I parked in the driveway. A worker wearing knee pads emerged from a shed, his radio playing. I tried to ask him a few times if the old house was gone entirely. But he was from Ukraine, and conveyed he didn’t speak much English. The answer was obvious, though. I thanked him and got back into my car, resolved this was a dead end.
Back during the Casa Susanna’s pinnacle, guests dressed up in attendance and took hundreds of photographs of themselves despite the risks of creating such evidence, when being discovered as having this pastime or deep desire might have meant you could lose your family, your job, or even be locked up in a psychiatric ward, if not jail.
It was only after a random trove of those photographs were discovered at a flea market in 2004 that exhibitions honoring Casa Susanna followed, and this history was remembered, spawning the book and an accompanying exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year. Yet I do, nowadays, also fear we’re returning to the same nightmares of the ‘50s and ’60s that Casa Susanna’s guest had to contend with, given the recent passage of draconian laws all over this country and particularly in some states—like in Idaho (where trans folks might risk arrest now for using the bathroom) or in Kansas (where trans people were stripped of their drivers licenses, essentially overnight).
Myself, like everyone trans I know, wonders if we even have a future in this country anymore. My kitchen table, these gatherings each month, includes many who’ve fled red states for this blue one already. These pictures, and knowing that these people existed, here, enliven my weary trans soul.
And yet, where Casa Susanna itself once stood, there was no plaque, no sign, no marking at all of what had transpired here, its significance to the broader emergence of trans people and our networks. When my home is full with my trans and queer neighbors sharing cookies, I feel how we are echoing Susanna and the others before us. Without them and all our brave ancestors, I wonder, would we ever have come to exist?
