The concept of Casa Susanna (subject of Harvey Fierstein play) began with a larger property, Chevalier d’Eon, and female impersonator shows at a club called the Wigwam.

The driving forces behind these projects were Marie Tonell, the spirited and enterprising Italian American owner of a Manhattan wig shop, and her husband, Chilean transplant Tito Arriagada, whose alter ego was Susanna Valenti.

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Tonell’s grandson Gregory Bagarozy speaks fondly of sneaking out to watch the performances, and of the love between Marie and Tito/Susanna.

In the privacy of the resort, they could discover how it felt to live as a woman for a stretch of time, rather than in stolen hours during their otherwise conventional lives.

Many were accomplished professionals, and all of them identified as heterosexual at the time. Their wives and girlfriends were part of the community in the countryside and carried on in a couple of groups in Manhattan.

Betsy Wollheim, the film’s fourth interviewee, learned years later that her mother drove her father to the Catskills every weekend of the summer for much of her childhood so that he could spend time with fellow cross-dressers.

At Casa Susanna, performance wasn’t the goal. Hanging out together, sharing meals, gardening, the guests helped one another make their way through the world, and tried to sort out the question of who they were and where they belonged.

As Cummings tells Merry-Shapiro on their walk through the wood of their former haunt, “I never adopted people because they were trans; I adopted people because I liked them.

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