Fleapit revisited:Casa Susanna.

"That's a very isolating experience .... for any human being. To feel like who you are is against the law" - Diane Merry-Shapiro

In the late fifties/early sixties, at the foot of the Catskills in rural New York state, there stands a small house that was once home to a clandestine network of cross dressers. Casa Susanna (directed and written by Sebastien Lifshitz, part of BBC4's Storyville strand and currently available on the iPlayer) tells its story via the words of two regular weekend visitors, Diane and Katherine - now both in their eighties, as well as relations of other Casa Susanna regulars.

It was a place where people played card games, ate spaghetti, helped with the gardening, and just generally hung out. There was a barn "where the theatricals took place" in the form of performances of Swan Lake and impersonations of The Andrews Sisters but most of all it was a place of community. A place where people could talk about things they couldn't talk about elsewhere. It was a place where people could be their real selves.

All surrounded by beautiful countryside. Those people included pilots, attorneys, film directors, tugboat captains, and aeronautical engineers. As well as Katherine and Diane. Katherine had been born male in Australia but had started wearing her sister's dresses at the age of five and desperately wanted to tell her dad that he had "two daughters now".

But she didn't. She got engaged and wondered if she'd become a 'normal' person and lead a 'normal' life. Her partner, Irene, agreed to visit Casa Susanna with her and, from then on, it seems there was no turning back. Katherine had found who she really was. But, of course, her journey was far from straightforward.

Diane's story is, perhaps, even more incredible. As a young boy, Diane would go to sleep at night praying hard that she'd wake up a girl. She felt isolated in Iowa and as her mother was seriously Lutheran and took an all too literal approach to the Bible she felt she had nobody at all to talk to.

She started to think that maybe she'd grow out of it, that it'd somehow just go away. But she never did grow out of it, it never did go away. A man becoming a woman was illegal in the US at that time and Diane feared her mother would put her in an institution or force her to have electroshock treatment. She, then he, grew up to be a decent college footballer and ultimately married Julie.

As with Katherine and Irene, Diane visited Casa Susanna with her wife. Diane talks about how finally finding her community felt like an "almost out of body experience". Elsewhere, the experience of Casa Susanna is described as incredible, thrilling, poignant, unbelievable, and sublime. Even silly - in the best sense of the word.

But beneath the happiness, and especially away from Casa Susanna, lurked a fear of exposure, a fear of blackmail, and a fear of going to prison. Many in what was then known as the cross dressing community took their own lives. Many others considered doing the same.

Casa Susanna is not portrayed, by today's standards, as some kind of woke paradise. The resort was ostensibly exclusively open only to heterosexual cross dressers and their wives (50s/60s USA was just a touch homophobic) but it was a time when there were lines - sometimes clear, sometimes less so, between gay communities, transvestite communities, and transsexual communities. Most of those lines seem to have been forced by the societal mores of the era but in the intervening decades they have become increasingly blurred. Many of the Casa Susanna residents who insisted at the time they were transvestites but neither gay nor transsexual have since partnered up with same sex partners and/or had gender-affirming surgery.

Casa Susanna, the film, makes for a very interesting watch. It's touching and it's sad in places and it manages to be as heartwarming as it is sometimes heartbreaking. You can learn a little about Christine Jorgensen, David A. Wollheim, Harry Benjamin, and McCarthyism and you can learn a lot about what it was like to be transvestite or transgender in an era when it was deemed completely beyond the pale.

Ultimately, it's all about acceptance. Acceptance of others and, even more so, acceptance of oneself. Not everyone has been able to accept others and not everyone has been able to accept their true self. But what's very instructive is that those that do accept seem far at more peace than those who don't.