“Two antique dealers discover a stash of 340 photographs at a flea market.” Thus begins Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, one of the most captivating photography books in recent memory. Casa Susanna was a secluded bit of property with a few bungalows and a barn in the Catskills. In the 1950s and ’60s, the property belonged to Marie Tornell and her wife, a trans woman who was known to friends as Susanna Valenti. Susanna was a cover girl and contributing editor to Transvestia magazine, and she and Marie opened up their home to other like-minded people—including those who were assigned male at birth but wanted to live authentically as women, if only on holiday. A textured dust jacket gives the volume a sensual quality, so that opening its pages is like admiring a silk taffeta blouse. The photograph chosen for the book’s cover—one among hundreds of candid, unaffected shots—shows four different smartly dressed women pointing their cameras at a friend mid-pose. It speaks to the number of women involved in the project, and also the importance they saw of documenting each other. Elsewhere, the well-coiffed women playing Scrabble or sitting around a dining table at Casa Susanna are charmingly ordinary. Facsimiles of letters, magazine articles and even a handful of Susanna’s own advice column clips, “Susanna Says,” open up a whole world in a few hundred pages. The sheer volume of pictures included will open eyes to the existence of trans people before the contemporary age.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
