(JEWISH GROUP) The Borscht Belt was a haven for Jews -- and for crossdressers

Though the Borscht Belt is famous as the birthplace of Jewish comedy, it’s less associated with the transgender movement. But the Catskills’ Jewish history is deeply intertwined with its past as one of the first safe places for trans women and crossdressing men to be themselves.

An exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum called “Casa Susanna” explores this latter saga, which took place largely at the eponymous hotel in Jewett, New York. There, Susanna Valenti — a Chilean immigrant born as Humberto Arriagada — and her wife Maria Tornell, an Italian Catholic woman who ran a wig store in Manhattan, hosted a safe space where their community of guests could dress and act as they pleased throughout the 1960s. (The pair also previously ran a short-lived resort called Chevalier d’Eon, after the 18th century French spy who infiltrated the Russian court by dressing as a woman.)

Cross-dressing was taboo at the time, so the community connected largely through exchanging letters and pictures of themselves, as well as via an underground publication called Transvestia, where women published their stories; the exhibit draws heavily from these troves of images of the resort and its activities, which were kept otherwise hidden.

The show offers careful analysis of the importance of Casa Susanna, putting its guests into the historical context of the 1960s — their jobs, their families, the ways they identified within the understandings of sex and gender that dominated that era. Many of the guests considered themselves heterosexual men and were married with families, though some eventually came out as transgender women. Wall text analyzes photos of guests posing while doing chores like sweeping or washing dishes, considering the ways Casa Susanna aspired to a sort of idealized, socially acceptable femininity; Susanna herself even set rules forbidding bathing suits and pants at the resort to reinforce proper, decorous feminine norms — though not everyone hewed to them. The curators even discuss why so many of the photos are Polaroids: Guests wanted to avoid undue scrutiny from photo lab workers, and the new invention of instant film made it possible to keep their photos away from outside eyes.

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