[Upfront] The Month
[The Buzz] Club News
[First Person] Trannies Like Me
[In the News] Casa Susanna Revisited
[People] Flawed Beauty
[From the Archive] Clothes Don't Make the Woman - March 1992
[Last Laugh] Inquiring Minds

[Upfront]
THE MONTH

Celebrate our differences – Please!

A couple months ago, Diane wrote about a strange Cding phenomenon. Specifically, why is it that so many CDs think that their brand of Cding is the only brand of CDing?

Turns out that our old friend, the properly British Becky EnVérité [September 2005] recently experienced this phenomena in the Mother Country, and wrote about it in her smart, witty blog. She graciously allows us to present it here.

There they go again!

Back in April 2005 the La Femme Silhouette newsletter look was updated including use of the elegant Georgia font. One year later (April 2006) the New York Times updated the look of their website including the use of Georgia font!

In December 2005 and again in April 2006 we highlighted the new art book, Casa Susanna, a collection of photos of a late 1950s early 1960s upstate New York CD retreat.

And, this month the NYT has an article on, yes, Casa Susanna. Coincidence?

Great article though, so I have included it here.

Fourteen years ago current member, Deborah Lee, discussed what clothes mean and do not mean to her on the journey. (first time on the web)

There's humor, and more!

Elaine

[The Buzz]
LOCAL NEWS

September Birthdays

[First Person]
Becky's T*Blog
Sunday, August 20, 2006

By Becky EnVérité

Don't you know who we are?

This weekend Jane finally completed her Grand Tour of my semi-regular tranny haunts. Having blown out Pink due to the weather, and on a bit of a whim, I decided to take her to the Fox and Hounds in Essex.

It's a bit of a trek from my place (in fact it's about the furthest distance you can travel in a straight line within East Anglia), so I don't make the trip as often as I'd like. Which is a shame because it's a quite nice venue. A little oasis of camp in the Essex countryside!

In fact, this was the first time I'd been in over a year. It's not changed much. They've knocked through a wall to put the pool table in it's own room, and they no longer seem to serve food (as far as I could tell), but that's about it.

There were only two other trannies there, which seemed a little unusual. Wednesday is their regular "tranny night" and the place is heaving with us, but there's usually a smattering at the weekend too. Perhaps Pink over in Cambridge was a bigger draw than I'd expected.

Jane and I had been there a while soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying people-watching when a tranny who'd arrived after us came over and said hello. She asked if we were together, and seemed suprised that Jane was accepting of me as a tranny. I explained that Jane had known about Becky before we'd even met, as we'd both got blogs.

Blank looks. Jane explained what a blog was, and how she'd got to know me a little through mine.

She then got the idea that maybe Jane fancied trannies, and it took a bit of explaining that Jane hadn't been trawling the net for trannies (she wasn't, she promises me!) it was just that she was OK with it, and found it kinda fun.

She then wanted to know how often I dressed, from my "look" she'd expected me to be full time (I'd made about my usual amount of effort). Then she asked if Jane was prepared for me to start wanting to dress "more and more"?

I explained that I was a pretty casual tranny, and since my early days of being out I'd actually dressed less and less, and in fact the last time I'd fully dressed up was Sparkle.

More blank looks, so we explained that Sparkle was a big tranny meet back in June, then incredulous looks that I'd not dressed in over a month.

It was at this point I decided I'd much rather be elsewhere. So Jane and I went dancing.

Meeting that tranny made me realise that I'm living in a bit of a bubble when it comes to where I think we are at. The we in the title doesn't refer to me and Jane (I'm not that big headed, honest), it refers to Trannies Like Me.

If you're reading this and you're a tranny, then Trannies Like Me probably includes You.

Trannies Like Me have, or seek, partners who see them as a whole. Parters who are neither repelled by trannies nor actively seek them.

Trannies Like Me know that these partners are special, but not unusual.

Trannies Like Me aren't defined by how often we dress, we're defined just by the fact that we dress, and we identify as a tranny because we dress.

Trannies Like Me are capable of wanting to look fantastic (I said "wanting," not often "managing") without wanting to go "full time."

Trannies Like Me feel a part of a wider community through the internet. We might not have blogs, we might not participate much, but we gain a wider understanding of what it means to be a tranny by seeing what other trannies are doing.

Trannies Like Me exist. Don't you know who we are?

[In the News]
CASA SUSANNA REVISITED

New York Times - September 7, 2006

By Penelope GREEN

A Safe House for the Girl Within

THERE was a pilot and a businessman, an accountant, a librarian and a pharmacologist. There was a newspaper publisher, and a court translator. By day, they were the men in the gray flannel suits, but on the weekends, they were Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Sandy, Fiona, Virginia and Susanna. It was the dawn of the 1960’s, yet they wore their late 50’s fashions with awkward pride: the white gloves, the demure dresses and low heels, the stiff wigs. Many were married with children, or soon would be. In those pre-Judith Butler, pre-Phil Donahue days, when gender was more tightly tethered to biology, these men’s “gender migrations,” or “gender dysphoria,” as the sociologists began to call cross-dressing, might cost them their marriages, their jobs, their freedom.

And so they kept their feminine selves hidden, except for weekends at Casa Susanna, a slightly run-down bungalow camp in Hunter, N.Y., that was the only place where they could feel at home.

Decades later, when Robert Swope, a gentle punk rocker turned furniture dealer, came across their pictures — a hundred or so snapshots and three photo albums in a box at the 26th Street flea market in Manhattan — he knew nothing about their stories, or Casa Susanna, beyond the obvious: here was a group of men dressed as women, beautiful and homely, posing with gravity, happiness and in some cases outright joy. They were playing cards, eating dinner, having a laugh. They didn’t look campy, like drag queens vamping it up as Diana Ross or Cher; they looked like small-town parishioners, like the lady next door, or your aunt in Connecticut.

Mr. Swope was stunned by the pictures and moved by the mysterious world they revealed. He and his partner, Michel Hurst, gathered them into a book, “Casa Susanna,” which was published by Powerhouse Books in 2005 and reissued last spring, and which became an instant sensation, predictably, in the worlds of fashion and design. Paul Smith stores sold it, as did the SoHo design store and gallery Moss, which made a Christmas diorama of a hundred copies last year. Last month, you might have seen it in the hands of a child-size mannequin in the Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street.

But it was only after the book’s publication that Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurst began to learn the story of Casa Susanna, first called the Chevalier d’Eon resort, for an infamous 18th-century cross-dresser and spy, and only in recent months, as they have begun working on a screenplay about the place, that they have come to know some of its survivors.

“At first, I didn’t want to know more,” Mr. Swope said. “I didn’t want to find out that the stories turned out to be tragedies.”

But the publication of the book has drawn former Casa Susanna guests out, and it turns out that their stories, like most, have equal measures of tragic and comic endings. Some are still being told.

Robert Hill, a doctoral candidate in the American studies program at the University of Michigan who is completing his dissertation on heterosexual transvestism in post-World War II America, came across Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurst’s book by accident in a Borders last year, reached out to them through their publisher, and sketched in many of the details.

Casa Susanna was owned by Susanna herself — the court translator, otherwise known as Tito Valenti — and Valenti’s wife, Marie, who conveniently ran a wig store on Fifth Avenue and was happy to provide makeover lessons and to cook for the weekend guests. It was a place of cultivated normalcy, where Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Fiona and the others were free to indulge their radical urges to play Scrabble in a dress, trade makeup tips or walk in heels in the light of day.

“These men had one foot in the mainstream and the other in the margins,” Mr. Hill said the other day. “I’m fascinated by that position and their paradox, which is that the strict gender roles of the time were both the source of their anxiety and pain, and also the key to escaping that pain.”

What still moves Murray Moss, the impresario behind Moss the store, about the images in the book is their ordinariness. “You think of man dressed as woman and you think extremes: it’s kabuki, Elizabethan theater, Lady Macbeth,” he said. “It’s also sexual. But these aren’t sexual photos. The idea that they formed a secret society just to be ... ordinary. It’s like a mirror held up to convention. It’s not what you would expect. It’s also not pathetic. Everybody looks so happy.”

At first, Casa Susanna was a thrilling place, said Sandy, a divorced businessman, “because whatever your secret fantasies were you were meeting other people who had similar ones and you realized, ‘I might be different but I’m not crazy.’ ” Now 67 and living in the Northeast, he hasn’t cross-dressed for decades, and asked that his identifying details be veiled. He was a graduate student in 1960, he said, living in New York and visiting Casa Susanna on the weekends.

“It was the most remarkable release of pressure, and it meant the world to me then,” he said. “I’d grown up in a very conventional family. I had the desire to marry, to have the house, the car, the dog. And I eventually did. But at that point there were all these conflicting desires that had no focal points. I didn’t know where I fit.”

Sandy remembers one weekend sharing a cabin with another man and his girlfriend. “She obviously accepted the situation with him for better or worse,” Sandy began. “Anyway, I didn’t get dressed until later in the day, and when I did, the girlfriend was just coming down the stairs. ‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘you certainly have made a change. I have to tell you, I much preferred the person who got out of the car.’ And with that she reached under my dress and groped me. She said, ‘It’s a shame to have all that locked up in there.’ In one sense, it was titillating, in another, depressing. And yet in another way, it put a finger on the issue.”

Casa Susanna was a testing ground for many. Katherine Cummings, who went by Fiona at Casa Susanna, was born John Cummings in Scotland 71 years ago. Now living in Sydney, she has been a transsexual for more than 20 years, as well as a librarian and an editor. When she was 28, she took a post-doctoral degree in Toronto, and spent her weekends at Casa Susanna, the first place, she said last week, where she could dress openly. In her 1992 memoir, “Katherine’s Diary,” she writes hilariously about a late October weekend, shivering in the cold bungalows, and accepting a ride from the main house down to the cabin she had been assigned with a burly man in slipshod makeup and a slapped-on wig. She turned to the back seat and froze: there lay a nightstick, handcuffs and other police paraphernalia. Turns out her chauffeur was the sheriff of a small New Jersey town.

The resort catered to hunters as well, Ms. Cummings said, and sometimes there was overlap. “Libby, who was very beautiful, was also Lee, who was a very macho person. And one day the hunters were there and so were we and they all had a great time discussing rifles.”

Mostly the guests talked and talked. “They talked about fashion, and passing, and how and if they’d told their wives or girlfriends,” said Ms. Cummings, who is divorced and has three daughters. “In those days we didn’t know where we were going.”

They had parties, and even a convention of sorts, one Halloween in 1962, that drew cross-dressers from all over the country, as well as a few psychologists from the Kinsey Institute. Led by the irascible pharmacologist Virginia Prince, who made them their own magazine, Transvestia, for which Susanna was a columnist dispensing exhortatory advice and tips on deportment and makeup, many of them formed a loose collective that decades later grew into a not-so-secret society called Tri-Ess (a k a the Society for the Second Self).

“I remember the first morning we all arrived,” Ms. Prince said last week, “and all these, let’s just call them people, descended on the bathrooms and you see all these folks in their nighties and kimonos and so forth standing around shaving. It was a very amusing sight. Beards tend to grow. I had mine removed years ago.”

Ms. Prince became known as the founder of the transgender movement, and wrote copiously on the subject for science and sex research journals and conferences, irritating more than a few Casa Susanna graduates, who weren’t comfortable with the politicizing of their issues, or the strict categories she created. Born male (and still biologically male), she has been living as a woman for the past 40 years. At 94, she’s no longer allowed to drive, but she leads the Lollies (“little old ladies like me,” she said the other day) at her California retirement home in a study group (they’re covering astronomy this month) and drives a red scooter.

“I invented gender,” she said proudly. “Though if the ladies here find out I’m a biological man I’m a dead duck.”

Of Susanna herself, the trail ends with her last column for Transvestia in 1970, when she, like Virginia, announced her plans to live henceforth as a woman.

“Scene: The porch in the main house at our resort in the Catskill Mountains,” Susanna writes in a snippet from one of her early columns, courtesy of Mr. Hill’s research, and trimmed a bit. “The time: About 4 o’clock in the morning as Labor Day is ready to awaken in the distant darkness. The cast: Four girls just making small talk. ... It’s dark in the porch; just a row of lights illuminate part of the property at intervals — perhaps a bit chilly at 2,400 feet. ... An occasional flame lighting a cigarette throws a glow on feminine faces — just a weekend at the resort, hours in which we know ourselves a little better by seeing our image reflected in new colors and a new perspective through the lives of new friends.”

Click on the cover below to learn more about and buy Casa Susanna via Amazon

[People]
FLAWS

Audrey Tautou doesn't recommend growing up in Paris. For a young girl, the actress says, it's overwhelming to be surrounded by so many exquisitely gorgeous women. "I thought to myself, It's insane the number of beauties there are here in Paris! If I really want to be an actress, how on earth can I do it? Look at me! There's nothing special about me. I don't think I'm ugly. But for me, beautiful women simply shimmer with loveliness. That's certainly not the kind of looks I have, where people gasp, How gorgeous she is!" At 5-foot-3, weighing just 93 pounds, Tautou had to settle for being called "cute." That stung, especially since she was so aware of her defects, such as her prominent ears, which she hid behind her hair. "Oh, it was something I hated and obsessed about, just loathed, like the fact that I am so skinny! And my legs! They are so very strange! They're just like two sticks." Now 27, Tautou has learned an important bit of wisdom.

“when you accept your defect, suddenly no one on earth sees it anymore”

"If you obsess about some defect, you make it obvious to everyone, and suddenly everyone is staring at just that defect. The more you hide something, the more it shows. But when you accept your defect, suddenly no one on earth sees it anymore. In fact, it becomes an asset."

[From the Archive]
La Femme Silhouette - March 1992

CLOTHES DON'T MAKE THE WOMAN

By Deborah LEE

It was quite a few years ago when "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" was popularized on television with Jack Palance as it's host. I was always intrigued by the odd, the extraordinary, the psychic and unusual events that were commonplace on that show. One story in particular really caught my attention because it had something to do with me in one sense.

The story was about a military officer in some army. I believe it was Austria or somewhere in that region at the turn of the century. (Please, if anyone knows the details of the incident, I would love to have the information. Send information care of this newsletter.) The officer was given a retirement party in his honor and all of his fellow officers attended. After some time at the party, the guest of honor disappeared, later to reappear garbed in tights, slippers and tutu. This dignified officer, who appeared to be in his mid 70's, performed excerpts from his favorite ballet, dancing the role normally reserved for the prima ballerina. Needless to say, the others were astonished at this behavior, yet admiring him to the point of commenting very positively on his form and execution of the ballet. This however, is not the end of the story. The tragic part was that after the officer finished his display of talent, he sat down to rest and died. Those around him didn't know what to do, so they laid him in state. But prior to displaying the corpse, they had to cut the tights and tutu off of him and place him in his uniform.

Jack Palance then said this is the incident where the phase was coined "Clothes Do Make the Man."

I don't know whether that is true or not, but I understand what he meant.

This remembrance got me to thinking about what I'm doing or trying to accomplish in my life. Just because I wear the attire of a woman, am I trying to become a woman? Will I try to make the inside of me more like a woman or am I simply content with wearing women's clothing?

These are complex questions and it is not a static issue, since I am continually investigating, analyzing and experiencing my evolution. Currently in the emergence of my persona from it's tightly woven cocoon, I am experiencing strong desires to make a concerted effort to learn more about my feminine side. I know for a fact I am more at home in a skirt, blouse and all the other paraphernalia of a woman than I could ever be as my male self. The tension, anxiety, pain and hurt seem to disappear and a much more loving person is before the mirror. I know a lot of those feeling are also with me as my male self, but as a male I have a tendency to pull myself inward and turn the love to anger and compassion into self pity. As Deborah, I direct this love more outwardly to others, Elaine and our home. Doug will come home bitchin' about the job, about the management, about the pettiness of people but the moment I dawn my female attire, Elaine and our home come foremost in my mind. I ask of myself, "What can I do to improve the quality of life and how can I express my love in meaningful ways?"

Another phenomenon is my energy level picks up when I am Deborah. This allows me to do more with the newsletter, the chapter and housework in the evening. As Doug, I am sapped of all energy and fighting with myself too much.

With these observations, there is a strong tendency at home to be Deborah most of the time. I still have problems with getting up during the week to play the part of Doug. Isn't it strange that all my life I had to work hard at being who I was supposed to be in the eyes of my parents and peers rather than spending the time getting to know more about myself and learning to be comfortable and loving to myself? Talk about masochism!

Now that the pain is subsiding, there is much excitement and joy in actively discovering who I am. But, in the back of my mind there is the feeling there is still a lot of suffering to come before those whom I love get a chance to really know me.

Now back to my original subject.

Do clothes make the woman? My answer is "No," but it is a major method to investigate the side of me I believe is dominant in my character and persona. Therefore, I believe it is my destiny to become that which I am and I will work to educate myself, my wife and those who say they love me so the outside package reflects what is inside of me.

Another anecdote is that I am very much like that officer, because all through my life I wanted to be a ballerina. Around 1973 I got so frustrated, I told my first wife (her name was Janet) about it and she said, "Go for it!" I joined a dance studio in Elyria where I was taught and practiced ballet and modem dance. I was the only "man" in class and my instructor was pleased I attended her classes. I didn't dance in our first recital but choose to attend with my classmates, standing just off stage saying to myself, "I'm going out there some day." It was shortly after that Janet and I moved to the ashram (spiritual home of a yogi) and my hopes of dancing were pushed aside with much anguish and regret. Perhaps I will get off my duff and lose this weight so I can return to one of my favorite pastimes.

Love, Deb

[Last Laugh]
INQUIRING MINDS

Alpha Omega is a non-profit social support group for heterosexual crossdressers and their wives or partners. Also, members from related organizations, helping professionals, and approved guests are welcome when cleared through Alpha Omega’s officers. We serve Cleveland and nearby Northeast Ohio communities.

Meetings are the second Saturday evening of each month unless a special event is scheduled that takes the place of the regularly scheduled meeting. The location of the meeting or event is only released to members or others with the approval of an officer. Members and visitors must be 18 years of age or older.

This newsletter is copyright 1998-2006 by The Alpha Omega Society. All rights reserved. Articles and information contained in this newsletter may be reprinted by other non-profit crossdresser organizations with advance permission of the author and provided a copy of the issue containing the reprinted material is sent to Alpha Omega within two months after the material is published and proper credit is given to author and source. The opinions or statements contained in this newsletter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Alpha Omega.

Contributions of articles are welcomed, but may be altered in the editing process, with the author’s intent retained, or may be rejected, whether solicited or not. Absolutely no sexually explicit material will be accepted or printed.

We will exchange newsletters with any other similar group. Send all correspondence to Alpha Omega, P.O. Box 2053, Sheffield Lake, OH 44054.