Original subtitles

Now, for reasons which will become very clear,

we're going to use first names only.

Would you please introduce yourselves?

Misty. Vicky.

Sonya. Simone.

Misty, what do you do?

I'm a bank teller.

And Vicky? Cosmetician.

Sonya? Hairdresser.

Window display.

Are those your own eyelashes?

Nope.

And, Sonya, is that your own hair?

No.

That's a very lovely dress, too, that you're wearing, Simone.

Where did you buy it? Oh, I made it myself.

Ladies and gentlemen, the reason for using first names only

for these very, very charming contestants

is that right now, each one of them is breaking the law.

You see, each of our contestants is a man.

MUSIC: But Not For Me by Jackie Gleason

I would think that none of these trees

had even started growing when I was last here.

The times I was here were very good times.

Yes, that's the house.

When I went there...

..there was a swing hanging in the end of the veranda.

This was the old barn where the theatricals took place.

Halloween, 1962.

I was being a little swan in Swan Lake.

Susanna was doing erotic dancing, South American dancing,

and three of my friends were being the Andrews Sisters.

It looks as good as it did then.

We all used to have our meals there

and people used to sit out the front on the veranda, on the lawn.

People used to do gardening work.

I just loved it, being here, because they had total freedom,

total... chance to be themselves for a change.

The weekend of Halloween 1962

was when Virginia Prince

formed a national sorority of cross-dressers

called FPE,

which was for Full Personality Expression.

And it was a very interesting weekend, to say the very least.

There were psychiatrists from the Kinsey Institute,

there were people from all over.

There were over 100 people there that weekend.

But it's... it's much the same.

SHIP'S HORN BLOWS

Visiting Casa Susanna was almost a necessity for me.

I had to leave my family in Australia and come to America,

because I needed to know more about myself.

I needed to know what it would be like to live as a woman

for an extended period,

and, in the back of my mind, I thought, if I go to Casa Susanna

and I find that I am more woman inside than I am man,

that might be the point where my new life starts.

I think there were very few people like me,

because I was a white child with a single sibling

living on a coral island in the middle of the Pacific.

I can remember as far back as about five,

my sister dressing me in one of her old dresses.

The fact that I absolutely adored the feeling and wanted it to go on,

wished it could happen every day...

..wished that when my father came home from the sea,

I could say, "You've got two daughters now."

One doesn't know where these thoughts start.

It wasn't until a lot of years later that I had that experience of joy,

of sheer joy at being able to walk among people

and talk to them without hesitation,

to know that they understood the person I was.

No matter what I looked like inside, I was a real woman

and I wanted them to know it, and they did know it.

Between my third grade and fourth grade,

I would go to sleep at night praying that I would wake up as a girl.

And I would pray hard, you know?

It was a secret that I had,

and mostly because I was very active

and I was very social and very out there.

It didn't have much impact in terms of what it appeared,

but I knew that it was... there was something down inside of me

that was not right.

That was... That was not who I was.

And there was... And there was no way to make it right.

I don't... I think it's very hard to kind of have an appreciation

for the difference for me,

isolated in Iowa,

where literally, you cannot talk to anyone about this at all.

You have to kind of understand

that my mother was very seriously Lutheran,

which is a very literal Christianity.

The Bible, the Earth was created in six days.

So, when I began to have feelings about wishing that I were a girl,

there was just no way that could possibly be OK.

And I kept thinking I would grow out of it.

And, you know, there was a kind of almost optimism about it

in the face of pretty dark frustration.

That, OK, you'll get through this.

Just... Just go to school, do your school,

do your college, get married,

and this will go away.

And it never did go away.

That thing was always there, and there was no way to express it.

There was nobody, there was no information.

There was no library I could go to.

There was just no place.

And that was the real darkness,

that there was kind of nothing to help me think about it, even.

You know, what must this be?

What is this that could be going on with me

that makes me have these feelings?

ARCHIVE: Christine Jorgensen, who used to answer to George,

creates quite a stir as she returns home to New York from Copenhagen.

Christine hit the headlines following the series of operations

in Denmark that transformed her from a boy into a girl,

all of which made her a celebrity to meet and talk to

when she stepped off the plane at International Airport.

Gentlemen, please give her a chance to talk.

REPORTERS SHOUT

I'm very impressed by everyone coming.

Christine, are you happy to be home?

Yes, of course.

What American wouldn't be?

Have you been offered a movie contract?

Yes, but I haven't accepted it.

Do you... Do you have any plans regarding the theatre?

No, I don't think so.

Are you going to go on with your photography?

I hope so, yes.

I see.

I'm very happy to be back,

and I don't have any plans at the moment,

and I thank you all for coming, but I think it's too much.

Fine. Thank you very much.

I was a paper boy and I carried the paper.

And when I went down to pick up the papers,

there was Christine Jordans on the front page.

And I think I sat down and I read the story.

I read it avidly...

..and that was it.

There was nobody I could talk to about it.

If I were to talk about it, "Oh, this is horrible."

That would be that, you know, this horrible, sinful thing

that this person did to themselves,

and they will be damned to hell,

and all my friends would just make fun of it.

Talking to my parents would be a disaster.

It was illegal in this country.

So almost everybody in the country thought it was wrong.

All the doctors thought it was wrong. It was all wrong.

It was just barely beginning to be contemplated

as something that was plausible, might be conceivable.

I was pretty sure that my mother

would try to do something pretty radical

if she thought that that was how I was,

put me away in an institution or do electroshock or pretty bad things.

Because she sort of believed

in how people who have these kinds of thoughts are treated,

that they...they must be sick, and they must be fixed.

I kind of knew that could be really bad if I exposed myself.

So by the time I was in high school, I was a good athlete

and I was a pretty good student and I played the trumpet

and I played football and I sang in the choir

and I grew up playing the game, and I played it very well.

When I got a scholarship to Valparaiso University,

I got into the theatre department and I met Julie.

And through the years we got closer and closer

and it became kind of like, "We should...

"We should probably get married.

"We should probably..."

I think, you know, we thought we loved one another.

And I told Julie about...

..that I had this problem, and it was just like, "Oh, well, OK,

"so you have this little feminine side" sort of thing.

It was not anything very substantial about it.

But, "I'm glad you told me."

It's a very frustrating thing

when you... when people speak as though this is not a problem,

all you have to do is change your mind,

and I... and I say, "OK, when will my mind change?"

You know, "How does it change? What makes it change?"

Well, you just don't think about it.

None of those things are even close to relevant, in my estimation,

and they certainly didn't work for me.

Around 1994, my mother was about to go into surgery.

It was a 50-50 chance that she might die on the table.

That weekend, that Saturday, she started to tell me everything.

She brought out boxes of photographs.

She brought out the book my father had written,

A Year Among The Girls by Darrell G Raynor,

a book that nobody realises he wrote except my mother.

I was fascinated.

Suddenly, everything seemed to snap into place.

I suddenly realised that the church architect in California

that we... that I was so fond of, was so fun,

he was one of the cross-dressers.

People I had stayed with in Ireland,

he was a cross-dresser.

Everybody that my parents were most close to

was in the transvestite scene.

I suddenly realised why I went to summer camp for two months

every single year, starting when I was seven - two entire months away -

so my father could go up to Casa Susanna and dress.

My mother drove him there and stayed with him because he couldn't drive.

A lot of women were up there, too, the wives,

and I think they hung out together.

But my mother drove him to Casa Susanna every weekend of the summer,

and I know that, because that's why I went to summer camp

for eight years.

My father was Donald A Wollheim.

He was one of the founders of the entire science fiction industry.

He wrote 18 science fiction novels

in a world where people had never even heard that term.

He grew up in Manhattan.

My grandparents owned a townhouse on 81st and York,

and his childhood was extremely complicated and Gothic.

My grandfather was a doctor.

He graduated from Columbia Medical School in 1903,

and he practised on the second floor of the house -

and in a brownstone, you have to walk through an entire floor

to get to the next staircase.

So his children had to walk through his medical offices

to get to their bedrooms.

And my grandfather was a specialist.

He was a urologist who specialised in venereal disease,

syphilis and gonorrhoea, which at that time was incurable and deadly.

So, he was terrified

that his children would, running through the second floor,

touch a wet door knob, put their hand in their mouth

and get gonorrhoea of the mouth.

So he filled his children with a terror

of the human body, really, and of germs.

And I think that moulded his personality his whole life.

He was a very isolated introvert.

So, you know, he really wasn't...

He wasn't really a naturally social creature.

He was a shy man.

I'm sure he felt ugly.

I think he had no relationship with women at all until he met my mother.

Their first date,

they met at the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Museum of Natural History,

and she was two hours late and my father was still sitting there.

And when she saw him sitting there, she burst into tears

because she realised he was really interested.

Otherwise he would have left.

I think she loved my father.

I mean, clearly she loved him unconditionally.

Otherwise she would never have driven him every single weekend

up to the Catskills.

I'm sure that she realised very early

all about his cross-dressing,

for the simple reason that when I was seven, eight, nine,

my girlfriends and I would play in the house when my mother was out

and we would all put on her negligees,

and there was one negligee that was six feet long -

was the prettiest one - six feet long,

and it had a kind of drawstring at the chest

so you could expand the chest.

And we all wanted to wear that one.

Of course, this was my father's nightgown.

And one year my father said he was going to have a "dress rehearsal",

because he was going to dress up as his sister

for Halloween the next day.

So, I was 12 and my father was in the bathroom for five hours,

and even at 12 I realised that wasn't usual

for somebody just getting ready for a Halloween party.

And when he came out, I was really quite frightened,

because he looked very ghoulish to me.

He had shaved his arms, his legs, his chest.

He had taped up his face.

I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door

because I was, like, momentarily shocked.

I knew pretty immediately that he was really into this.

I just didn't know the extent.

"My wife and I drove up Saturday morning.

"The weather was clear and cloudless.

"There was a sharp chill in the air

"and it was a three-hour drive upstate.

"Last part of the drive took us along precipitous winding roads

"near the edges of cliffs and higher and higher into the mountains.

"Were we nervous? Of course.

"Who would not be?

"Were we afraid? No.

"From these people, we had nothing to fear -

"but there was still that thrilling little tang

"in doing something secretive,

"something the rest of the world knew nothing about,

"something which might have an element of danger about it."

Kate! Hello, beautiful.

Hi!

It's so good to see you again.

It's so good to see your friends from so long ago.

I know. I love hearing your voice.

So how have you been?

I take about seven pills in the morning

and two in the middle of the day and one in the afternoon.

It makes you feel any better,

I take 14 pills every night when I go to bed!

So... You seem to be all right now!

God, I felt like it's been forever since we've seen each other.

You were such a good friend.

Yes. I mean, I remember you, I remember you coming to the house.

I remember your eldest, when she was four.

What... What did you think about my dad during this time?

I always found him an admirable man.

He knew a lot.

He spoke very intelligently about any topic you cared to raise!

Yeah.

He never talked about sex.

Understandable enough between men.

They don't talk about sex.

Of course they do, but he never did,

and so I never made that link.

He did tell me once about the nightdress

and how he couldn't really be happy

unless he was sleeping in the nightdress... Yeah.

..but that was something that maybe I inferred,

maybe he implied, that this happened in adulthood.

That's what I assumed.

And he said on one occasion

that he never even thought of cross-dressing

until one time when he was particularly down,

and your mother encouraged him to.

That's really nice to hear.

Yeah, she was sad when she told me about it,

but I think she was just a very romantic person,

and my father was probably the least romantic man that ever drew breath!

So...

Although, in his book he says they were in love,

and I'm surprised to see,

I'm really surprised to see that he said that.

Because I never experienced... I knew he loved my mother deeply,

but I didn't see the in-love part.

After I had completed all the possible qualifications

for librarianship, which was my profession in Australia,

I had to choose a place where I could go to add to the theory.

At that time, I had also made contact with cross-dressers

in the United States and Canada, mainly,

through a magazine called Transvestia,

and all of my friends that I'd been corresponding with

said, "Do come. We'd love to see you.

"Love to know you."

And so I found myself on a ship to Canada.

A ship! Remember ships?!

Yes, I was on a ship to Canada by way of Miami,

and I was engaged at the time,

so I had the double confusion

as to whether I would go to Canada and come back and be a normal man

and just get married and live a normal life,

or whether, in fact, I would stay in North America

and take the full change.

I didn't know, myself.

And, so, when... very soon after I arrived in Canada,

Irene, my apartment mate,

said, "Why don't we go down for the weekend to the Casa Susanna?"

I was extremely interested.

And so we went down and Irene had warned people

that I was coming with her,

and so there were a select gathering of people at the resort

waiting to meet this strange marsupial transdresser

who was coming so far around the world.

When we arrived at the resort,

it was dark by then.

Marie was playing a card game with Gail,

and there was a Lee, who was a city engineer I met

through the magazine Transvestia,

and there was, of course, Susanna.

Marie cooked a huge meal of spaghetti

and we sat around and talked and played card games

and talked about each other and talked about ourselves,

and for the very first time in my life,

I could talk to anyone I wanted to talk to.

I could talk to them about subjects

that the average person had never even thought of as existing,

let alone as a difficulty in society.

You could actually react with people on a one-to-one basis

without there being any misunderstanding,

without there being any need to say, "I know I sound like a man

"and I probably don't look much like a woman,

"but deep down inside, I'm a woman,

"and I want you to treat me like a woman."

There was no need for any of that.

The rest of the weekend,

a lot of people got into groups and said, "Why me?

"Why am I like this?"

What was this thing, and why was it us,

and how is it different from being gay

and how is it different from...?

Well, in those days we thought we were just cross-dressers.

So, how was that different from being a transgender person

who really wanted to change?

It was a very difficult situation

to try and sort out these different classifications of people.

The Catskills were a getaway for people from the city,

go up to the country, enjoy swimming and fishing and boating

and recreation, especially in the fall.

The country place that became known as Casa Susanna

was initially an incredible property called Chevalier D'Eon,

which had a creek on it, a pond.

As a child, I got to romp through the woods.

We had a cornfield.

We had cows, because my grandmother leased out some of the fields

for them to graze on.

It was magical.

Maria was my grandmother,

an incredibly strong lady.

She came over from Italy to bring back her father,

who had come to America and become successful,

and somehow he got killed and all the money was stolen,

and then Marie was left here as a child of 15,

and she managed to get a job and worked real hard

and finally built this wig shop on Fifth Avenue

called Maria's, of course.

Maria was from a very traditional Italian churchgoing family,

always went to church on Sunday.

Every weekend we'd come and go over to her house

and she'd cook a big dinner,

and family was very important to her,

and there'd be three different types of pasta

and artichokes,

and I remember those meals, they were absolute feasts

and the entire family came over and partook of them.

And then one day she met Tito,

this gentleman who came into the shop

and was trying on wigs and pretending it was for his sister

or his niece or something like that,

and... she basically outed him

and said, "Oh, come on, I know this is for you,"

and he was rather shocked, and... but she did it in a loving way.

And Tito told me later that he was so impressed by her openness

and by her acceptance of him

that, you know, she was the one and special person in his life.

Tito was very affable and energetic.

He was a radio commentator

for the Latin American station in the United States.

He used to come up to the country place for us,

and he used to dress as a woman and become Susanna.

And we weren't supposed to know that, and...

So, one day I was at the porch in the country,

and Susanna grabbed me and sat down and had a conversation

and revealed himself to me.

And at the end of the conversation,

I said to him, "You know, if my grandmother loves you,

"then you are OK with me,"

and he was very touched by that.

And then we found out that they were getting married

and went to the wedding, and it was...

You know, I was very happy for Maria,

because she seemed very happy at the time,

and I could see the sparkle in her eyes

and I could see that they both cared and loved each other.

But on the other hand, my mom, Yolanda, Maria's only child,

thought morally, it was wrong.

She didn't understand it.

No matter how many times Tito, Susanna,

tried to explain it to her -

but then again, she couldn't avoid it,

because Maria said, you know, "This is what's going to happen,

"this is what it's going to be,

and we're going to create a club in the Catskills

"for... female impersonator shows," which she did.

And, you know, every Saturday night

they'd throw female impersonator shows

and numbers and numbers of performers would come in

and do different acts,

and it actually was, you know, quite a success up there,

and every Saturday night they'd get, you know, 50, 75 people

in the Wigwam, including the mayor of the local town,

who would actually come to the show, which we thought was hilarious.

And, of course, we weren't allowed to be anywhere close to that,

but what we did as precocious children was sneak around

and stand on soapboxes and peek in the windows

and then get found out and dragged back to the house,

and ten minutes later, we'd be back to watch the show again.

So, she wasn't too happy about that,

but this was a part of Maria's world,

and it was part of her husband's world,

so she embraced it wholeheartedly,

and was very supportive in any endeavour

that he wanted to get into with her.

The property was a beautiful place, very private.

So a lot of people could go there

and be who they were, and who they are.

So, we would have 10, 12, 15 people coming up every weekend

to stay at the bungalow colony, which is what it was back then,

and do a show every week.

MUSIC: Concerto for Violin and Cello in B-flat major, RV 547 by Vivaldi

I have mixed feelings about that,

because there was, you know, peer pressure

and there was a couple of incidents where some of my local friends

would come over and said, "Oh, guess what I saw today!"

and I said, "What?"

"I saw this big, burly guy in the hardware store

"wearing a dress and a wig and make-up.

And I said, "Oh, yeah, really?"

In the meantime, you know, the gentleman was staying at our house,

so I was somewhat mortified by that.

But I came to a resolution of that,

that, you know, I wasn't going to be ashamed,

that this was who they were and who they are,

and if that's what they wanted to do and be,

and it made them happy, who was I to judge them?

OK, passengers, this stop, Hunter, New York.

Hey! Hey!

Good to see you.

Wonderful to see you, too.

I'll give you a hug.

Oh, man.

God, it's just unbelievable.

Did you ever meet Don Wollheim?

I met Don Wollheim once.

This is Betsy. Hi! Great to meet you.

Very glad to meet you.

You remember, probably even better than I do.

You and I met in 1962.

That was '62...

So, I must have been 24 - 23, 24, maybe 25.

That's the year my father wrote about. Ah.

He said it was absolutely freezing. Exactly!

But the cold didn't even affect me.

What cold? What cold?

He said everyone was sleeping with all their male clothes

and all of their female clothes on.

That's how cold it was.

It was very cold. Wearing all the blankets I could find! Absolutely -

and he said he believed

that that was the greatest group of transvestites

that had ever gathered in the history of humanity,

which is absolutely... There were a lot of people,

but I don't think it was a world record!

You know, my father said it was wonderful. It was.

I mean, it was certainly an incredible experience for me,

but it was almost an out-of-body experience.

I mean, you know, it was so, so powerful.

That weekend, for the first time,

an attempt was being made to take

all these disparate little groups of cross-dressers

and form them into a national sorority.

Right. And that was the work of Virginia Prince.

Yeah. She was a scientist.

She lived on the West Coast.

She was a very forceful personality.

She was a pain in the neck sometimes.

And she had the drive and she had the organisational skills

to contact many of these small groups.

And, of course, Virginia went on editing the magazine Transvestia.

It was partly wish fulfilment fiction, badly written,

and partly stuff stolen from scientific magazines

on cross-dressing.

And there was a large social section.

"Would you like to meet other people who cross-dress?"

And so people made their own little internal networks as well.

Yes, that's how I did, too. Yeah.

And so that is the reason

why all those people finished up at that resort.

You didn't get more involved in the Casa Susanna, did you?

No. No, I didn't.

As I say, I mostly stayed away from the culture.

Yeah.

I mean, mostly it's not so much staying away

as not participating, you know?

I mean... Sure, I understand.

I never adopted people because they were trans.

Uh-huh. I adopted people because I liked them.

Yes! Yes.

So I want to go look inside of one of these.

I don't remember... See what they look like.

This is the one deluxe, the one with the green side.

Yes, indeed. That's our specialty.

I wonder if there were 100...

I mean, putting 100 people in there, that's a pretty...

Well, for an audience, you can do it,

because you've got ten rows of ten. Yeah. That's easy -

but to accommodate them overnight, that's more of a difference.

Touch wood.

You bet. You bet.

You know, two women standing here leaning up against the wall,

you never know what kind of trouble we can get into.

Well, we can try.

LAUGHTER

# Completely round is the perfect pearl... #

I'll hit you with my stick if you sing that awful song!

LAUGHTER

I sang it quite well, I think.

Oh, you sang it well.

The lyrics are silly.

They're very silly. They're supposed to be silly.

LAUGHTER

I don't even know how I got invited to Casa Susanna.

I desperately, of course, wanted to go to this Halloween party,

and I had no idea how I would ever pull it off,

but I sort of got Julie to agree that it was a...

..you know, it would be...

..it would be OK for me to do that,

to maybe find some stuff out about myself.

So, off I went, and it was an incredibly dangerous adventure,

with a big suitcase, stood on the highway,

and I hitchhiked from Valparaiso, Indiana to Casa Suzanna.

The first thing that happened was, I think we went into the main house

and there was somebody there who would set my hair.

Now, I'd never had my hair curled, ever,

and it was just the most exciting experience!

It was unbelievable to me. It was...

It's so unbelievable to me what those small pleasures,

you know, how thrilling they were.

I mean, it all seems kind of silly and funny...

..and it is, I mean, even then it was done with a light heart,

but it was also very piquant, very poignant.

And one of the cross-dressers, Gloria,

gave me this wonderful pair of shoes that had these high heels

that were just spectacular - and they fit -

and I was pretty successful.

So they were all kind of oohing and aahing,

and that was, you know, great support.

It made me feel really authentic, you know,

made me feel like, "Wow, this is..."

you know, "I could really be like this."

I remember that there were a lot of people,

but individuals are not so clear to me,

and I don't think that it's so much that I didn't interact

with the people in fun ways,

but I was so out of myself,

it was just so incredible

that that remembrance is not a part of what it felt like.

It's more, really, a feeling,

this incredible feeling of exultation that was... sublime.

It was... I mean, it was unreal, obviously,

I mean, there was something that...

it's just that something I would never have...

..hoped could happen.

Oh, I remember that night. I did The Dance of the Little Swans.

I had done a bit of training as a classical ballerina.

So, yes, I could dance on toe for... for 20 seconds.

Some of the cross-dressers were excellent.

Some of them were very well done,

well made up, well dressed, good taste.

But on the other hand, of course, there were some

who looked like Donald Duck in a drunken orgy or something like this,

but everyone wanted to just join in and be another woman amongst women.

The style of Casa Susanna wasn't vampy or very sexy.

They were dressing up as middle-class women

that would be putting on their Sunday best and their finery.

And it wasn't like they wanted to be a Bettie Page

or something like that.

They wanted to be an accepted person of the female persuasion in society.

And the transformation for most of them

wasn't an easy thing to accomplish.

It took hours to get to the point where they were satisfied

with their look.

To become Susanna took hours.

I mean, Tito was a perfectionist.

When he was becoming Susanna,

I mean, I saw him tweeze every hair on his face,

which was an incredibly long process -

and I asked him, you know, I mean...

.."It takes a long for you to transform,"

and his answer was, "Well, it's worth it."

She loved to play the starring role,

and aside from the cross-dressing shows that we did at the Wigwam,

and then when she was the grande dame at Casa Susanna,

loved to be up front and a performer,

and she just had this incredible personality

that just spilt over everything.

Susanna is owed the respect that is due her.

She told me a story once that she was growing up in Chile,

where she was from,

and that she always knew that she wanted to be a woman,

so this was not something that was a fad or a fixture.

And Tito felt actually blessed

that he didn't have to hide it from Maria,

that she was accepting of it and made his life a joy,

rather than constant paranoia of - "Who's going to find out,

"am I going to lose my job, am I going to lose my family?"

Which was what happened back then.

These have seen better days.

ARCHIVE: The big cities attract homosexuals,

and the liberal law has made here the biggest magnet in the nation.

The city can offer anonymity and permissiveness.

The city's downtown Tenderloin district is the home ground

of the always-visible segment

of the city's homosexuals and transvestites.

The drag queens are here at Turk and Taylor.

So frequent were the fights between screaming queens

in the 2am to 3am period

that police had had enough and asked an all-night cafeteria

to close by midnight.

One thing you have to remember is that we are talking about the 1960s,

when the cross-dressers were in some places illegal

and certainly in many places looked down upon and bullied

and had a bad time.

It was a very hard time back then to know who to trust.

Where do you get your information from?

One of the reasons why there are relatively few photographs

taken at the Chevalier D'Eon Resort

and at the, er, at the Casa Susanna...

..people didn't like to have to...

They didn't like to lose control of the photographs

that were taken of them.

You'd be very unlikely to have someone come up and say,

"Would you take a photograph of me on your camera?"

Because they would know then that that negative, that camera

would go away somewhere,

that person could do anything with those photos,

and we were all a little bit paranoid

about having our reputations destroyed

or having blackmail exercised on us.

And because of the prejudice against gay people,

they wanted to differentiate themselves.

So the resort was designed for cross-dressing men

who were exclusively heterosexual.

They wanted their wives to be part of the organisation.

Well, they labelled themselves as cross-dressers.

They didn't label themselves as gay or transsexual.

Most of them claimed that they were totally heterosexual.

The times were the middle '50s through '60s,

which reigned of McCarthyism, of anti-communist sentiment.

You know, if someone was perceived as being gay,

it was, you know, just, um, it was a crime.

Let's face it, you could go to jail for that.

In that context, not only do you come out and be a cross-dresser,

but then you're gay on top of that,

so that's like strike two, you know, so you're getting,

you know, a double whammy from the, um,

you know, from the religious front,

from the moral majority back then.

And that was a moral majority back then.

I have approached many numerous firms

asking them for any kind of work that they had to offer.

Over a period of eight months, the same response -

"We can't hire anybody of your calibre.

"We don't want any of your people working for us."

So what else was I supposed to do when you get damn hungry?

I'm not up here tonight for criticism.

I'm up here for help.

Now, I know about, roughly about 20 of us girls

who are very well qualified to do work.

Legitimate work. We don't want to hustle.

We hate hustling.

I do.

I hate it very bitterly.

But when I get starving for two and three days

and somebody comes along,

I'm going to take a meal off them if it's the only means available.

Not only did you have two strikes on you,

but you were then a total degenerate.

So I think they wanted to skirt that issue

in order to again get a certain amount

of acceptability or tolerance -

let's use that word instead of acceptability. Tolerance.

Maria wanted to become the landing pad, so to speak,

and she walked a very fine line

because these people were major film directors,

they were attorneys, they were tug boat captains,

there were airplane pilots,

there was all sorts of professions

that people reached, you know, the pinnacle of their careers,

where they were making good money, had great jobs.

It must have been an extremely strong desire to do this

because they were rolling the dice

every time that they became their alter ego.

And then, IF found out, the downside of it was horrendous, you know,

I mean, who'd want to be brought into jail dressed as a woman

in your community?

I mean, it would have been front page anywhere in the United States.

So they risked a lot for doing what they wanted to do.

That is Irene, who was an aeronautical engineer.

She also was one who swore that she would never go anywhere

near sex change.

She said, "Certainly not. What an idea. Disgusting.

"I am a cross-dresser and I will remain a cross-dresser."

And a couple of years after I returned to Australia,

I had a letter saying, "Sit down before you read this.

"I've just had the operation."

Felicity was an airline pilot with many years' experience.

She had intended to be the first person to fly solo

across the Atlantic. Wow.

But Lindbergh beat her to it. Yeah.

Gail. I miss him so much.

Gail was the first person I met who used the technique of glueing

elastic to the skin and then pulling it back to give a false

and temporary safe face-lift.

Yeah. I learnt many things from Gail

and one of the first was that there was someone else in the world

like me, which was very important to know.

That's Downtown Group. Downtown Branch.

Donna is the only one I recognised.

Donna, I thought, was quite beautiful. And elegant, too.

She wasn't just beautiful, she was elegant. She...

Yeah, she could definitely pass.

That's Donna in male mode.

I have never seen Donna as Don. Ever.

Had she transitioned?

She had transitioned and she had de-transitioned.

Oh. Why do you think? I don't know.

Maybe she saw herself deteriorating,

maybe she thought she was no longer the person that she could have been.

Sadly, she decided just to walk back down that path

she had just climbed her way up.

It's a fabulous dress.

Gloria was large. She was about 6ft 4, and she had a stroke,

so she was paralysed on one side.

But she did her best with her accumulated wealth to help

other transgendered people.

I read about that, yeah. And she paid for their operations

and she looked after them until they felt free to go out into society.

When she died, the minister who conducted the ceremony

had a problem because they had invited a lot of people,

some of whom knew Rex and some of whom knew Gloria. Yeah.

And so they put the Gloria people on one side of the church

and the Rex people on the other,

and the minister had to stumble his way through the eulogy saying,

"This, uh, um, person was a fine p-person,

"and we should all...we should all honour this, um, person.

Oh, that's me! Is that you? That's me.

And that's the wig that Marie put together for me. Mm-hm.

I love that photo. Me in a swimming pool.

I love that photo. ..a swimming costume and garter.

You've got great legs there. Oh, great legs.

Of course, I admit that - honesty forces me to admit that!

Oh, dear.

Bad. That was taken in my family home in Sydney.

That was what I used to do for myself with my little home-made

self-timer on the camera, and I would stand in the corner

and take photographs, and all the doors were deadlocked.

I love the photos with you with your natural hair.

You look more like yourself.

And I like that.

I love that photo.

I love that photo!

Don't laugh, I LOVE that photo!

It's the sheepdog.

I know, but it's very...

The way it covers one of your eyes is very fetching.

I like it. Veronica Lake...

I LOVE that photo.

I love this one, too, cos you're so young.

Another one taken from my home.

How old were you there?

Well, that would have been at university, so somewhere

between 16 and 20.

So young. That is my father.

That's in my mother's house.

Is it? And there he is again.

There's more of him around in a dress than I knew of.

Oh, yes. There are many, many photos of him in dresses.

I'm learning things about your father every minute.

Oh, yes. And there's my dad again.

That's him again. Yes.

And again. That's him again with my mom. With some short woman.

I love that. She always has a look of adoration

whenever she looks at him, you know?

So you didn't really see him dress much? No.

Well, only once ever, I think.

Oh, my God, there's many, many photos of him.

There he is again.

I'm certainly surprised because I had always

been under the impression that he suppressed

it as much as possible,

that it was all going on in his head, but not in real life.

I think that was true for a few years.

And then it just popped out.

Yeah.

Look, he has good legs too. Yeah.

I don't know where these clothing were cos they certainly

weren't in our house.

My mother always said that my father was a pure clothing fetishist.

But seeing all these photos, I can't help but wonder,

was there more involved?

Do you...what do you think?

What is your take on this?

My take on this is that no-one knows.

No-one will ever know what goes on in some of the depths

of someone's mind.

Who knows? The shadow knows. Only the shadow knows. Yes.

Only the shadow knows.

Who is that? I don't know.

Quite attractive, though.

Yeah.

Is this a...?

Where? Is that me?

Is that really me?

Are you sure?

Somebody said so, huh?

Is that really me?

Where would that have been?

Oh, God, I can't stand it.

This is unbelievable. I don't believe that's me.

Is that really me? Oh, wait a minute.

"Diana and Dee." That's not me. This is not me.

That's not me.

That's not me.

These are not me.

That could be me.

This is kind of an embarrassing picture, but it says my name right

on the back. So it must be me.

THIS is me.

These are definitely me.

Those three are definitely me.

My hair had grown quite long by that time.

This was right around when I got the surgery.

And, um...

I was...I was feeling my oats.

I was pretty happy here.

Very, very happy.

Coming here made me realise that this was really how I needed

to be, and I had to face up to that.

This was so powerful for me and so important

that I had to figure out a way to...

..um, to allow it to...

..bloom.

So after this Halloween party, we went to Gail's place in the city.

So I stayed there for a couple of days. Always as Diana.

It was Diana the whole time.

Then I got this call from Julie.

And the sad part was that she had had a miscarriage.

That was like a real, uh...

..kick in the head because, you know,

kind of almost the worst thing that you can imagine happening

when you're in the middle of this blissful pleasure

and your...and your beloved is having a miscarriage,

there's just something kind of very dissonant

about that, and very unhappy.

When I went back to Australia after my degree,

I was determined to marry.

I was determined to give up cross-dressing and I thought

it would be almost automatic. Very many cross-dressers think,

"Oh, once I get married, it'll all go away.

"I won't need this imaginary woman

"that inhabits half my body and most of my mind."

But it didn't work out that way.

I still had the urges to dress, even when I was engaged,

and as the marriage drew closer and closer, and finally I had decided,

I really, in fairness, had to tell her about myself

before we got married.

And at that point, her father was killed in a road accident.

So I couldn't tell her,

I couldn't bring two tragedies into her life so close together.

So I determined instead to give up

anything to do with cross-dressing for a full year.

And maybe I could give it up completely then,

and at least I wouldn't have committed myself to life,

I would be able to either renew my vow of...masculinity

or else I would...give way

and go forward towards being feminine.

So one year after we were married, I told my wife about myself,

and she was quite naturally very upset.

But in a few days' time, she came back to me and said that we would try

and make it work because that's what marriage was about.

And we did make it work, through three children and 25 years.

In the early sixties, my father's obsession was getting worse.

So he flew out to the West Coast to meet Virginia.

He wanted somebody to talk to about this very secret

subject, completely undercover.

And so Virginia suggested Susanna and Gail.

Gail and Susanna both had, um, meeting places

for men of this nature,

of this ilk.

Gail was in the village, so she's the "Downtown Group".

And Susanna was in midtown, so she was the Midtown Group.

So my father wrote a letter to Susanna and Gail.

Gail answered within a week, and they both just hit it off.

He would say he was going book hunting on Saturday,

but I really think a lot of those times,

he didn't come back with books.

He came back occasionally with books, but not usually.

And I think he went to Gail's house on 11th Street.

But he knew he would have to tell my mother,

and he asked advice from Virginia.

And Virginia said, "Come at it slowly."

And so he did.

He, you know, he started to wear nylon tricot,

and he eventually went nightgown shopping with my mother.

When I was 12, it was 1964.

So I think that was about the time

when he might have opened the WHOLE door to her

cos I think she felt it was just something between them originally,

but when she discovered the network

and she realised it wasn't going to stop, it wasn't a phase,

there was some watershed moment for my mother.

Julie and I, we loved one another, and the love

was beyond all the other things about ourselves.

But we were innocent in some ways

about life and about how people are and can be.

So we thought that New York would be a place where I could learn

how I really was.

And it wasn't so much that it would all be healed,

but if there were any place where it COULD be healed,

it would be someplace like New York.

Her hope was that it would be... it would be something

we could live with.

And that was my hope, too.

So we decided to move to New York and go visit Harry Benjamin

and see if there's anything to be done for me.

At that time, anybody who was even remotely thinking of surgery

had to see Harry Benjamin.

I didn't dress all that much,

I don't think. Julie and I would visit Gail

and we would visit Susanna.

Julie was very much a part, although she was often tortured by it

because she didn't understand it.

It was not pleasant for her.

But she was willing to go along with it

because she wanted... she wanted this to turn out...

..OK, for both of us.

And then I started to take hormones.

I started to develop a little bit, and it became apparent

that that was what I wanted.

So we came to realise that this really couldn't work.

She moved back to Valparaiso, where a good friend of ours, Paul,

asked her to marry him.

So Julie and I were separated.

I was working at a public relations place.

I was taking hormones.

I was doing electrolysis.

And I was...

It was...it became more and more known that I wanted to have surgery,

but there didn't seem any way for me possibly to do it

because it was thousands of dollars.

But then Gloria did call.

We went out to dinner and...he said,

"Well, if you really want to do this, I'll help you out.

"I'll take you to California

"and we'll find a place for you to do this.

"I'll pay for it and you can stay with me."

So I resigned and I tried to pull everything together.

I changed to Diana the night before the flight.

And, um...

And that was the last time I was David.

It was a very rough flight to California.

I thought that I was going to die and God would have gotten me!

And my mother was right all along!

But fortunately, the plane landed.

And we just kind of leisurely made our way across the country.

And then we went to Tijuana.

In the United States, this was illegal.

Everybody agreed that it was right that it was illegal.

There was no way to find a moral place to stand.

And that's a very isolating experience for any human being,

I think, that to feel like who you are is against the law.

There's still a little bit of anger in me even now

that I actually had to leave the country to have the surgery done.

I feel wronged about that.

I woke up, and it was pretty fierce pain.

And my surgery was certainly not the most refined of the surgeries.

I would have wished that I'd been able to go in other places,

Casablanca was the place at the time.

But I DIDN'T have that and I...I was very grateful that I got what I got.

But it was very painful.

It was in a hospital where nobody spoke,

well, everybody spoke Spanish.

So I learned "mucho dolor"...

..and "agua caliente".

Then we decided we should drive back to Pennsylvania,

and on the way we should stop in Iowa and visit my parents.

We drove across the country, Gloria and I.

And we stopped in Omaha and my father came to meet us.

And I remember I was in the room and my hair was in curlers.

And he came into the room.

He just came across the room and gave me a big hug and said,

"I'm so glad to see you."

And it was...

..you know, it was truly an amazing, amazing gift of love.

He was an incredible kind of marriage of strength and...softness.

He was both an incredibly strong, masculine man,

but he was an incredibly gentle soul as well.

And, um...

Uh...

That's...

That's always been a model for how people should be,

um, that they should...

..have a zest for life

and a love for the excitement of life,

but a willingness to...

..to give and to...

..and to, uh, have vulnerability.

To be vulnerable.

And, um...

And my dad was just an incredibly...

He crossed all of those.

And I don't... He was a simple man.

He was not, he was not some super-educated or...

But he was just...

He was just a very good being.

But that didn't produce a super-good relationship with my parents,

because my mother was just... it was just too much.

You know, they were in a small town,

it was...it was embarrassing - quotes -

"embarrassing" to them for me to show up, to be around.

I was an embarrassment, you know.

So it was...it was just as well to them that I was...

..kind of disappeared.

My relationship with my wife was never the kind of secret

that is hidden away in a closet.

Back in Australia, when I went to a dinner or a party,

she knew where I was going and who I was going to be with.

And, in fact, she even came to a few of the functions with me.

When we moved back to America after a few years,

we met Downtown Branch and sometimes others.

But after, I don't know, four or five times, she said

she would really rather not come because she was afraid of hurting

people's feelings by calling them by the wrong name.

So from then on, I would go by myself.

In those days, I should add, that we didn't visit Casa Susanna,

mainly because the resort had disappeared.

I would ask how, "How's Marie,"

and people would say, "We think she's dead."

And I'd ask, "What about the resort?"

And they'd say, "Oh, it closed years ago. We don't know."

So although it was only four or five years since I'd been there,

it was nonetheless as if the resort had been all imagination

and had never existed.

And it was strange because no-one knew.

You imagined that someone at least would have known

the truth about something.

Whereas, Tito, nobody knows.

But that was only one part of our lives anyway.

And I was too busy with myself.

It wasn't so much that the urge was increasing,

but that time was passing.

And I knew that the proportion of my life that I would have to spend

as a woman was diminishing compared to the proportion of my life

that I had already spent and would spend as a man.

And so the pressure became greater.

I kept wanting more and more.

I wanted to dress more frequently.

I wanted to dress with more freedom.

I felt that I'd spent the first third of my life being the person

that my family wanted me to be.

And the second third of my life, I had spent being who my marital

family wanted me to be.

And I wanted time for myself to be the person I wanted it to be.

And, of course, several of my friends committed suicide.

And I thought, is this the way I have to go?

Is this the only way that I'll ever get away from this circle

of being John then Katherine then John then Katherine?

Maybe I have to break the marriage or commit suicide.

And when I went to my wife and told her that I needed to try

living as a woman, she seemed to be very sympathetic and say,

"Well, we can't have anything else happening that's worse."

Because I think I've raised it,

"I have to try living as a woman or do something sillier,"

was my phrase.

And she said, "Well, we can't have that."

And we obviously both were talking about suicide and I thought

it was all going to be all right.

I told my family.

My eldest daughter burst into tears and said, "Is that all it is?"

Because they'd seen the distress that I was under and stress

that my wife was under, and they had assumed that like every

second family around us, I was having an affair with some

other woman, of which I was, of course, but it was me.

So that was the situation.

That was really what pushed me over the edge.

I had the operation early in February, and at the end

of the operation I felt marvellous.

I felt that for the first time in my life I was the real person

and that I had discarded those bits of me that weren't necessary.

And I had gained those bits of me that were.

But when I told my family, it was such a shock to them

that there weren't really any questions that I could answer.

One daughter has been my best friend

virtually ever since the operation.

The other two don't want to know me as Katherine.

One of them I haven't seen for many years.

The other one wrote me a letter of hope when I had my

first heart operation.

Hope that I would recover soon and be well, and so on.

I thought, here is an opportunity I can take.

It will have been worth having my triple bypass if I can make

a contact with my daughter.

And so I wrote back to her and thanked her and said,

"Maybe when I come out of the hospital, we could sit

"down for coffee and have a talk."

And I received a reply which said,

"It's too soon."

So I still haven't seen her.

I drove home calm and filled with thoughts of the astonishing

secret world I had come into.

I had heard some astonishing stories, but I could not visualise

myself taking part in such adventures.

There is indeed a certain dead end element in Gail's life.

It was evident in everything he said and did that he looked back on each

episode as something guilt ridden.

He was like a man on a toboggan slide, enjoying the sensation,

unable to get off, and having no idea of what cliff or wall might lie

at the bottom.

I saw Gail as a man laughing to cover up a desire to scream

as joking to keep from crying,

as running to avoid having to stop and look at himself.

My father was somebody, I think, who really couldn't change...

..even as Doris.

My father was still Donald.

I have a letter from him to my mother from 1942 where he says,

"This is the way I am.

"I am prone to moods.

"I wake up in the morning one morning and everything is shit

"and all people are crap, and there's no good place for anything

"and nothing good can ever happen, and that's the way I feel.

"And then I wake up another morning and everything seems fine and fun

"and nice and interesting."

And that's the way he was his whole life.

After they had me, things were really happy for the first ten,

maybe, years of my life.

But as I started to go through puberty, my father started to get

insulting and say things like,

"Looks like me, poor kid."

He said things to me that were absolutely unforgivable.

Unforgivable.

When I was 12 years old, I was 12 - I was in sixth grade, 12 -

he said I was a liar, a cheat and a fraud.

How could a 12-year-old be a fraud?

And I never lied.

I told my mother everything.

My friends would tease me that I'd tell Mommy everything.

So, you know, I didn't lie.

I didn't cheat because I was the smartest kid in school.

So who would I cheat from?

And, you know, I wasn't a fraud because

what 12-year-old could be a fraud?

It's ridiculous. Impossible.

And it took me another...

..over 20 years to realise that that was all

projection of how he felt about himself.

He obviously had a lot of self-hatred, which was like a black

cloud in our household, like a hole, like a cloud.

My father was somebody who opened his mouth and said things that most

people would consider unsayable.

Really, unsayable.

He would just say it like that, no problem.

He told me I had no worth as a person, that basically

I was just a broodmare.

I was a worthless piece of crap.

I mean, I really loved my father.

I worshipped him. I adored him.

I loved him. I idolised him.

So every single nasty thing he said to me, I bought it.

I bought it all.

I believed it.

And I'm still trying to rid myself of some of these beliefs

now at age 70.

I wonder if his own hatred for his father -

he just assumed that I would hate him because he was the father.

I don't know, I have no idea.

Maybe he hated me because I was the girl that looked like him.

I really don't know.

I don't know.

So anything that made him happy was a happy thing for our household.

That's why I feel happiness

that he got pleasure from cross-dressing,

because that was, like, if you made a chart and there was a negative

side and a positive side, there were so many negatives

and that cross-dressing, he was happy.

He was happy.

When I walked around yesterday, I looked around here and I could

think, I could imagine all of them, you know,

going through the grass in their high heels, you know, coming

from the cabins.

And I could imagine them all so happy.

And I thought, my father must have been so happy here.

He had found a group that accepted him with all of his quirks,

even his most outrageous quirk.

And he says in his book that he bonded

with people immediately.

My father wasn't like that with other people.

He really wasn't.

He could be very cruel. He was very, very cruel.

He was cruel to my mother.

He was cruel to me.

He was cruel to a lot of his authors.

He wasn't cruel at all to others.

It really depended on their personality.

And I don't think he was ever cruel

to his fellow transvestites, ever.

He loved them and he bonded with them in a way that he bonded

with nobody else.

I didn't feel love for my father, until recently.

I'm almost 70, but just recently

I'm beginning to feel like

I remember the love I felt as a child.

I can feel it again.

But really, it took decades.

Then it was time for me to sort of imagine, how would I get out

into the world?

And one of the things that I wanted to do was get married.

I even thought at the beginning that I would love to have children.

And much of that was realised.

I was married to a man for a while.

And I had very traditional ideas about...

..I think both of us did, actually, about how it would be.

You know, he took me to meet his parents and they were lovely

people and we had a wonderful time.

And his mother was a Tupperware salesman.

And I got lots of Tupperware and it was wonderful.

So for the first couple of years, it really was just me kind

of learning how to be a homemaker, getting to know his mother,

having that relationship with his mother, just being domestic.

And I would have been very happy to be just a housewife.

But it was not to be that way.

So eventually we split and I had to find work.

And that became a whole new career, and it was quite an exciting career.

And it had almost nothing to do with being transgender.

It had a lot to do with being a woman working in computers.

When I got to Xerox, the place was just beaming with excitement

and energy and fun.

It was just outrageous in a New Agey way.

So I sort of went from being a secretary

to being a research scientist.

It was very funny.

We began to develop this language called Smalltalk.

That was a big thing in the day, and it did have a large impact

on a lot of the software that exists to this day.

And here I was, a woman in this research centre

that was mostly all men.

And they let me play.

There was no problem, you know?

It was just, welcome to the clan.

And still, it was hard for me to tell people who I am.

I think there is a piece of me that feels some regret, or kind

of sadness, because it's truly very much a part of who I am.

My whole goal was to not be afraid.

I didn't want to be afraid.

I wanted to...

I wanted to be just a human being, an alive human being,

having a fun, interesting, useful life.

And then Carol Shapiro walked into my life.

She put her hand up on the couch and I put my hand on the back

of the couch.

And the next thing we knew, we were kissing.

You have to get the idea that that was not a common thing.

And we were not... That was not our normal way of being.

I mean, you know, our relationship, even to this day,

is just spectacular.

And it has nothing to do with small talk and it has nothing

to do with transgender, and it doesn't...

Now, Carol is actually very proud of me.

And even my transgender past,

she thinks that, wow, that's pretty incredible.

Maria sold this property because it was just becoming

too large to manage.

I mean, again, it's 288 acres of land.

There's always something that needed to be done.

So she downsized a little bit and moved a couple of miles away

to a 188-acre property, which became known as Casa Susanna,

which was a totally different operation.

They didn't do cross-dressing shows, but it became like the bed

and breakfast of the cross-dressing community where people could come

and stay and enjoy themselves for the time that they were here.

That was another magical place.

And Susanna spent a lot of time of her life up there and would go out

regularly to the store or to parties.

She was her own individual and wasn't sheltered to the house

and hiding undercover there.

She was quite flamboyant.

And she actually enjoyed the property a lot more

than Tito did.

They were separate individuals.

Tito was a person who worked for radio for years,

had his own show, and Susanna got into the translation business

at the UN.

So she was also eventually able to support herself.

Again, they were both separate and individual people.

Although I think that Tito was taking hormones to grow breast,

to transform and live as Susanna full time.

I did, spoke to her about that and I said,

"Well, you know, suppose you became a woman.

"Would you want, you know, the comfort of a man?"

And she said "No."

So she was pretty adamant about her relationship with Maria.

So I guess that would make them a lesbian couple.

This used to be the old swimming hole down here.

We used to come here almost every day.

My grandmother used to dam up so we could get a big, deep

swimming pool here.

And then every year in the fall, the water would just wash everything

away and we'd have to put a new dam in every year.

I can see some of the rocks that are still there

from when we used to do that.

What's remarkable is my family used to own that mountain.

Maria was up in the house in Mount

Vernon because we had moved there

and I was actually staying

at her house on 103rd Street.

So my brother Richard called me

and said that she had fallen

down a flight of stairs

and that she had, you know, cracked

open her skull and was unconscious.

And he didn't know for how long

she was lying there

and called an ambulance

and brought her to the hospital.

But she was seriously hurt.

She had to have three burr holes

cut into her skull to relieve

the pressure from the haematoma

that was growing under there

and the bleeding,

and had a very long

convalescence after that.

And not only did we have to

go through that, helping

her with her convalescence,

but the hospital bills

from that incident were astronomical

and put an extreme

financial pressure on the family,

and especially on Tito.

You know, he had to take care of his family and that's what he did.

And that became his motivation

in every waking minute,

and all of his energy was put into that.

So they had to sell Casa Susanna

and that was the end of the property.

And then I would say in the '80s, my grandmother

was getting worse and worse and then starting to get

into her hoarding phase.

She had a eight-room Upper West Side apartment in the city,

and there was barely a path to walk from the kitchen to the bedroom

to the bathroom.

So Susanna got her own apartment on 42nd Street and started living

as Susanna full time.

And she slowly but surely created her identity and got

a driver's licence and a Social Security card.

But also during that time,

Susanna had developed a brain tumour

which was inoperable, and eventually she was going to die from it.

So Maria was a hoarder,

Susanna had brain cancer,

and their lives physically were separated.

But they were always in communication with each other.

And I would sometimes overhear their conversations.

And they were very endearing and always ending with, you know,

"I love you, I miss you.

"Lots of kisses, and someday soon we'll be back together again,"

which was incredibly sweet, I thought.

But they couldn't.

In fact, when Marie died, Susanna was in such a state

that she couldn't move from that apartment.

And she passed the week after Maria died.

We were told she was laying on the bed fully dressed as Susanna.

I loved your grandmother, Maria.

She was an incredible woman.

She was such a strong woman.

And I know she put you all to work immediately when you got here.

There were some cross-dressers who just wanted to get

into the washing-up and scrubbing the floor.

That wasn't me. I was the perch on the bar stool one.

THEY LAUGH

I mean, that building was fantastic.

There were so many, you know, incredibly talented people

that came here.

For a long time, for some time anyway,

there was the sort of belief that you really didn't find

that community unless you were intelligent and educated

and inquiring and, you know, all these things.

It wasn't that at all, actually. It was just communication.

You weren't allowed to put an ad in the paper saying,

"Cross-dressers interested in running a resort at the Catskills."

You just couldn't do that.

So it all had to be word of mouth and word of mouth people

tended to be university graduates and the professionals.

So, yes, it was a select group that used to come here,

and it was a very interesting group. Great to listen to.

So how old were you at that time?

I was, again, anywhere from five...

I was born in 1951.

So...

So you were just a kid? I was just a kid. I know.

I mean, we couldn't come and see the shows, so we'd peek

through the window until we got called.

That's perfect.

So if you're born in the '50s, I'm well ahead of you cos I'm 86.

God bless you. Look at that.

So, you know, I want to tell you both something because,

you know, it's long been a dream or even a quest of mine,

because I actually am the holder of Susanna, Maria's

and Yolanda's ashes.

And I've have always wanted to

bring them here and... Excuse me.

..and pass them out,

cos I think that this is the place for them to be, you know?

It seems like the perfect place.

Seems like the perfect place.

I would be honoured if you two would help me do that.

It would be my great honour.

It would be my great honour.

So how do we go about that?

Yeah, I was going to do it over by that tree over there.

OK.

Because it has some colour.

And I just think that they should be here.