#American Experience

[rewild]

Hey babe, let’s get coffee at the combo Dunkin- urgent-care!

[deadpresidents]

Did you watch the pbs documentary on the vice presidents yet and what did you think? And what vp that never became president do you think would have been best qualified to be president?

Yes, I was very much looking forward to PBS American Experience's "The American Vice President," and watched it as soon as it was released. I'm basically the target audience for documentaries like that, so I always appreciate and enjoy them. I will say that I thought that there were a lot of missed opportunities in it, however. I was really hoping that there would be some short biographical pieces on the various Vice Presidents, particularly many of the earlier VPs that nobody knows anything about. There are some really fascinating stories that could have been told about them, so I was a little bummed we didn't get that.

For the most part, the episode focused on the idea of the Vice Presidency as opposed to individual Vice Presidents. And it spent a lot of time on succession and the 25th Amendment. Now, that is no surprise -- that's basically the reason the Vice President exists in the first place. But at times it felt more like a documentary on continuity of government than the Vice Presidency, and I just wish there would have been more time spent on the personalities who have served in the position over the past 235 years.

As for the second part of your question, I'm going to do what the documentary largely did and answer based on the Vice Presidents since World War II. Once the nuclear age was upon us, the Vice Presidency became a more important role for those continuity of government reasons, and the quality and experience of most Vice Presidential candidates has improved during that time because it was more necessary to choose a running mate who was capable of actually taking over as President than balancing the ticket regionally or ideologically.

Since World War II, I think the Vice President who was best equipped to become President but never did was obviously Al Gore. I have always been shocked that Gore never made another run for the White House after 2000, but I also imagine that it must be an absolutely soul-crushing experience to run for President, seemingly win (and definitely win the popular vote), only to have the Presidency awarded to your opponent by a party-line decision of the United States Supreme Court.

Another post-World War II VP who never became President in his own right but probably would have been good in the job was Nelson Rockefeller. Because of the circumstances and brevity of his time as Vice President, Rockefeller is often forgotten about, but he was considered a real contender for the Presidency on numerous occasions before he was appointed to fill the Vice Presidential vacancy created when Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon in the White House after Nixon resigned. Rockefeller won four elections as Governor of New York, all by comfortable margins, and he never achieved his Presidential goal because the timing was just never right for him. His best bet as a Presidential candidate should have been 1964 or 1968, but after JFK's assassination, few Republicans wanted to run against LBJ less than a year later (and with good reason, LBJ's popular vote landslide was huge). And by the time the 1968 election rolled around it became clear that Richard Nixon had spent his years in political exile following his humiliating loss in the 1962 California Gubernatorial race building a powerful campaign machine that helped sweep him into office. But when it comes to experience, few VPs were better qualified than Vice President Rockefeller.

If you haven't seen "The American Vice President" from PBS's American Experience, I would definitely recommend checking it out. You can watch it (and many of American Experience's other excellent documentaries) on the PBS website. It's also currently available to watch for free via the PBS feed on YouTube.

[petiteclover]

the nine University of Washington students who took the rowing world and the nation by storm when they captured the gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The Boys of ’36 will show how the team overcame psychological, physical, emotional and economic hardships to beat not only East Coast Ivy League teams but Adolf Hitler’s elite German rowers. Their surprise triumph gave hope to a nation struggling to recover from the Great Depression.

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday #evebest #actress #RhaenysTargaryen #HouseoftheDragon #NurseJackie #AmericanExperience #TheHonourableWoman #TheKingsSpeech #PrimeSuspect #TheFinalAct #SomeoneYouLove #LieWithMe #LuckyMan #FateTheWinxSaga #Maryland #TheCrown #Macbeth #HeddaGabler #MuchAdoAboutNothing

[amatesura]

American Experience: The Gilded Age (2018)

[your-funky-human-companion]

in a costco

heard a scream

everything’s just as it seems

[tilbageidanmark]

Girl on a street corner in Chicago by British photographer Michael Ormerod, 1978.

[xtruss]

Mapping Gilded Age New York

The Gilded Age was a study in contrasts. Immigrants arrived in New York City with little to nothing in their pockets, while just uptown some of the richest men and women in America built mansions that resembled European palaces. As more and more people carved out their homes on the island at the end of the 19th century, different ideas about what New York was and who belonged there emerged. American Experience spoke to Jack Tchen, Associate Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, about the way race and class tensions played out against the vibrant, dynamic landscape of New York City in the Gilded Age

— By Jack Tchen | American Experience | Published: February 2018 | November 04, 2023

J. W. Williams, Root & Tinker/Library of Congress

1. The Spine

Leading up to and during the Gilded Age, New York City begins to define itself along its spine, the middle of the city, rather than by its shoreline. The wealthy are gravitating away from the shoreline, which is seen as rougher and more dangerous. If you have money, you’re afraid that the workers in your counting house or your factory are going be jealous. You want to find other people who have money. And Fifth Avenue becomes the place where you find them. From Bowling Green to Washington Square Park, from Washington Square Park to Madison Park, and from Madison Park up to Central Park and 57th Street — this becomes what wealthy white Anglo-American Protestants feel is their New York. They feel that the greatest wealth of the city and of the nation is being generated and being expressed along this spine. The global branding of Fifth Avenue really emerges at a moment in which the Fifth Avenue merchants come together and say, “We have to protect Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue is ours and to maintain our identity, we have to keep out all the new immigrants who are trying to make money, who are setting up garment factories.” They begin to re-territorialize what had been a neighborhood of small producers, and to claim a kind of ascendancy and superiority.

Charles Pollock/Library of Congress

2. Metropolitan Opera House - Broadway and 39th Street

The building of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 is a great example of how cultural capital actually works. Did the people who went to the Met love opera? Probably not. In some ways, this was an emulation of European culture, especially Italian culture — but in Italy, opera was actually a mass activity that people from all stations of life loved. In the new world, it was transformed into this rarified art that supposedly only elites could understand. It was stilted in terms of performance, especially in comparison to the more popular forms of theater. And it was in a foreign language.

But the building was important. The box seats were important. Who was sponsoring the performances was important. So in a sense, supporting the opera became the perfect vehicle for elites to outdo each other.

Ernest Marx/Library of Congress

3. Vanderbilt House — 1 West 57th Street in New York City

Alva Vanderbilt was the driving force behind the “Petite Chateau” Vanderbilt mansion, which was completed in 1883. It was built of limestone, in contrast to neighboring brownstones, in the style of a French Renaissance palace. Her housewarming party was one for the ages. Twelve-hundred guests attended. Their costumes were sheer excess and outré; one woman, Miss Kate Strong (nicknamed “Puss”), wore a taxidermied cat head and seven cat’s tails decorating her skirt. By today’s dollars, the party was said to cost $6 million—one quarter of which went to the finest champagne.

What’s really important here is to acknowledge the role of women in the wealth-building process itself. Because it’s not just wealth building in terms of actual dollars — it’s also wealth building in terms of status. And women are the ones who know how to build that kind of social and cultural capital that gives their families the standing and prestige that other families of wealth will begin to recognize and accept.

In some ways, the women who are leading these families and creating these parties are like the ad men on Madison Avenue. They’re branding the family. They’re making the public — other elites especially — appreciative of why they belong and why they should be recognized widely. So when Alva Vanderbilt builds her mansion, she’s being very creative, very thoughtful, and very tenacious in trying to establish that profile of the Vanderbilt family.

Petite Chateau, Library of Congress

4. Seventh Regiment Armory - 640 Park Ave., Bet. East 66th & East 67th

The street grid of New York City means that people of great wealth are cheek-to-jowl next to people living in extreme poverty. That sense of injustice and the divide between the wealthy and the poor is palpable.

The Gilded Age was a fractious time, and amidst growing wealth and opulence, a sense of desperation and resentment emerged. I think the wealthy felt some anxiety at the thought that at some point that tension would erupt.

So they built armories to defend against riots and protests. The armories housed volunteer regiments — the precursor of the National Guard. The Seventh Regiment, also known as the “Silk Stocking” or “Blue-Bloods” regiment, was a who’s who of the Gilded Age elite. It was first headquartered on the Lower East Side — but it moved uptown as the wealth of the city did. The armory now on Park Avenue opened its doors in 1880.

The New York Public Library

5. Harbor

New York Harbor was deep enough that it didn’t freeze over, so it could actually operate year-round. Lots of raw products — grains, sugars from the Caribbean — can all be exchanged in this deep-water port and then processed and sent by way of the Erie Canal into the heartland, and also traded across the Atlantic. So New York becomes kind of a central economic exchange hub, feeding and processing so much of what is being consumed by the growing middle classes of North America, and Europe.

Currier & Ives/Library of Congress

6. Orchard Street

As the wealthy Protestant elite move uptown, away from the waterfront, the lower east side becomes a neighborhood of immigrants. Jewish and Italian immigration really starts in great numbers in the latter part of the 19th century. Millions of people are coming to New York. They’re dazzled by visions of streets of gold.

The older tenements on the lower east side become jam-packed. The whole notion of a middle class apartment with one person in a room — that didn’t exist. A single apartment could house multiple extended family members; a family might even rent out a room to make ends meet. The idea of how you used space was different. The streets were really an extension of where you lived.

Take the market on Orchard Street. It was really an American reproduction of the small market towns that many Jews had left in eastern Europe. If you look at old photos, you can just imagine the sounds and smells. Jews, Italians, and Chinese are living side by side. And out of that, a port culture begins to emerge. People are bringing the cultures that they left. Lots of languages are being spoken, and lots of new dishes and new fashions are being created. It’s all part of this new, intermingled culture. And that intermingling, I think, is what’s distinctive to New York City — as opposed to the culture of the uptown elites, who are really emulating their fantasy of the european aristocracy.

The uptown elites, by the way, are really scared of this new, intermingled port culture. They have a certain notion of Protestant destiny in terms of who this country properly belongs to. They’re concerned with who’s creating value — monetary, but also the cultural value of the nation. Meanwhile, these non-Protestants of suspect racial origin keep coming into the city. So there’s a growing guardedness of who should count, who belongs there.

Bain News Service/Library of Congress

7. Bowery

While the elites are walking up and down Broadway, checking each other out in a way that prefigures the shopping mall or the arcade, immigrants and members of the white working class hang out on the Bowery. It’s where people go for dime museums, tattoo parlors, bars; all that kind of popular culture that we tend to think of now as connected to Coney Island originates on the Bowery.

These new immigrant and working class audiences are constantly looking for new and exciting forms of expression. They’re willing to pay maybe five cents to see what’s happening on the stage, what’s happening in music, and in bars. Essentially, what happens is street culture gets brought into the commercial culture, the indoor culture in which people are willing to pay for entertainment.

Library of Congress

[zippiestrock]

As an adult looking back can we all agree that the rule against hats in schools (like beanies and shit) is the dumbest fucking thing ever. American public school had harsher reactions to a hat on a cold day than a weapon

[smashpages]

The PBS program American Experience, which documents interesting events and people from American history, recently ran an episode on the lie detector test — something that William Moulton Marston, the co-creator of Wonder Woman, falsely claimed to have invented. This webcomic by Kirstin Butler and Derrick Dent details Marston’s many endeavors over the years, from his attempts at creating a an early polygraph prototype to the female hero he helped create with artist H.G. Peters.

Read more

[lenbryant]

Inventions from the Sun Queen (careful with that moniker, lady, or Tennessee will ban you).

[deadpresidents]

I want to see this now!

[amatesura]

The Donner Party (1992) | dir. Ric Burns

[randumblygeneratedusername]

“We also bought a used boat and plan to fix It up for the sole purpose of doing a trial run from one end of Lake Powell to the other. In preparation for the long-spoken-of-plan of canoeing from Utah to Page, Arizona, we aim to document any tribulations we may encounter. From tempestuous weather, capsizing waves, navigation, and catching our own food to the physical and mental struggle of being out on the water for two weeks or longer. We anticipate sudden onslaughts of stormy weather we’ll have to endure and paddle through, 1000 foot canyon walls that tower at 90 degrees above us straight to the sky, canyons of varying widths. Off the main channel where its easy to lose ones way or get lost, and periods of rowing and hoping for land where there isn’t any; because of the ever-variable water levels that could brung us to new unseen places. Once below water, or wash out a path that once existed.”

inspiring excerpt from a handwritten letter from an adventurous friend, August 2024

[acrowseye]

i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

[xtruss]

There Was an Underground Magazine for Transgender Women in the 1960s! Transvestia's Archives Provide a Window onto a Hidden World

— June 22, 2023 | Kirstin Butler & Casa Susanna | Article | American Experience

The cover of the August 1966 issue of Transvestia magazine.

In the first month of a new decade, a Los Angeles chemist named Virginia Prince mailed out the inaugural issue of a magazine. It was, as the title page of the January 1960 edition of Transvestia states, a privately printed journal “with three objectives: to provide EXPRESSION for those interested in the subjects of exotic and unusual dress and fashion; to provide INFORMATION to those who, through ignorance, condemn that which they do not understand,” and, finally, “to provide EDUCATION for those who see evil where none exists.” With these oblique statements, Prince launched what would become the first long-running periodical for male-to-female crossdressers and transgender women in the United States.

Over its 25-year print run, Transvestia grew from 25 initial subscribers to several hundred distributed across the U.S. Most readers received their bi-monthly issues through the mail, though after 1963 the magazine could also be found in alternative and adult bookstores and newsstands in major American cities. Prince was the magazine’s driving force and served as editor until 1979, but Transvestia’s contents were as much by its readers as for them. Subscribers submitted life histories, letters, editorials, book reviews and photographs of themselves. They had their own jargon: “TV” for transvestite, “GG” for “genetic girls,” “brother” for their male identities and the “girl-within,” to refer to their feminine selves; some readers also used “femmepersonator” or “FP” for short. Prince also reprinted medical papers on topics such as gender identity and the psychology of cross-dressing.

Each issue typically ran around 80 pages, with several dedicated to advertisements for various goods—self-published books, custom undergarments and wigs—and services such as electrolysis and makeup consultation. “Perhaps there are no good stores in your town. Perhaps you are too well known,” offered one advertisement for a personal shopper. “Perhaps you need an unusual size and would be embarrassed to ask for it. Whatever the reason, I can help.” Every issue also contained a “Person to Person” section where subscribers could connect with one another. “Lifelong TV, married, 34, scientist, welcomes all correspondence with all TV’s foreign or domestic,” reads a listing by Barbara, a reader from southern New England, in the December 1965 issue.

An optician’s ad in Transvestia’s October 1969 Issue.

Transvestia was an outlet for creative writing as well. A piece of fiction in the magazine’s first issue told the story of a married couple enjoying a night out, both husband and wife dressed in traditionally feminine attire: “The sound of my high heels matching hers, the sight of my frock swirling beside hers, made us feel as one…sensing the fragrance of the real woman so close to me, the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ vanished like smoke in a high wind.” Prince herself contributed a poem to that issue, composing on a theme that would recur in many other editions of the magazine—the relief experienced upon transforming from masculine to feminine archetypal expectations and presentation.

Poems in the January 1960 and March 1961 issues of Transvestia.

In fact, several subjects appeared with a great deal of regularity throughout Transvestia’s pages. Dr. R.S. Hill, a professor at Concordia University, authored a seminal study of the magazine as his dissertation. Reflecting on Transvestia’s most oft-recurring content, Dr. Hill wrote, “The letters and histories endlessly elaborated on the same themes and topics: theorizing the causes of their condition; crossdressing for the first time; overcoming obstacles to free expression; dealing with guilt, fear, or loneliness; disclosing to or hiding from parents, wives, and children; venturing out in public; passing successfully as women without public detection; describing articles of clothing, wardrobes, and bodily measurements; and sharing fashion and make-up advice.”

Through the magazine, Transvestia readers forged a group consciousness, united not just by mutual interests but also for their common demography: The majority of subscribers were white, middle-to-professional-class, and considered themselves heterosexual. Most were married and had children. Some spoke of cross-dressing as just a relaxing “hobby” they occasionally enjoyed. But a substantial number would come to identify as women over the course of the journal’s publication, including Prince herself as well as contributing editor Susanna Valenti. Prince wrote about that decision in her final issue as editor in 1979, saying, “I figured that since I had learned pretty much all I needed to know about being a man in this world, that I might just as well devote the rest of my life to exploring the other side of my own humanity…That was in June of 1968 and I have lived as Virginia ever since.”

All of the magazine’s readers agreed that the practice of cross-dressing allowed them to access their most vibrant selves. “I have been married, have fathered five children, and am about to become a Grandpa any day now,” said the magazine’s 1962 covergirl Eileen in an accompanying personal history. “The men I work with are all hairy chested so-and-so types, and have accepted me into their ranks without question. Yet, when I rush home from the office and enter my own world of delight, that is when I truly live.”

Transvestia subscriber Eileen graced the cover of the magazine's August 1962 Issue.

The Publisher

Having been through a great deal of pain, fear, guilt, loneliness and frustration in my life I wanted to help others to avoid or conquer these feelings. My tool for doing this has been Transvestia.” — Virginia Prince, Transvestia, Vol. 3 No. 16, August 1962

Born in 1912, Virginia Prince was the highly opinionated, often irascible godmother of Transvestia’s print pages and its extended real-life network. After launching the magazine, she also founded a national sorority for other crossdressers in 1962 called Phi Pi Epsilon—or FPE, which also stood for Full Personality Expression. This later became Tri-Ess, or the Society for the Second Self, an international crossdressing organization that still exists to this day. Prince frequently gave interviews to American and international media and liaised with medical professionals about the practice of cross-dressing.

The magazine’s “Person to Person” section was restricted to FPE sorority members to ensure correspondents’ safety.

Prince’s primary goal was to destigmatize cross-dressing; and she utilized the magazine as well as FPE to create a conservative bulwark against other, competing forms of transgender life and community in the United States in the 1960s. “Prince wanted to socialize individual ‘deviance,’” said Dr. Hill, “to place transvestism within a group context, domesticate it, and normalize it by promoting the radical idea that transvestites were not immoral, sexual deviants but rather normal, respectable citizens with only a harmless gender variation.” Even the name of Prince’s regular column in the magazine, “Virgin Views,” was part of her plan to de-eroticize a lifestyle that included cross-dressing by linking it to connotations of purity.

Already within a year of Transvestia’s genesis, Prince had assumed the role of self-appointed moral arbiter. “We must keep our own house clean and above reproach,” she asserted in the magazine’s March 1961 issue. In a repressive Cold War context where heteronormative standards reigned, that meant distancing cross-dressing from other gender and sexual subcultures: “We all know that the world confuses transvestism and homosexuality and when there is a campaign against the latter we are caught in the crossfire.” Prince asked readers to police themselves and each other, saying, “you come into the future of the magazine, not just by way of financial support and contributions of material, but by being a watchdog too.”

Prince’s column in the December 1965 issue included her portrait.

As part of her desire to domesticate transvestism, Prince also sought out and published writings by transvestites’ female partners. Some were tender—thus supporting Prince’s respectability campaign—as in an account from a wife about her husband’s transformation to “Betty Lynn, the Blonde Bombshell.” “I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want another dimension to their love,” wrote Fran. Still, the majority of Transvestia readers spoke of fraught negotiations around their cross-dressing, sometimes ending in the dissolution of marriage.

The narrative Prince espoused through Transvestia initially held that the goal of transvestism should be an exercised balance of masculine and feminine identities, with each having its own separate opportunity for expression. “[T]ry to employ perspective in seeing FemmePersonation as an adjunct to your masculine personality, not a substitute for it,” she suggested in her August 1962 “Virgin Views” column. “Transvestia does not exist for the purpose of impairing or destroying the masculine but rather to allow those who are aware of their feminine side to extract the full benefits from it. We can experience some of the feminine side of life, express part of our personality that way, and be better persons and citizens for it IF we…keep the whole matter in balance and under control.”

She advised against medical interventions such as hormone therapy and what was then known as sex reassignment surgery, saying, in 1965, “I realized that surgery would be a form of suicide not only for my masculine self but for Virginia too since it would cut the ground (as well as other things) out from under her…being a woman some of the time is wonderful, having to be one all the time would not be half as great as it seems to be from a distance.” As Dr. Hill writes, “‘transsexuality’ is everywhere in Transvestia as a category against which the ‘true transvestites’ defined themselves.”

Transvestia’s October 1962 cover featured photos of its first two years of cover models—“The composite cover of 12 livin’ dolls.” Prince’s is the largest photo in the center.

Over the coming years, however, Prince’s position would shift from this earlier dichotomous gender model to an identity where one’s masculine and feminine selves were merged into an integrated whole. “[V]ery little in life is tied up hard and fast with the fact that one is male or female,” she wrote in the August 1966 issue, adding “that the ideas of man and woman and masculine and feminine are cultural inventions for all their as­sumed usefulness.” Her views on gender had gradually become more flexible.

By June 1968, Prince had come to a decision to live full-time as a woman. Assembling the magazine, she said later, was what had allowed her to arrive at that turning point. “In trying to help you, my readers, I have learned and grown myself,” she wrote in the magazine’s 100th anniversary issue in 1979, which was largely dedicated to “The Life and Times of Virginia,” her personal history. “I am now a whole person, completely self accepting and at ease…[M]y best hopes and good wishes to all of you—may you, too, find the acceptance and the internal peace that we all need, and with that I say farewell.”

Susanna Says

“But Enough of Philosophising…Let's Gossip!” — “Susanna Says,” Transvestia, Vol. 7 No. 40, August 1966

Where Virginia Prince was Transvestia’s reigning West Coast intellectual, Susanna Valenti, the magazine’s contributing editor, was its East Coast bon vivant. Her regular column, “Susanna Says,” contained social news, fashion tips and advice, all served up with attitude and pointed humor. “I most certainly have particular people in mind whenever I unsheath a journalistic claw,” she wrote in February 1963, in response to what some readers deemed her “cattish remarks.” “Where would the fun be,” she protested, “if people could not see themselves mirrored in the printed page?”

For Valenti, criticism also had a noble purpose. She offered cosmetic and comportment tips—informing her readers about the right ways to walk, how to soften their voices and what pressed powders to wear—because those elements would allow them to more safely present to a world threatening arrest and violence. “Sorry, my friends, to sound so mean,” she demurred in that same column. “[S]omebody has to pour out a bucketful of cold, merciless realism, just to remind ourselves that the world is not entirely made of pretty clouds and blue skies. There’s also mud and hard pavement under our feet.” If being “read”—common community parlance for being discovered while dressed—was the greatest danger, and “passing”successfully as female would ensure their protection, then Valenti would scold Transvestia subscribers into shape.

Virginia included this image of herself and Susanna in Tranvestia’s 100th anniversary Issue.

“[P]resent as smooth an image as possible,” “Susanna Says” advised in 1965. “In some areas there's nothing we can do about—height, skeletal frame, feet, hands, muscles, etc—but in those areas where something can be done, there's just no excuse if we don't at least make an effort.” Valenti spoke at length about her own efforts: wardrobe alterations, dance classes and diets. For her, moral improvement could be achieved by means of aesthetic perfection—and why not enjoy oneself doing it? “The real fun about being a TV,” she proclaimed, “is in the CONSTANT IMPROVING.”

The April 1965 issue continued a feature that spanned several editions called “What Should I Wear?” and contained tutorials on wardrobe color, shape and style, including guides to neckline types and hem lengths.

Like Prince, Valenti had a significant community presence both on and off the page. In the very first issue of Transvestia, she announced that she and her wife Marie were opening a private retreat at their property in the Catskill Mountains catering specifically to Transvestia’s audience; the “Chevalier d’Eon Resort” was named after an 18th-century French crossdressing spy. “Change clothes as many times as you want, stay inside or go out—in short, do as you please and ‘LIVE.’ Even hairdressing help will be available,” promised the announcement. “What more can you ask? This sounds more like fiction than a lot of fiction, but it's real!” Indeed, over the next decade, Marie and Susanna would run what eventually became the eponymous “Casa Susanna,” which became the East Coast hub for crossdressers and a burgeoning transgender community.

Valenti, who had adopted Prince’s script against transitioning, also came to change her position with the changing times. She announced her own decision to live full-time as a woman in Tranvestia’s October 1969 issue. “I’ve ceased feeling that fabulous thrill of the change itself,” Valenti said of her part-time transitions back and forth from Susanna to her male identity. “It’s only fabulous in one direction: from HIM to HER. But the reverse from HER to HIM, is becoming more and more painful. It actually depresses me… To be ‘her’ is quite different. Energy seems to flow into me from all directions, and no matter what activity I engage in, I never seem to tire…I cannot speak of thrills, but of a peace and contentment that I find nowhere else.”

Susanna Valenti announced a momentous personal decision in her column for the October 1969 Issue.

Still, her final words in the magazine were more equivocal. A decade later, in 1979, Valenti reprised her column once more at Prince’s request for the centennial issue. “One hundred years! Or is it one hundred issues of TVia?” Valenti mused. “It really seems like a century ago we started groping in the confusion of our lives for a truth and a self-definition. We followed the same pattern that modern youth seems to have found, the eternal question of ‘who am I’?” Then she took stock of the gains Transvestia had won for her community, saying, “We seem to have moved forward to a certain extent. A good number of people, many more than there were one hundred issues ago, know about us. The moral ‘liberation’ of our times seems to have helped somewhat, too.

“But,” she concluded, “we ask ourselves, have we really become liberated? Have we really become understood? Accepted?”