A HUGELY ORIGINAL BOOK DOCUMENTING A BYGONE AGE OF A UNIQUE AND EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE CLUB This is a wonderfully intimate insight into the private lives of a group of cross-dressers in the mid-50s and mid-60s who made Casa Susanna their place of liberation. A truly unique and fascinating view into this most private of clubs. Some time ago, while at a New York flea market, inveterate collectors Michael Hurst and Robert Swope discovered a large body of snapshots: album after album of well-preserved images, taken roughly between the mid-50s and mid-60s, depicting a group of cross-dressers united around a place called Casa Susanna, a rather large and charmingly banal Victorian-style house in small-town New Jersey. The inhabitants, guests, visitors and hosts used it as a weekend headquarters for a regular "girl's life" - and thus a Queendom was born Through these wonderfully intimate shots - perhaps never intended for viewing outside of the safety of Casa Susanna - these people styled era-specific fashion shows and dress-up tea parties. As gloriously primped as these shots are, it is in the more private and intimate life at Casa Susanna, where the girls clean, cook, knit and play Scrabble, that the stunning insight into a private club becomes nothing less than brilliant and awe-inspiring in its pre-glam, pre-drag-pose ordinariness and nascent posturing in new identities. It is not glamour for the stage, but for each other. There is an evident sense of pleasure of being at Casa Susanna, a liberation from, and simplification of, the conflicts inherent in a double life. A truly unique and engaging book that moves, entertains and educates.