TV HOST: Now, for reasons which will become very clear,
we're going to use first names only.
Would you please introduce yourselves?
Misty. Vicky.
Sonia. Simone.
Misty, what you do?
I'm a bank teller.
TV HOST: And Vicky? Cosmetician.
Sonia? Hair dresser.
Window display.
Are those your own eyelashes?
No.
And Sonia, is that your own hair?
No.
That's a very lovely dress, too,
that you're wearing, Simone, where did you buy it?
Oh, I made it myself.
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.
♪ ♪
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.
♪ ♪
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 theatricals took place.
Halloween 1962,
I was being a little swan in "Swan Lake."
Susanna was doing erotic dancing.
South American dancing.
And three of my friends were being the Andrews Sisters.
It looks as good as it did then.
(insects chirping)
We all used to have our meals there,
and people used to sit out the front--
on the veranda, or on the lawn.
People used to do gardening work.
They 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.,
which is 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 a hundred people there that weekend.
But it's, it's much the same.
(ship horn blares)
Visiting Casa Susanna was almost a necessity for me.
I had to leave my family in Australia and come to America
'cause 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 and I find that
I'm more woman inside than I am man,
that might be the point where my new life starts.
I think there are very 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.
I can remember as far back as about 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 would happen every day,
wished that when that my father came home from the sea,
I could say, "You've got two daughters now."
One doesn't know where these thoughts start.
It wasn't until lot of years later that
I had that experience of joy,
of sheer joy at being able to walk among people
and talk to them without hesitation,
to know that they understood the person I was,
no matter what I looked like inside,
I was a real woman and I wanted them
to know it and they did know it.
♪ ♪
DIANA: Between my third grade and fourth grade,
I would go to sleep at night
praying that I would wake up as a girl.
And I would pray hard, you know.
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, that was not who I was.
And there was, and there was no way to make it right.
I don't... I think it's very hard to kind of get...
have an appreciation for the difference...
for me, isolated in, in Iowa,
where, literally, you cannot talk to anyone
about this at all.
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 six days,
so when I began to have feelings about
wishing that I were a girl,
there was just no way that could possibly be okay.
And I kept thinking I would grow out of it.
And some... you know, there was a kind of almost
optimism about it, in the face of
pretty dark frustration.
That, okay, you'll get through this,
just, just go to school, do your school,
do your college, get married,
and this will go away.
And it never did go away.
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, you know.
What must this be?
What is this that could be going on with me
that makes me have these feelings?
(newsreel music playing)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Christine Jorgensen,
who used to answer to George,
creates quite a stir as she returns home
to New York from Copenhagen.
Christine hit 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 international airport.
Gentlemen, please give her a chance to talk!
(overlapping chatter, reporters clamoring)
I'm very impressed by everyone coming.
REPORTER: Christine, are you happy to be home?
Yes, of course.
What American wouldn't be?
Have you been offered a movie contract?
Yes, but I haven't accepted it.
Do you have any plans regarding the theater?
No, I don't think so.
Are you going to go on with your photography?
I hope so, yes.
I see. 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.
♪ ♪
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.
I read it avidly.
And that was it.
There was nobody I could talk to about it.
If I were to talk about it,
"Oh, this is horrible," that would be that,
you know, this horrible, sinful thing
that this person did
to themselves and they will be damned to hell
and all my friends would just make fun of it.
Talking to my parents would be a disaster.
♪ ♪
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 plausible,
might be conceivable.
♪ ♪
I was pretty sure that my mother would
try to do something pretty radical
if she thought that that was how I was.
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.
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 sang in the choir, and I grow up...
playing the game, and I played it very well.
When I got a scholarship to Valparaiso University,
I got into the theater department,
and I met Julie.
And through the years, we got closer and closer
and it became kind of like...
we should, we should probably get married.
We should probably... I think we, you know,
we thought we loved one another.
And I told Julie about...
that I had this problem.
And, um, 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."
It's a very frustrating thing
when you... when they... when people speak as though,
"This is not a problem,
all you have to do is change your mind."
And I, I'd say, "Okay,
when will my mind change?"
You know, how does it change?
What makes me... 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 about to go into surgery.
There was a 50-50 chance
that she might die on the table.
That weekend, that Saturday,
she started to tell me everything.
♪ ♪
She brought out boxes of photographs.
She brought out the book my father had written,
"A Year Among the Girls" by Darrell G. Rayner,
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 we,
that I was so fond of, was so fun,
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 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.
But, um, 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 eight years.
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 had never even heard that term.
He grew up in Manhattan.
My grandparents owned a townhouse on 81st and York.
And his childhood was
extremely complicated and gothic.
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 disease-- syphilis and gonorrhea--
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 gonorrhea of the mouth.
So, he filled his children with
a terror of the human body, really, and of germs.
And I think that molded 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.
I'm sure he felt ugly.
I think he had no relationship with women at all
until he met my mother.
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.
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.
I'm sure that she realized very early
all about his cross-dressing.
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.
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 didn't know the extent.
(train rumbling)
♪ ♪
"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 along 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."
♪ ♪
Kate! Hello, beautiful.
Hi!
It's so good to see you again.
So good to see friends from so long ago.
I know. I love hearing your voice.
(chuckles)
So how have you been?
I take about seven pills in the morning,
and two in the middle of the day,
and one in the afternoon.
If that makes you feel any better, I take 14 pills
every night when I go to bed, so...
You seem to be all right.
God, I felt like it's been forever
since we've seen each other.
You were such a good friend.
Yes.
I mean, I remember you,
I remember you coming to the house,
I remember your eldest when she was four.
What... what did you think
about my dad during this time?
I always found him an admirable man.
He, he knew a lot.
He spoke very intelligently about
any topic you'd care to raise. (chuckles)
Yeah.
He never talked about sex.
Understandable enough between men,
they don't talk about sex.
Of course they do, but he never did,
and... 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.
Yeah.
But that was 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.
Well, 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 surprised to see-- 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 add to the theory.
At that time, I had also made contact with cross-dressers
in the United States and Canada mainly,
through a magazine called "Transvestia."
And all of my friends that I'd been
corresponding with said, "Do come, we'd love to see you,
love to know you."
And so, I found myself on a ship to Canada.
A ship! Remember ships?
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.
And so, when, very soon after I arrived in Canada,
Irene, my apartment mate said,
"Why don't we go down for the weekend to the Casa Susanna?"
I was extremely interested.
So, we went down and 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.
When we arrived at the resort, it was dark by then.
Marie was playing a card game with Gale
and there was a Lee who was a city engineer
I met through the magazine "Transvestia."
And there was, of course, Susanna.
Marie cooked a huge meal of spaghetti
and 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 wanted to talk to.
I could talk to them about subjects that
the average person had never even thought of
as existing, let alone as a difficulty in society.
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.
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 and 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 as Casa Susanna
was initially an incredible property called Chevalier d'Éon,
which had a creek on it, a pond.
As a child, I got to romp through the woods.
We had a cornfield, we had cows
'cause my grandmother leased out
some of the fields for them to graze on.
It was magical.
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,
and she managed to get a job,
and worked real 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 go over to her house,
and she'd cook a big dinner,
and family was very important to her,
and there'd be three different types of pasta,
and arancinos and artichokes.
I remember those meals, they were absolute feasts.
And the entire family came over and partook of them.
And then one day she met Tito,
this gentleman who came into the shop
and was trying on wigs,
and pretending it was for his sister,
or his niece, or something like that,
and, um, she basically outed him
and said, "Oh come on, I know this is for you!"
And he was rather shocked and...
but she did it in a loving way.
And Tito told me later that he was so impressed
by her openness and by her acceptance of him
that, you know,
she was the one and special person in his life.
Tito was very affable and 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.
And we weren't supposed to know that,
and, um, 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.
And at the end of the conversation,
I said to him, you know,
"If my grandmother loved you, then you're okay with me,"
and he was very touched by that.
And then we found that they were getting married
and went to the wedding and it was...
I was very happy for Maria
'cause she seemed very happy at the time
and I could see the sparkle in her eyes
and I could see that they both cared and loved each other.
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 times Tito, Susanna,
tried to explain it to her.
But then again, she couldn't avoid it
because Maria said, you know,
"This is what's going to happen, this is what it's gonna be
"and we're gonna create a club
"in the Catskills for a, um...
female impersonator shows."
Which she did.
And, you know, every Saturday night,
they'd throw a female impersonator show
and numbers and numbers of performers would come in
and do different acts,
and it actually was, you know, quite a success up there.
And every Saturday night, they'd get, you know,
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.
And, of course, we weren't allowed to be anywhere
close to that, but what we did
as precocious children was sneak around
and stand on soapboxes, and peek in the windows,
and then get found out,
and dragged back to the house and, uh,
ten minutes later we'd be back to watch the show again,
so she wasn't too happy about that but, um...
This was a 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 endeavor that
he wanted to get into with her.
The property was a beautiful place,
very private, so,
a lot of people could go there and be who they were
and who they are, so, we would have
ten, 12, 15 people coming up every weekend to stay
at the Bungalow Colony, which is what it was back then,
and then do a show every week.
♪ ♪
I have mixed feelings about that
because there was, you know, peer pressure
and there was a couple of incidents where
some of my local friends would come over
and say, "Oh, guess what I saw today?"
I would say, "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, you know, the gentlemen were
staying at our house, so,
I was somewhat mortified by that.
But I came to a resolution of that,
that, you know, 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, this stop.
Hampton, New York.
♪ ♪
KATHERINE: Hey! Hey!
Ah!
Good to see you.
KATHERINE: Wonderful to see you, too.
Let me give you a hug.
Oh, man.
God, it's just unbelievable.
Did you ever meet Don Wollheim?
I met Don Wollheim once. This is Betsy.
BETSY: Hi, great to meet you.
Very glad to meet you.
DIANA: You remember,
probably even better than I do.
KATHERINE: You and I met in 1962.
That was '62,
so I must have been 24-- 23, 24, maybe 25.
BETSY: That's the year my father wrote about.
He said it was absolutely freezing!
DIANA: Exactly, but the cold didn't even affect me.
KATHERINE: What cold?
He said everyone was sleeping with all
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.
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... There were lot of people,
but I don't think it was a world record.
My father said it was wonderful.
It was, I mean it was certainly,
an incredible experience for me,
but it was almost an out-of-body experience.
I mean, I, you know, 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. DIANA: Right. Yeah.
KATHERINE: 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.
Yes, that's how I did, too. Yeah.
And so that is the reason why
all those people finished up at that resort.
(leaves rustling)
(birds chirping)
You didn't get more involved
in the Casa Susanna, did you?
No, no, I didn't.
As I say, I mostly
stayed away from the culture.
Yeah.
(leaves rustling)
I mean, mostly, it's not so much staying away,
as not participating. You know, I mean...
Sure, I understand.
I never adopted people because they were trans,
Uh-huh. I adopted people because I liked them.
Yes, yes.
So, I wanna go look inside of one of these.
I don't remember, let's see what they look like.
This is the one deluxe,
the one with the green side.
Yes, indeed. That's our specialty.
I wonder if there were a hundred...
I mean putting 100 people in there, that's a pretty...
Well, for an audience you can do it because
you've got ten rows of ten, that's easy,
but to accommodate them overnight,
that's more of a difference.
Touch wood.
You bet.
You bet, you know,
two women standing here leaning up against the wall,
you never know what kind of trouble we can get into.
Well, we can try...
(laughing)
♪ Completely round is the perfect pearl ♪
I'll beat you with my stick if you sing that awful song.
(laughter)
I sang it quite well, I think.
Oh, you sang it well, but the lyrics are silly.
They're very silly, they're supposed to be silly.
(laughing)
DIANA: I don't even know how I got invited to Casa Susanna.
I desperately, of course,
wanted to go to this Halloween party,
and I had no idea how I would ever pull it off.
But I sort of got Julie to agree that it was,
it would be a good...
you know, it would be okay for me to do that,
to maybe find some stuff out about myself.
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 Susanna.
The first thing that happened was,
I think we went into the main house
and there was somebody there who would set my hair.
Now, I never had my hair curled, ever.
And it was just the most exciting experience,
it was unbelievable to me. (chuckles)
It was... it's so unbelievable to me what
those small pleasures, you know, how thrilling they were.
Um... 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.
And one of the cross-dressers, 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 authentic, you know,
it made me feel like, wow, this is, you know,
I could really be like this.
I remember that there were a lot of people,
but individuals are not so clear to me.
And I don't think it's so much that I didn't
interact with the people in fun ways,
but I was so out of myself, it was just so incredible
that the... that that remembrance
is not a part of what it felt like.
It's more really a feeling, this incredible feeling
of exaltation that was, uh, sublime.
It was...
I mean, it was unreal, obviously.
I mean, it was something that... it's just that
something I would never have hoped could happen.
KATHERINE: (chuckles)
Oh, I remember that night!
I did "The Dance of the Little Swans."
I had done a bit of training as a classical ballerina,
so yes, I could dance on toe for 20 seconds.
(chuckles)
Some of the cross-dressers were excellent,
some of them were very well done,
well made-up, well dressed, good taste.
But on the other hand, of course, there were some
who looked like Donald Duck in a drunken orgy
or something like this.
But everyone wanted to just join in
and be another woman amongst women.
GREGORY: The style at 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.
♪ ♪
To become Susanna took hours.
I mean, Tito was a perfectionist.
When he was becoming Susanna, I mean, I saw him
tweeze every hair on his face, which was
an incredibly long process.
And I asked him, you know, I mean...
"It takes so long for you to transform."
And his answer was, "Well, it's worth it."
♪ ♪
She loved to play the starring role and 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, um...
she just had this incredible personality
that just spilt over everything.
♪ ♪
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 of it and made his life a joy,
rather than constant paranoia of who's going to find out,
am I going to lose my job, am I going to lose my family,
which was what happened back then.
♪ ♪
(exhales)
These have seen better days.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: The big cities attract homosexuals
and the liberal law has made here
the biggest magnet in the nation.
The city can offer anonymity and permissiveness.
The city's downtown Tenderloin district
is the home ground 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 2:00 to 3:00 a.m. period,
that police had had enough,
and asked an all-night cafeteria 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 upon
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.
One of the reasons why there are relatively
few photographs taken at the Chevalier d'Éon resort
and at the, 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.
♪ ♪
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.
They wanted their wives to be part of the organization.
♪ ♪
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 middle '50s through '60s,
which reigned of McCarthyism,
of anti-communist sentiment.
You know, if someone was perceived as
being gay was, you know,
just... 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, you know, be a cross-dresser,
but then you're gay on top of that,
so that's like strike two.
You know, so you're getting, you know,
a double whammy from the, um...
you know, from the religious front,
from the moral majority back then,
and that was a moral majority back then.
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 of them
if it's the only means available.
Not only, um,
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.
Maria wanted to become the landing pad, so to speak,
and she walked a very fine line
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, you know, the pinnacle of their careers
where they were making good money, had great jobs.
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.
you know, I mean, who'd want to be brought into jail,
dressed as a woman in your community?
I mean, it would have been front page
anywhere in the United States.
So, um, 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.
"Certainly not, what an idea! Disgusting!
I am a cross-dresser 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. Wow.
But Lindbergh beat her to it. Yeah.
KATHERINE: Gale.
BETSY: I miss him so much.
KATHERINE: Gale was the first person I met
who used the technique of gluing elastic to the skin,
and then pulling it back to give a false
and temporary safe facelift. Yeah.
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.
Downtown branch!
Donna is the only one I recognized.
Donna, I thought, was quite beautiful.
And elegant, too.
She wasn't just beautiful, she was elegant.
Yeah. She could definitely pass.
That's Donna in male mode. God.
I have never seen Don-- Donna as Don, ever.
Had she transitioned?
She had transitioned,
and she had detransitioned.
Oh, why do you think?
I don't know, maybe she saw herself deteriorating.
Maybe she just thought she was no longer
the person she could have been, sadly,
she decided just to walk back down that path
she just climbed her way up.
It's a fabulous dress!
Gloria was large, she was about six foot four.
And she had a stroke,
so she was paralyzed on one side.
But she did her best with her accumulated wealth
to help other transgendered people.
I read about that, yeah.
She paid for their operations, and she looked after them for...
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 of whom 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, ah, um, person,
"was a fine person, and we should all,
we should all honor this, um, person."
(laughter)
Oh, that's me.
Is that you?
That's me, and that's the wig that
Maria put together for me. Mm-hmm.
I love that photo!
Swimming pool-- swimming costume and garter!
Great legs, though.
Oh, great legs, of course, I admit that.
Honesty forces me to admit that! (chuckles)
Oh dear-- bad!
(Betsy chuckles)
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 the camera.
Yeah.
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, I love that photo!
(laughs)
Don't laugh, I love that photo!
But that's the sheep dog!
I know but it, it's very,
the way it covers one of your eyes is very fetching.
I like it. Veronica Lake resuscitated!
I love that photo, and I love this one, too.
Yeah, that's another one... So young!
Taken from my home.
How old were you there?
Well, I would have been at university,
so somewhere between 16 and 20.
So young.
That is my father.
That's in my mother's house. Is it?
There he is again.
There's more of him around and dressed than I knew of.
Oh yes, there are many, many photos of him in dresses.
I'm learning things about your father every minute.
Yes, and there's my dad again.
That's him again. (chuckles)
That's him again, with my mom. With some short woman.
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?
No, only once ever, I think. Well, he's...
Oh my God, there's many, many photos of him.
There he is again.
I'm certainly surprised because
I had always been under the impression
that he suppressed it as, as much as possible,
that it was all going on in his head, but not in real life.
I think that was true
for a few years and then it just popped out!
Yeah.
Oh, like, he has good legs too.
Yeah. I don't know where
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?
Do you-- what do you think? What is your take on this?
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.
Yes, yes, only the shadow knows.
Who is that?
I don't know. Quite attractive, though.
Yeah.
Is this a...?
Where... is that me?
Is that really me?
Are you sure?
Somebody said so, huh?
Is that really me?
Where would that have been?
(laughs)
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.
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 had grown quite long by that time.
This is right around when I got the surgery.
(sniffs) And, um...
I was, I was feeling my oats.
I was pretty happy here.
Very, very happy.
Coming here made me realize
that was really how I needed to be.
And I had to face up to that.
This was so powerful for me, and so important,
that I had to figure out a way
to, um, allow it to... bloom.
So, after this Halloween party,
we went to Gale's place in the city.
So, I stayed there for a couple days, always as Diana,
I was Diana the whole time.
And I got this call from Julie.
And the sad part was that she had had a miscarriage.
That was like a real, uh...
kick in the head.
Because, you know, 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."
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 lie
if I would be able to either renew my vow of masculinity,
or else I would give way
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 obsession was getting worse.
So he flew out to the West Coast to meet Virginia.
He wanted somebody to talk to about this very secret subject
completely undercover.
And so Virginia suggested Susanna and Gale.
Gale and Susanna both had, um,
meeting places,
for men of this nature, of this ilk.
Gale was in the Village, so she's the "Downtown Group."
And Susanna was in Midtown, so she was the "Midtown Group."
So my father wrote a letter to Susanna and Gale.
Gale answered within a week, and they both just hit it off.
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 Gale's house on 11th Street.
But he knew he would have to tell my mother.
And he asked advice from Virginia,
And Virginia said, "Come at it slowly."
And so, he did. He, you know, started to wear
nylon tricot and he eventually
went nightgown shopping with my mother.
When I was 12, it was 1964.
So, I think that was about the time
when he might have opened the whole door to her.
'Cause I think she felt
it was just something between them originally.
But when she discovered the network
and she realized it wasn't gonna stop,
it wasn't a phase,
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 that New York would be a place
where I could learn
how I really was.
And it wasn't so much that it would all be healed,
but if there were any place where it could be healed,
it would be someplace like New York.
Her hope was that it would be,
it would be something we could live with.
And that was my hope, too.
So we decided to move to New York,
and go visit Harry Benjamin and see
if there's anything to be done for me.
At that time, anybody who is
even remotely thinking of surgery
had to see Harry Benjamin.
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 a part, although she was often
tortured by it, because she didn't understand it.
It was not pleasant for her.
But she was willing to go on with that,
because she wanted, she wanted this to turn out
okay for both of us.
And then I started to take hormones,
I started to develop a little bit.
And it became apparent that that was what I wanted.
So, we came to realize that this really couldn't work.
She moved back to Valparaiso,
where a good friend of ours, Paul, asked her to marry him.
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 was, it became more and more known
that I wanted to have surgery.
But it didn't seem any way for me, possibly, to do it,
because it was thousands of dollars.
But then Gloria did call.
We went out to dinner.
And he said: "Well, if you really want to do this,
"I'll help you out.
"I'll take you 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, um,
tried to pull everything together.
I changed to Diana,
uh, the night before the flight,
and, um, that was the last time I was David.
♪ ♪
It was a very rough flight to California.
I thought that I was going to die,
and God would have gotten me. (laughs)
And my mother was right all along!
But, fortunately, the plane landed.
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.
There was no way to find
a moral place to stand,
and that's a very isolating experience
for any human being, I think, that, to feel like
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.
I woke up,
and it was pretty fierce pain.
My, 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 dol..." "mucho dolor." (laughs)
And "agua caliente."
♪ ♪
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.
And I remember I was in the room,
and my hair was in curlers and he came into the room.
He just, came across the room and gave me a big hug,
and said, "I'm so glad to see you."
And it was a...
you know, 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.
(voice cracking): And, um...
Uh...
That's...
That's always been a model for how people should be.
Uh, that they should, uh...
have a zest for life,
and a love for the excitement of life,
but a willingness to...
to give and to...
and to...
have vulnerability, to be vulnerable.
And, and my dad was just an incredibly...
he crossed all of those.
And I don't... he was a simple man.
He was not, he was not some super-educated or...
but he was just...
he was just a very good being.
But that didn't produce a super-good relationship
with my parents, because my mother was just,
it was just too much.
You know, they were in a small town.
It was embarrassing-- quote "embarrassing"-- to them
for me to show up, to be around.
I was an embarrassment, you know.
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,
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.
When we moved back to America after a few years,
we met the Downtown Branch,
and sometimes others.
But after, I don't know, four or five 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.
In those days, I should add,
that we didn't visit Casa Susanna.
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, "What about the resort?"
They'd say, "Oh, it closed years ago, we don't know."
So, what, 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.
But that was only one part of our lives so anyways.
I was too busy with myself.
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.
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
what my marital family wanted me to be.
And I wanted time for myself to be the person I wanted to be.
And, of course, several of my friends committed suicide.
And I thought, "Is this the way I have to go?
"Is this... is there any way that I'll ever get away
"from this circle of being John then Katherine
"then John then Katherine?
"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 phrased it,
"I have to try living as a woman
or do something sillier," 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, the stress 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.
Which I was, of course, but it was me.
So that was the situation that, that,
was really what pushed me over the edge.
I had the operation early in February,
and at the end of the operation,
I felt marvelous, I felt that for the first time
in my life, I was the real person and that I had
discarded those bits of me that weren't necessary,
and I, I had gained those bits of me that were.
But when I told my family, it was such a shock to them
that there weren't really any questions that I could answer.
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...
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.
♪ ♪
BETSY: "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 a desire to scream
"as joking, to keep from crying;
as running to avoid having to stop and look at himself."
My father was somebody, I think,
who really couldn't change.
Even as Doris,
my father was still Donald.
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 (muted), and all people are crap,
"and there's no good place for anything,
"and nothing good could 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.
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, um, started to get insulting...
And say things like, "Look like...
looks like me, poor kid."
He said things to me that were
absolutely 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-old be a fraud?
And I never lied; I told my mother everything.
My friends would tease me that I tell Mommy everything.
So they would, you know...
I wasn't... 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 no...
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 projection
of how he felt about himself.
He obviously had a lot of self-hatred,
which was, it was like a black cloud
in our household.
Like a whole... like a, a cloud.
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.
He told me I had no worth as a person.
That basically I was just a broodmare.
I was a worthless piece of crap.
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 it, I bought it all.
I believed it.
And, um, I'm still trying to rid myself
of some of these beliefs now at age 70.
I wonder if his own hatreds for his father,
he just assumed that I would hate him
because 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.
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.
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."
He had found a group that accepted him
with all of his quirks.
Even his most outrageous quirk.
And he says in his book
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.
And, um, 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.
(crickets chirping)
♪ ♪
I didn't feel love for my father.
Until recently; I'm almost 70.
But just recently
I'm beginning to feel like...
I remember the love I felt as a child.
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 was get married.
I even thought at the beginning that
I would love to have children.
And much of that was realized.
I was married to a man for a while,
and 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.
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.
And 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.
It had a lot to do with
being a woman working in computers.
When I got to Xerox, the place was just beaming
with excitement and energy and fun.
It was just outrageous in a new age-y way.
So 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.
There was no problem, you know, it was just...
"Welcome to the...
to the, to the clan."
And still, it was hard for me
to tell people who I am.
I think there is a piece of me that feels some regret,
or a kind of sadness.
Because it's truly very much a part of who I am.
My whole goal was to not be afraid.
I, I didn't want to be afraid.
I wanted to... I wanted to be...
just a human being,
an alive human being
having a fun, interesting,
useful life.
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. (chuckles)
We were not, that was not
our normal way of being.
I mean, you know, our relationship,
even to this day, is just spectacular.
And it has nothing to do with Small Talk,
and it has nothing to do
with transgender, and it doesn't...
Now, Carol is actually very proud of me.
(chuckles) As my...
in my... even my transgender past.
She thinks that, "Wow, that's pretty incredible!"
(leaves rustling)
♪ ♪
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 a couple of miles away to a 188-acre property,
which became known as Casa Susanna...
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.
♪ ♪
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.
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.
They were separate individuals.
Tito was a person who, you know,
worked for radio for years, had his own show.
And Susanna got into
the translation business at the U.N.,
so she was also eventually
able to support herself.
Again, they were both separate and individual people.
Although I think that Tito was taking hormones
to grow breasts to transform
and live as Susanna full-time.
I did... spoke to her about that,
and I said, "Well, you know, suppose you became a woman,
would you want, you know, the comfort of a man?"
And she said no.
So, she was pretty adamant about
her relationship with Maria,
so I guess that would make them a lesbian couple.
(water rushing, leaves rustling)
This used to be the old swimming hole down 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 would just wash everything away,
and we'd have to put a new dam in every year.
I can see some of the rocks
that are still there from
when we used to do that.
(water rushing, bird cawing)
What's remarkable is
my family used to own that mountain.
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.
Um, 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.
But she was seriously hurt.
She had to have three burr holes cut into 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 inc... incident
were astronomical
and put an extreme financial pressure on the family.
And especially on Tito.
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 was...
and all of his energy was put into that, 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 starting to get into her hoarding phase.
She had a, um, eight-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 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.
So, Maria was a hoarder,
Susanna had brain cancer,
and their lives physically were separated,
but they were always in communication with each other.
And I would sometimes overhear their conversations
and they were very endearing.
And always ending with, you know,
"I love you, I miss you, lots of kisses,
and someday soon we'll be back together again."
Which was incredibly sweet, I thought.
But they couldn't.
In fact, when Marie died, Susanna was
in such a state that she couldn't move
from that apartment.
And she passed the week after Maria died.
We were told she was laying on the bed,
fully dressed as Susanna.
♪ ♪
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. (laughs)
There were some cross-dressers
who just wanted to get into the washing up
and scrubbing the floor. (all laugh)
That wasn't me. I was the percher
on the bar stool one. (all laugh)
I mean, that building was fantastic.
There was so many, you know,
incredibly talented people that came here. DIANA: Yeah.
For a long time--
well, for some time, anyway--
there 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,
"Cross-dressers interested..." Right.
"...in a resort at the Catskills."
You just couldn't do that. Mm-hmm.
So, it all had 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.
So how old were you at that time?
I was-- again, anywhere from five...
I was born in 1951, so, um...
DIANA: So you were just a kid!
I was just a kid, I know.
I mean, we couldn't come and see the show,
so we'd peek through the window until we got caught.
That's, that's perfect. So, if you were born
in the '50s, I'm well ahead of you, because I'm 86.
Oh, God bless you, look at that. (laughter)
So, um...
I...
I want to, I want to tell you both something
because, you know, it's long been a...
a dream or even a quest of mine,
because I actually am the holder of
Susanna, Maria's, and Yolanda's ashes.
DIANA: Oh my goodness.
And I've always wanted to
bring them here and, um...
(sniffs) Excuse me.
(voice breaking): And pass them out.
Because I think that this is
the place for them to be, you know, and...
DIANA: Seems like the perfect place, seems like
the perfect place. ...place, and I would...
I would be honored, if you two
would help me do that.
DIANA: It would be my great honor.
It'd be my great honor.
So how do we go about that?
Yeah, we were going to...
I was going to do it over by that tree over there.
DIANA: Okay.
...because it has some color, and, um...
(inhales) And, um...
I just think that they should be here.
♪ ♪
(ashes pouring)
♪ ♪