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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Stunning Barbara Payton

I can’t confess to generally have a weakness for 1950s blond glamourpusses, but I make an exception for one now only slightly remembered, Barbara Payton. Probably only one movie she starred in is much remembered: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), in which she played opposite James Cagney.

But her career went down rather than up from there. By the next year she would be starring in movies like Bride of the Gorilla and from there she would spiral into scandal and alcoholism, and she would be dead at 39. She tugs at my heartstrings, though, perhaps in part because I have a weakness for tragedy and also perhaps in part because before she flamed out she also starred in an obscure British science fiction movie called The Four-Sided Triangle of which I might be one of very few fans, possibly because to me it is a stunning example of mad science personal identity porn, a micro-genre of which I am also probably one of very few fans, but a very devoted one for all that.

But for more general appeal, we can note that even as her career was in decline, Barbara also posed for some stunning photographs taken on Malibu beach in 1952 by Andre de Dienes. John O’Dowd, in his biography Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story, reproduces a few.

She might have been Marilyn…

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