cross-dressing. And there was a large social section. "Would you like to meet other people who cross-dress?" And so, people made their own little internal networks as well.
Diana: Yes, that’s what I did too.
Katherine: And so that is the reason why all those people finished up at that resort.
Katherine: You didn’t get involved in the… Casa Susanna, did you?
Diana: No! No, I didn’t. as I say I mostly stayed away from the culture. Mostly, it's not so much staying away as not participating.
Katherine: Sure, I understand I never adopted people because they were trans. I adopted people because I liked them.
Diana: Yes! Yes.
Diana: So, I wanna go look inside of one of these. I don’t remember, let’s see what they look like!
Katherine: This is the one deluxe. The one with the green side.
Diana: Yes, indeed.
Katherine: That's our specialty.
Diana: If they were hundred, I mean putting a hundred people in there that’s a pretty…
Katherine: Well, for an audience you can do it because you've got 10 in rows of 10, it's easy, but to accommodate them overnight, that's more of a difference.
Katherine: Touch wood!
Diana: You bet! You bet you know, two women standing here leaning up against the wall, you never know what kind of trouble we get into!
Katherine: We can try...
Diana: Completely round is the perfect pearl…
Katherine: I’ll beat you with my stick if you sing that awful song.
Diana: I sang it quite well, I think.
Katherine: Oh, you sang it well, but the lyrics are silly.
Diana: They're very silly, they're supposed to be silly.
Diana: I don’t even know how I got invited to Casa Susanna. I desperately of course wanted to go to this Halloween party.
Diana: And I had no idea how I'd ever pull it off. But I sort of got Julie to agree that it was it would be OK for me to do that, to maybe find some stuff out about myself.
Diana: So, off I went, and it was an incredibly dangerous adventure. With a big suitcase I stood on the highway, and I hitchhiked from Valparaiso, Indiana to Casa Susana. The first thing that happened wasI think we went into the main house and there was somebody there who would set my hair. Now, I never had my hair
Diana: curled, ever. It was just the most exciting experience, it was unbelievable to me! It's so unbelievable to me what's those small pleasures how thrilling they were. I mean, it all seems kind of silly and funny. And it is, I mean, even then it was done with a light heart. But it was also very piquant, very poignant.
Diana: And one of the crossdressers Gloria, gave me this wonderful pair of shoes that had these high heels that were just spectacular, and they fit. And I was pretty successful. So, they were all kind of 'Oohing' and ‘ahhing’ and that was you know, great support. Made me feel really
Diana: authentic, it made me feel like: "wow! This is… I could really be like this"
Diana: I remember that there were a lot of people. But individuals are not so clear to me. I don't think it's so much that I didn't interact with the people in in fun ways. But I was so out of myself, it was just so incredible that the remembrance is not a part of what it felt like. It's more really a feeling this incredible feeling of exaltation that was…sublime, it was…I mean, it was unreal, obviously. I mean, it was something that is just that, something I would never have, hoped could happen.
Katherine: Oh, I remember that night! I did The Dance of the Little Swans.I had done a bit of training as a classical ballerina.
Katherine: So yes, I could dance on toe for 20 seconds.
Katherine: Some of the crossdressers were excellent. Some of them were very well done, well made-up, well dressed, good taste. On the other hand of course, there were some who looked like Donald Duck in a drunken orgy or something like this.
Katherine: Everyone wanted to just join in and be another woman amongst women.
Gregory: The style at least in Casa Susanna wasn't vampy or very sexy, they were dressing up, as middle class women that would be putting on their Sunday best, and their finery. And it wasn't like they wanted to be a Betty Page or something like that,they wanted to be an accepted person of the female persuasion in society. And the transformation for most of them wasn't, an easy thing to accomplish. It took hours to get to the point where they were satisfied with their look.
Gregory: To become Susanna, took hours. I mean, Tito was a perfectionist. When he was becoming Susanna, I saw him tweeze every hair on his face, which was,
Gregory: an incredibly long process. And I asked him: "It takes so long for you to transform!" and his answer was, "Well, it's worth it."
Gregory: She loved to play the starring role. Aside from the cross-dressing shows that we did at the Wigwam and then when she was the Grand Dame at Casa Susanna. Loved to be out front and a performer, and… She just had this incredible personality that just spilt over everything.
Gregory: Susanna is owed the respect that is due her. She told me a story once that she was growing up in Chile, where she was from, and that she always knew that she wanted to be a woman. So, this was not something that was a fad or a fixture. And Tito felt actually blessed, that he didn't have to hide it from Maria, that she was accepting all of it and it made his life a joy, rather than constant paranoia of who's going to find out, am I going to lose my job, or am I going to lose my family... Which was what happened back then.
Gregory: These have seen better days.
Archive Speaker:
The big city attracts homosexuals and the liberal laws have made here, the biggest magnet of the nation. The city can offer anonymity and permissiveness. The city’s downtown tenderloin district is the homeground of the always visible segment of the city’s homosexuals and transvestites. The drag queens are here at Turk and Taylor. So frequent were the fights between screaming queens in the 2 to 3am periods that police had had enough, and asked the all night cafeterias to close by midnight.
Katherine: One thing you have to remember is that we are talking about the 1960s; when the cross-dressers were in some places illegal and certainly, in many places looked down on and bullied, and... Had a bad time. It was a very hard time, back then to know, who to trust; and where do you get your information from.
Katherine: One of the reasons why there are relatively few photographs taken at the Chevalier d'Eon resort and at the Casa Susanna. People didn't like to have, they didn't like to lose control of the photographs that were taken of them. You'd be very unlikely to have someone come up and say: "Would you take a photograph of me on your camera?" Because they would know then that negative, that camera, would go away somewhere. That person could do anything with those photos, and... We were all a little bit paranoid about having our reputations destroyed. Or having blackmail exercised on us.
Katherine: And because of the prejudice against gay people, they wanted to differentiate themselves. So, the resort was designed for cross-dressing men who were exclusively heterosexual. And they wanted their wives to be part of the organization.
Gregory: Well, they label themselves as cross-dressers. They didn't label themselves as gay or transsexual. Most of them claimed that they were totally heterosexual. The times were the, you know, middle 50s through 60s, which reigned of McCarthyism, of anti-communist sentiment. If someone was perceived as being gay it was it was a crime!
Let's face it, you could go to jail for that! In that context, not only do you come out and be a cross-dresser, but then you're gay on top of that, so that's like straight to! You know, so you're getting a double whammy from the hm... from the religious front, from the moral majority back then, and that was a moral majority back then.
Archive Speaker:
I have approached many, numerous firms asking them for any kind of work that they had to offer over a period of eight months. The same response. We can't hire anybody of your caliber. We don't want any of your people working for us. So, what else was I supposed to do when you get damn hungry? I'm not up here tonight for criticism. I'm up here for help. Now I know about roughly about 20 of us girls who are very well qualified to do work legitimate work. We don't want to hustle. We hate hustling. I do. I hate it very bitterly. But when I get starving for two and three days and somebody comes along, I'm going to take a meal off this because it's the only means available.
Gregory: Not only… Did you have two strikes on you, but you were then a total degenerate. So, I think they wanted to skirt that issue, in order to again get a certain amount of acceptability or tolerance, let's use that word instead of acceptability, tolerance.
Gregory: Maria wanted to become, the landing pad, so to speak and she walked on very fine lines because these people were major film directors, they were attorneys, they were tugboat captains, they were airplane pilots, there was... All sorts of professions that people reached, the pinnacle of their careers where they were making good money had great jobs
So, it must have been an extremely strong desire to do this. Because they were rolling the dice every time that they became their alter ego. And then if found out, the downside of it was horrendous. Who want to be brought into jail, dressed as a woman in your community?
It would have been front page anywhere in the United States. So, hm... They risked a lot for doing what they wanted to do.
Katherine: That is Irene who was an aeronautical engineer. She also was one who swore that she would never go anywhere near a sex change, she said: "Certainly not, what an idea! Disgusting! I am a crossdresser and I will remain a cross-dresser!" And a couple of years after I returned to Australia, I had a letter saying: "Sit down before you read this. I've just had the operation." Felicity was an airline pilot with many years' experience. She had intended to be the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. But Lindbergh beat her to it.
Gale?
Betsy: I miss him so much.
Katherine: Gale was the first person I met who used the technic of gluing elastic to the skin and then pulling it back to give a false and temporary safe facelift. I learnt many things from Gale; and, one of the first was that there was someone else in the world like me, which was very important to know. That’s the Downtown group
Betsy: The Downtown branch!
Katherine: Donna is the only one I recognized.
Betsy: Donna, I thought was quite beautiful!
Katherine: And elegant too. She wasn’t just beautiful she was elegant.
Betsy: She definitely passed.
Katherine: That's Donna in male mode.
Betsy: I have never seen Don, Donna as Don. Ever! Had she transitioned?
Katherine: She had transitioned, and she had detransitioned.
Betsy: Why do you think?
Katherine: I don't know. Maybe she saw herself deteriorating. Maybe she just thought she was no longer the person she could have been and sadly, she decided just to walk back down that path she just climbed up her way up.
Betsy: It’s a fabulous dress!
Katherine: Gloria was large, she was about six foot four. And she had had a stroke, so she was paralyzed on one side. But she did her best with her accumulated wealth to help other transgendered people.
Betsy: I read about that.
Katherine: She paid for their operation then she looked after them until they felt free to go out into society. When she died, the minister who conducted the ceremony had a problem because they had invited a lot of people. Some of whom knew Rex and some who knew Gloria. And so, they put the Gloria people on one side of the church and the Rex people on the other. And the minister had to stumble his way through the eulogy, saying
"This… person was a fine… person and we should all… we should all honor this…person!"
Katherine: That’s me.
Betsy: That’s you?
Katherine: That’s me. And that's the wig that Maria put together for me.
Betsy: I love that photo!
Katherine: Swimming costume and garter!
Betsy: You have great legs though.
Katherine: Oh great legs! Of course, I admit that. Honesty forces me to admit that! Oh dear. Bad! That was taken in my family home in Sydney. That was what I used to do, for myself with my little homemade self-timer on camera. And I would stand in the corner and take photographs, and all the doors were deadlocked.
Betsy: I love the photos with you, with your natural hair. You look more like yourself. And I like that. I love that photo! Don’t laugh, I love that photo!
Katherine: But that's the sheep dog!
Betsy: I know but it's it's very, the way it covers one of your eyes is very fetching. I like it.
Katherine: Veronique Lake resuscitated!
Betsy: I love that photo. I love this one too! So young!
Katherine: Taken from my home.
Betsy: How old were you there?
Katherine: Well, I would have been at university, so somewhere between 16 and 20.
Betsy: So young…That is my father It’s in my mother’s house. There he is again.
Katherine: There is more of him around and dressed than I knew of.
Betsy: Oh yes, there are many, many photos of him in dresses.
Katherine: I’m learning things about your father every minute.
Betsy: Yes, and here is my dad again. That’s him again. That’s him again, with my mom.
I love that! She always has a look of adoration whenever she looks at him, you know. So, you didn't really see him dressed much?
Katherine: No! Not only once ever, I think!
Betsy: Oh my God, there's many, many photos of him. Here he is again.
Katherine: I'm certainly surprised because I had always been under the impression that he suppressed it as as much as possible, that was all going on in his head, but not in real life.
Betsy: I think that was true for a few years and then it just, popped out!
Katherine: Yeah.
Betsy: Although he has good legs too. I don't know where are these clothing were because they certainly weren't in our house. My mother always said that my father was a pure clothing fetishist. But seeing all these photos... I can't help but wonder, was there more involved? What do you think? What is your take on this?
Katherine: My take on this is that no one knows, no one will ever know, what goes on in some of the depths of someone's mind. Who knows? The shadow know, only the shadow know.
Betsy: Yes. That's only the shadow knows. Who is that?
Katherine: I don’t know. Quite attractive though.
Diana: Is that me? Is that really me? Are you sure? Somebody said so huh? Is that really me? Where would that have been? Oh god, I can’t stand it! This is unbelievable! I don’t believe that’s me. Is that really me? Oh, wait a minute. \ Diana D, that’s not me.
This is not me.
That’s not me.
That’s not me.
These are not me.
That could be me…This is kind of an embarrassing picture but it says my name right on the back so it must be me.
This is me!
These are definitely me.
Those three are definitely me.
My hair grown quite long by that time.
This is right around when I got surgery. And I was feeling my oats. I was pretty happy here. Very very happy.
Diana: Coming here made me realize that is really how I needed to be. And I had to face up to that.
Diana: This was so powerful for me, and so important; that I had to figure out a way…To allow it to… Bloom.
Diana: So, after this Halloween party, we went to Gale’s place in the city. And so, I stayed there for a couple of days, always as Diana, I was Diana of the whole time. And then I got this call from Julie. And the sad part was that she had had a miscarriage
Diana: That was that was like a real… kick in the head. Because the kind of almost the worst thing that you can imagine happening, when you're in the middle of this blissful pleasure and your and your beloved is having a miscarriage. There's just something kind of very dissonant about that and very unhappy.
Katherine: When I went back to Australia after my degree. I was determined to marry. I was determined to give up cross-dressing and I thought it would be almost automatic.
A great many cross-dressers think: "Oh, once I get married, it'll all go away. I won't need this imaginary woman that inhabits half of my body and most of my mind.”
Katherine: But it didn't work out that way. I still had the urges to dress even when I was engaged and as the marriage drew closer and closer. And finally, I had decided I really, in fairness, had to tell her about myself before we got married. And at that point, her father was killed in a road accident, so, I couldn't tell her. I couldn't bring two tragedies into her life, so close together. So I determined instead to give up anything to do with cross-dressing for a full year. And maybe I could give it up completely then. And at least I wouldn't have committed myself to life, I would be able to either renew my vow for masculinity or else I would give away and go forward towards being feminine.
So, one year after we’re married, I told my wife about myself and She was… quite naturally very upset. But in a few days' time, she came back to me and said that we would try and
make it work because that's what marriage was about. And we did make it work through three children and 25 years.
Betsy: In the early 60s my father’s obsessions was getting worse.
Betsy: So, he flew out to the West coast to meet Virginia. He wanted somebody to talk to about this very secret subject completely under cover. And so, Virginia suggested Susanna and Gale.
Betsy: Gale and Susanna both had meeting places, for men of this nature, this ilk. David was in the village, so it was the “Downtown group”. And Susanna was in Midtown, so she was the “Midtown Group”. So, my father wrote a letter to Susanna and Gale.
Betsy: And Gale answered within a week. And they both just hit it off.
Betsy: He would say he was going book hunting, on Saturday. But I really think a lot of those times he didn't come back with books. He came back occasionally with books, but not usually. And, I think he went to David Wilde’s house on 11th Street.
Betsy: But he knew he would have to tell my mother. He asked advice from Virgina . And Virginia said: “Come at it slowly”
Betsy: And so, he did. He started to wear
Betsy: nylon tricot and he eventually went night gown shopping with my mother.
Betsy: When I was 12 was it 1964. So, I think that was about the time when he may not have opened the whole door to her. Because I think, she felt it was just something between them originally.
Betsy: But when she discovered the network and she realized it wasn't gonna stop, it wasn't a phase…
Betsy: There was some watershed moment from my mother.
Diana: Julie and I, we loved one another. And the love was beyond all the other things about ourselves. But we were innocent in some ways about life and about how people are and can be. So, we thought New York would be a place where I could learn how I really was.
And it wasn’t so much that it will all be healed. But if there were any place where it could be healed, it would be someplace like New York.
Diana: Her hope was that it would be. It would be something we could live with. And that was my hope too.
Diana: So we decided to move to New York and go visit Harry Benjamin and see if there is anything to be done for me. At that time, anybody who is even remotely thinking of surgery had to see Harry Benjamin.
Diana: I didn’t dress all that much I don’t think. Julie and I would visit Gale and we would visit Susanna. Julie was very much apart. Although she was often, tortured by it, because she didn't understand it. It was not... It was not pleasant for her. But she was willing to go on with that because she wanted this to turn out… OK, for both of us.
Diana: And then, I started to take hormones, I started to develop a little bit. And it became apparent that was what I wanted. So, we came to realize that this really couldn’t work. So, she moved back to Valparaiso, where a good friend of ours, Paul, asked her to marry him.
Diana: So, Julie and I were separated. I was working at a public relations place. I was taking hormones. I was doing electrolysis and I was…It became more and more known that I wanted to have surgery.
Diana: But it didn't seem any way for me, possibly to do it because it was thousands of dollars. But then Gloria did call.
Diana: We went out for dinner. And… He said : "Well, if you really want to do this, I'll help you out.
Diana: I'll take you out to California and we'll find a place for you to do this, I'll pay for it and you can stay with me!" So, I resigned and I hm… tried to pull everything together. I changed to Diana. The night before the flight, and that was the last time I was David.
Diana: It was a very rough flight to California. I thought that I was going to die and God would have gotten me.
Diana: And my mother was right all along! But fortunately, the plane landed.
Diana: And we just kind of leisurely made our way across the country. And then, we went to Tijuana. In the United States, this was illegal. Everybody agreed that it was right that it was illegal.
So, there was no way to find a moral place to stand. And that’s a very isolating experience for any human being I think to feel that who you are is against the law. There's still a little bit of anger in me even now that I actually had to leave the country to have the surgery done. I feel wronged about that.
Diana: I woke up, and it was pretty fierce pain. And my surgery was certainly not the most refined of the surgeries. I would have wished that I'd been able to go another place. Casablanca was the place at the time. But that I didn't have that and I, I was very grateful that I got what I got. But it was very painful. It was in a hospital where nobody spoke... everybody spoke Spanish, so I learned "mucho dolor" and "agua caliente"
Diana: Then, Gloria decided we should drive back to Pennsylvania and on the way we should stop in Iowa and visit my parents. We drove across the country, Gloria and I. And we stopped in Omaha, and my father came to meet us.
Diana: I remember I was in the room and my hair was in curlers and he came into the room. He just, came across a room and gave me a big hug and said, "I'm so glad to see you."
It was…truly an amazing, amazing gift of love. He was an incredible kind of marriage of
strength and softness. He was both an incredibly strong, masculine man. But he was an incredibly gentle soul as well.
Diana: That's always been a model… for how people should be. That they should… Have a zest for life and a love for the excitement of life, but a willingness to... To give and to... have vulnerability, to be vulnerable. And my dad was just an incredibly…He crossed all of those, and he was a simple man, he was not he was not some super educated or, he was just a very good being.
Diana: But that did not produce a super good relationship with my parents because was my mother was just… It was just too much. you know, they were in a small town. It was embarrassing quotes, embarrassing to them for me to show up, to be around. I was an embarrassment. So, it was it was just as well for to them that I was kind of disappeared.
Katherine: My relationship with my wife was never the kind of secret that is hidden away in a closet. Back in Australia, when I went to a dinner or a party or whatever, she knew where I was going and who I was going to be with. And in fact, she even came to a few of the functions with me.
Katherine: But when we moved back to America after a few years, we met the Downtown Branch and sometimes others.
Katherine: But after I don’t know, 4 or 5 times, she said she would really rather not come because she was afraid of hurting people's feelings by calling them by the wrong name.
So, from then on, I would go by myself.
Katherine: In these days I should add that we didn’t visit Casa Susanna.
Katherine: Mainly because the resort had disappeared I would ask, you know, "How's Marie?" And people would say: "We we think she's dead". And when I'd ask: "And what about the resort?"
They'd say: "Oh, it closed years ago. We don't know." So, it was only four or five years since I'd been there. It was nonetheless as if the resort had been all imagination and had never existed. And it was strange because no one knew. You imagined that someone at least would have known the truth about something, Where’s Tito? nobody knows.
Katherine: But that was only one part of our lives so anyway. I was too busy with myself.
Katherine: It wasn't so much that the urge was increasing, but the time was passing. And I knew that the proportion of my life that I would have to spend as a woman was diminishing compared to the proportion of my life that I had already spent and would spend as a man. And so, the pressure became greater.
Katherine: I kept wanting more and more. I wanted to dress more frequently, I wanted to dress with more freedom. I felt that, I'd spent the first third of my life being the person that my family wanted me to be. And the second third of my life I had spent being my marital family wanted me to be. And I wanted time for myself to be the person I wanted to be.
Katherine: And of course, several of my friends committed suicide. And I thought, "Is this the way I have to go? Is there any way that I'll ever get away from this circle of being John and Catherine and John and Catherine. Maybe I have to break the marriage or commit suicide.” And, when I went to my wife and told her that I needed to try living as a woman, she seemed to be very sympathetic and say: "Well, you can't have anything else happening that's worse!” because I think I phrase it: "I have to try living as a woman or I'll do something silly" It was my phrase. And she said: "Well, we can't have that." And we obviously both were talking about suicide. And…I thought it was all going to be all right. I told my family. My eldest daughter burst into tears and said: "Is that all it is?" Because they'd seen the distress that I was under, the stress that my wife was under. And they had assumed that like all every second family around us, I was having an affair with some other woman. Of which I was, of course, but it was me. So that was the situation that was really what pushed me over the edge.
Katherine: I had the operation early in February, and at the end of the operation, I felt absolutely marvelous, I felt that for the first time in my life,
Katherine: I was the real person and... That I had discarded those bits of me that weren't necessary andI had gained those bits of me that were.
Katherine: When I told my family it was just a shock to them… That there weren't really any questions that they could ask or that I could answer.
Katherine: One daughter has been my best friend virtually ever since the operation. The other two don't want to know me as Katherine. One of them I haven't seen for many years. The other one wrote me a letter of hope when I had my first heart operation hoped that I would recover soon and be well and so on. I thought: "Here is an opportunity I can take. It would've been worth having my triple bypass if I can make a contact with my daughter. “ And so, I wrote back to her and thanked her and said: "Maybe when I came out of the hospital, we could sit down for coffee and have a talk". And I received a reply which said, "it's too soon”. So, I still haven't seen her.
I drove home calm and filled with thoughts of the astonishing secret world I had come into.
I had heard some astonishing stories, but I could not visualize myself taking part in such adventures. There is indeed a certain dead-end element in Gale's life. It was evident in everything he said and did that he looked back on each episode as something guilt ridden.
He was like a man on a toboggan slide, enjoying the sensation, unable to get off and having no idea of what cliff or wall might lie at the bottom. I saw Gale as a man laughing to cover up her desire to scream as joking, to keep from crying; as running, to avoid having to stop and look at himself.
Betsy: My father was somebody, I think who really couldn't change.
Betsy: Even as Doris, my father was still Donald.
Betsy: I have a letter from him to my mother from 1942 where he says: "This is the way I am. I am I'm prone to moods. I have very, I wake up in the morning, one morning and everything is shit and all people are crap and, there's no good place for anything and nothing good to ever happen, and that's the way I feel. And then I wake up another morning and, everything seems fine and fun, and nice and interesting" And that's the way he was his whole life.
Betsy: And after they had me, things were really happy, for the first ten maybe years of my life. But as I started to go through puberty, my father hm... Started to get insulting. And say things like "looks like me, poor kid"
Betsy: He said things to me that were absolutely
Betsy: unforgivable. unforgivable. When I was 12 years old, I was 12, I was in sixth grade, 12. He said I was a liar, a cheat and a fraud. How could a 12 year be a fraud? And I never lied, I told my mother everything. My friends would tease me that I tell mommy everything.
I didn't lie. I didn't cheat because I was the smartest kid in school. So, who would I cheat from? And I didn't, you know, and I wasn't a fraud because you know, what 12-year-old could be a fraud? It's ridiculous, impossible. And it took me another over 20 years to realize that that was all a projection of how he felt about himself.
Betsy: He obviously had a lot of self-hatred which was like a black cloud in our household. Like whole, like a a cloud…
Betsy: My father was somebody who opened his mouth and said things that most people would consider unsayable. Really, unsayable. He would just say it like that, no problem.
Betsy: I mean, he told me I had no worth as a person. That basically I was just a broodmare. I was a worthless piece of crap.
Betsy: I mean, I really loved my father. I worshiped him, I adored him, I loved him, I idolized him. So, every single, nasty thing he said to me, I bought, I bought it all. I believed it. And I'm still trying to rid myself of some of these beliefs now at age 70.
Betsy: I wonder if his own hatred for his father, he just assumed that I would hate him because I was, he was the father. I don't know, I have no idea. Maybe he hated me because I was the girl that looked like him. I really don't know. I don't know.
Betsy: So, anything that made him happy was a happy thing for our household. That's why I feel happiness that he got pleasure from cross-dressing.
Betsy: Because that was like, if you made a chart and there was a negative side and a positive side, there are so many negatives; And that cross-dressing he was happy. He was happy. When I walked around yesterday, I looked around here and I could think, I could imagine, I could imagine all of them, you know, going through the grass in their high heels. You know, coming from the cabins and I could imagine them all so happy and I thought: "My father must have been so happy here."
Betsy: He had found a group that accepted him with all of his quirks. Even the most outrageous quirk. he says that he bonded with people immediately. My father wasn't like that; with other people. He really wasn’t. He could be very cruel. He was very, very cruel. He was cruel to my mother. He was cruel to me. He was cruel to a lot of his authors. He wasn't cruel at all to others, it really depended on their personality. I don't think he was ever cruel to his fellow transvestites. Ever. He loved them. And he bonded with them in a way that he bonded with nobody else.
Betsy: I didn't feel love for my father. Until recently, and just recently, I'm almost 70. But just recently I'm beginning to feel like... I remember the love I felt as a child. And I can feel it again. But really, it took decades.
Diana: Then it was time for me to sort of imagine how would I get out into the world. And one of the things that I wanted to do is get married, I even thought at the beginning that I would love to have children. And much of that was realized.
Diana: I was married with a man for a while I had very traditional ideas about…I think both of us did actually about how it would be. He took me to meet his parents and they were lovely people and we had a wonderful time. His mother was a Tupperware salesman and I got lots of Tupperware and it was wonderful.
Diana: So, for the first couple of years it really was just me, kind of learning how to be a homemaker, getting to know his mother, having that relationship with his mother. just being domestic. I would have been very happy to be just a housewife but it was not to be that way So eventually we split. And I had to find work. And that became a whole new career, and it was quite an exciting career. And had almost nothing to do with being transgender. And had a lot to do with being a woman working in computers.
Diana: When I got to Xerox the place was just beaming with excitement and energy and fun it was just outrageous. In a in a new agey way. I sort of went from being a secretary to being a research scientist. It was very funny. We began to develop this language called Small Talk That was a big thing in the day. And it did have a large impact on a lot of the software that exists, to this day. And here I was a woman in this research center that was mostly all men. And they let me play.
Diana: There was no problem, you know, it was just... “Welcome to the to the clan!”
Diana: And still, it was hard for me to tell people who I am. I think there is a piece of me that feels some regrets or kind of sadness. Because it’s truly very much a part of who I am.
Diana: My whole goal was to not be afraid. I didn't want to be afraid. I wanted to be, just a human being, an alive human being having a fun, interesting, useful life.
Diana: And then, Carol Shapiro walked into my life. She put her hand up on the couch and I put my hand on the back of the couch. And the next thing we knew we were kissing. You have to get the idea that that was not a common thing. We were not…That was not our normal way of being. Our relationship even to this day is just, spectacular. And it has nothing to do with small Talk and has nothing to do with transgender…You know, Carol is actually very proud of me, in my transgender past. She thinks that: "Wow, that's pretty incredible!"
Gregory: Maria sold this property because it was just becoming too large to manage. I mean, again, it's 288 acres of land. There's uh, always something that needed to be done. So, she downsized a little bit and, moved couple of miles away. to 188-acre property, which became known as “Casa Susanna”.
Gregory: Which was a totally different operation. They didn't do cross-dressing shows, but it became like the Bed and Breakfast of the cross-dressing community. Where people could come and stay and enjoy themselves for the time that they were here.
Gregory: That was another magical place and Susanna spent a lot of time of her life up there; and would go out regularly to the store or to parties… you know, she was her own individual and wasn't sheltered to the house and hiding undercover there, she was quite flamboyant! And she actually enjoyed the property a lot more than Tito did. Let me be clear about that: they were separate individuals.
Gregory: Tito was a person who, you know, worked for radio for years, had his own show, and hm, Susanna, got into the translation business at the U.N., so, she was also eventually able to hm support herself.
Gregory: Again, they were both separate and individual people. Although I think that Tito was taking hormones to grow breath to transform and live as Susanna full time.
Gregory: I did speak to her about that and I said: “Well, you know, suppose you became a woman, would you want the comfort of a man?” And she said No!
Gregory: She was pretty adamant about her relationship with Maria, so, I guess that would make them a lesbian couple.
Gregory: It used to be the swimming hole here we used to come here almost every day. My grandmother used to dam up so, we can get a big deep swimming pool here. And then every year in the fall the water will just wash everything away and we’ll have to put a new dam here every year. I can see some of the rocks that were still there from when we used to do that.
Gregory: What’s remarkable is that my family used to own that mountain.
Gregory: Maria was up in the house in Mount Vernon because we had moved there. And I was actually staying at her house on 103rd Street. So, my brother Richard called me and said that she had fallen down a flight of stairs and that she had, you know, cracked open her skull and was unconscious. And he didn't know for how long she was lying there. And called an ambulance and brought her to the hospital. She was seriously hurt. She had to have 3 burn holes cut into her and to her skull to relieve the pressure from the hematoma that was growing under there and the bleeding, and had a very long convalescence after that. And not only, did we have to go through that, helping her with her convalescence, but the hospital bills from that incident, were astronomical and put an extreme financial pressure on the family. And especially on Tito. And, you know, he had to take care of his family and that's what he did. And, you know, that became his motivation in every waking minute. All of his energy was put into that so…
Gregory: So, they had to sell Casa Susanna. and that was the end of the property. And then I would say in the 80s my grandmother was getting worse and worse and then started to go into a hoarding phase. She had an 8 room Upper West Side apartment in the city; and there was barely a path to walk from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. So, Susanna
Gregory: got her own apartment on 42nd Street. And started living as Susanna full time. And she slowly but surely, created her identity and got a driver's license, and a Social Security card. But also, during that time, Susanna had developed a brain tumor which was inoperable. And eventually she was going to die from it.
Gregory: So, Maria was a hoarder, Susanna had brain cancer. And hm, their lives physically were separated. But they were always in communication with each other I would sometime overhear their conversations. And they were very endearing. And always ending with: "I love you; I miss you. Lots of kisses and someday soon we'll be back together again'" which was incredibly sweet I thought.
Gregory: But they couldn’t. In fact, when Marie died Susanna was in such a state that he couldn’t move from that apartment. She passed the week after Maria died. We were told she was laying on the bed, fully dressed as Susanna
Katherine: And I loved your grandmother, Maria.
Gregory: She was an incredible woman. She was such a strong woman, and I know she put you all to work immediately when you got here.
Katherine: There were some crossdressers who just wanted to get into the washing up and the scrubbing the floor. That wasn't me. I was the vertue in the bar stool.
Gregory: I mean, that building was fantastic. There was so many, you know, incredibly talented people that came here.
Katherine: For a long time; well, for some time anyway, it was the sort of belief that you really didn't find that community unless you were intelligent and educated and inquiring and all these things. It wasn't that at all, actually, it was just communication. You weren't allowed to put an ad in the paper saying: "Crossdresser interested in resort at the Catskills". You just couldn't do that. So, it all have to be word of mouth and the word of mouth people tended to be, university graduates and the professionals. So yes, it was a select group that used to come here, and it was a very interesting group.
Diana: So how old were you at that time?
Gregory: I was anywhere from 5. I was born in 1951 so...
Diana: So you were just a kid!
Gregory: I was just a kid. I know. We couldn't come and see the show so, we’d go peak through the window until we got caught.
Diana: That’s perfect!
Katherine: Well, if you're born in the 1950s, I'm well ahead of you because I'm 86.
Gregory: Oh, God bless you. Look at that. I want to tell you about something because, you know, it's long been a hm…A dream or even a quest of mine, because I actually am the holder of Susanna, Marias and Yolanda's ashes.
Diana: Oh my goodness.
Gregory: And I have always wanted to bring them here and hm, excuse me.And pass them out. Because I think that this is the place for them to be,
Diana: Seems like the perfect place, the perfect place.
Gregory: I would be honored, if you two would help me do that.
Diana: It would be my great honor. my great honor. So how do we go about that?
Gregory: Yeah, we were going to I was going to do it over by that tree over there. Because it has some color and hm, I just think that they should be here.
Casa Susanna
