Rae Bourbon: Let Me Tell You About My Operation
This album is not at all the sort of thing we expect to encounter with a 1956 date on it: a comedy/music/spoken-word record called “Let Me Tell You About My Operation” on the first track of which Rae Bourbon talks, sings, and jokes about her transition from “Ray” to “Rae”. “There’s been a change in gender” is part of the lyrics; this album is neither coy nor cryptic.
Everyone asks me “how does it feel?” Well it feels just fine to me —
I can be the woman I’ve always wanted to be!For the change I went south of the border; it took me just days to pack.
I arrived there with excess baggage, but I had a lot less coming back.There’s been a change in the gender, a big change in me…
From R-A-Y changed to R-A-E.So if anyone should ask you just feel free to say
there’s been a change in Ray. Oy, vey!
There’s been a change in Ray.
There’s a relevant Wikipedia article, but be warned: it’s a mess of conflicting pronouns and gender essentialism, and treats the transition as “no more than a publicity stunt” even while acknowledging that Rae always insisted thereafter in being billed as Rae rather than Ray.
Update: I got curious about liner notes and related album information so I went looking for better album scans than the Internet Archive has. It turns out the catalog entry and archive description for this item at the JD Doyle Digital Transgender Archive includes a scan in PDF format of the front and back covers of the album, which I have converted to a large image file at pretty good readable resolution.
Two contemporary newspaper accounts of Rae Bourbon’s transition, from Variety and from The New York Journal-American, are reprinted on the album’s back cover. Detail:
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=32974
its a cliche that the pop-culture memory of the 1950s is the 1950s as experienced by small children (and films and TV which were censored “for the children”). The serious discussions were happening in other places.
Vagans, you’re absolutely right! And one of the “other places” was indeed the comedy album, which I remember existing in mainstream record stores when I was a little kid. There wasn’t a lot of censorship applicable to records, and some very risque and filthy stuff could be sold via that channel. So, of course, it was.
I swear officer that Magic Roundabout LP is nothing to do with drug culture. Honest.
I’m hoping later this year to be in a position to review some of the albums my parents had, that I don’t remember being played when I was a child. If there is anything unusual worth preserving I will check the copyright and see about digitising for archive.org in due course. Definitely some more adult material than I ever knew they owned.
Meanwhile the eponymous Rae Bourbon website is an interesting read, and seems to have some better quality research and writing than the wikipedia article. Whether Ray underwent surgery I think only really matters to courts and bed fellows, but I wonder about them as a person. Ray’s obfuscation of his back story as documented over there sounds like something I’ve seen over the years in people abused as children, some because of gender dysphoria. That to me supports the surgery as I have met someone who underwent gender reassignment overseas recently because the system in the UK was not supporting them how they wanted (though maybe how they needed).
Separating the art and the artist though, Rae seems fun, however the character came about, and anyone who worked with Mae West certainly had some success. And probably some stories not on the albums.
Wikipedia can be frustrating because sometimes you get the wisdom of crowds, and other times you get either one angry person with lots of free time, or warring factions who write contradictory sections and sentences.
One reason I try not to stick my nose into people’s gender identity or gender-affirming care is that unless I know them very well I am missing a lot of context. And unless I am dating them / competing with them in sports does it really matter to me?
Vagans, in this case I think the Wikipedian obsession with citations to “published” sources (which increasingly means old books from another time) has contributed to the mess that is Rae’s Wikipedia entry. We live in a time when inquiring/speculating about the state of a trans person’s genitals is, variously and depending on context, at least gauche, probably a microagression, and sometimes a macro aggression. And yet it’s clear that such speculation was the dominant conversational trend in published sources about Rae after her transition. It might prove to be really difficult to clean up Rae’s article without having your edits pounded into oblivion by Wikipedians yelling about “citation needed”.
@Vagans, if you’re referring to the recent boxing debacle, I don’t think the contents of their shorts made much difference. I could write an essay about the failings that lead to that mess, and why m->f trans boxers might never be safe boxing as female. Sadly as Bacchus highlights in this case what looks like administrative failures resulted in macro aggression, more transphobia in sport and the Olympic ideal of inclusivity being set back.
As for Rae, I suspect the contemporary speculation was being exploited as marketing. The old ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ maybe. As humans we’re curious and I think trans-, while being better accepted in society is still a curiosity to some, and that overcomes manners some times. I know I had lots of things I wanted to ask the trans person mentioned above, to better understand them as a person.
As for Wikipedia, let’s not go there…
finagle: its more a general policy in a world where lots of people have loud opinions about trans and nonbinary people and where I casually know more of them. My understanding is that each Olympic sport decides how to define “male” and “female” for the purpose of the Olympics https://apnews.com/article/sex-eligibility-tests-female-athletes-07572d23d409126a8e069cb0bced1706