If you know, you know.
That was the case with Casa Susanna, a guesthouse in New York’s Catskill Mountains, which in the 1950s and 60s catered to a particular subset of the LGBTQ+ community, a group trans author and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen described as “transfeminine cross-dressers.”
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Some even brought their wives for weekends at the all-inclusive mountain retreat.
More than 60 years later, Allen, another LGBTQ+ Catskills transplant, became consumed with the history of Casa Susanna and the Victorian-era house it occupied.
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Following the president’s inauguration in 2025, Allen began hosting his own gatherings of trans neighbors and allies for cookies, coffee, and commiseration, leaning on community to counter the bad news coming out of Washington, DC, and red-state legislatures. How were his like-minded retreats similar or different to Casa Susanna’s?
The guest house was owned and hosted by Susanna Valenti, an immigrant from Chile, who was introduced to the Catskills by her wife, Marie Tornell. Tornell’s family owned a wig shop in New York City and a big property in the upstate vacation destination. It was a match made in heaven.
Casa Susanna was mostly lost to history until a trove of photographs was discovered at a flea market in 2004, including an iconic image of Valenti in a sleeveless gingham dress posing next to a sign reading “Casa Susanna” nailed to an oak tree.
If you know, you know.
The resort’s rediscovery inspired the Broadway play Casa Valentina; a similar retreat in the groundbreaking TV series Transparent; a 2023 American Experience documentary for PBS; and the recent book Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, with an accompanying exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this year.
The “network” referenced in the book’s title is one more “if you know, you know” piece of Casa Susanna history.
Valenti had an advice column in an underground magazine called Transvestia, where she once wrote that crossdressing was the ability to “bring to life a bit of magic in order to make life more beautiful, more exciting, more livable.”
Casa Susanna was a real-life manifestation of that magic. With advertisements for the resort in Tranvestia, subscribers were in the know.
For just $25, or about $260 today, guests could visit for weekends and experience a whole new world with like-minded transfeminine people; mingling in pumps, dresses, wigs, and makeup, openly and in the company of others just like them.
Allen learned the property was eventually sold in 1972, and Casa Susanna disappeared from history until that tranche of Kodachrome snapshots was rediscovered.
What happened to the house itself was a mystery until the journalist tracked it down.
“It seemed to have last sold in 2020,” Allen writes in Condé Nast Traveler, and “it was being offered either for a renovation or to demolish and start again.”
“Accompanying interior images made clear the house was not in great shape, as can happen to dwellings in these woods. Driving around the Catskills, one often sees old structures reclaimed by the forest.”
So he set out one day earlier this year to find it, on the other side of the Catskills about an hour’s drive from his own house.
“I drove through a one-stop-sign town, then an old graveyard, and eventually pulled up to what I’d gathered was the correct address.”
“My heart fell,” Allen writes.
“A stand of newly planted hedge bushes wrapped in burlap stood along the road, not the old trees I’d seen in photographs.”
Casa Susanna was gone. In its place, new construction was underway.
But while there was “no plaque, no sign, no marking at all” of what had transpired in the spot, its significance remained, Allen writes, in “the broader emergence of trans people and our networks.”
“When my home is full with my trans and queer neighbors sharing cookies, I feel how we are echoing Susanna and the others before us.”
Backing out of the site, Allen paused.
He noticed “several large impressive old tree roots, like cadavers that had been pried from the earth.”
Including, perhaps, the one Casa Susanna’s sign had hung from.
“I finally felt it, like a tingle on the back of my neck, that sense of a tangible connection to her. In my heart, I thanked her.”
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