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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Ellen Fapper’s Pedigree

So this delicious and hilarious screen capture appeared in my Twitter feed the other day. It was early, I was groggy, and for just a tiny but perfect moment I actually believed that there really could be a group called “Christians Against Masturbation” in this our beloved America, and that they might possibly be so deeply encased in their righteous and godly bubble that they could employ (in all innocence) a sweet-faced woman named “Ellen Fapper” as their spokeswoman:

(The comedy depends on knowing that “fap” is an onomatopoeic internet verb meaning “to masturbate” while apprehending that people may exist who do not know this. Thus I have mentioned it at this time just in case you, gentle reader, were one of those people ere now.)

Alas, on the internet these perfect funny things are almost always hoaxes. Typically they are born as jokes, not intended — by their original creators — to deceive. What happens next is that somebody else will file off the serial numbers, grind away some of the obvious comedy signals, and release them into the wild with deceptive intent. Sometimes, there, they go feral.

Anyway, I can’t blog it until I check it. And my weary certainty was that checking it would be a letdown. But was it, this time? Maybe not so much. It’s not real, but it’s still funny.

First, I’ll tell ya right up front, “Fapper” is a photoshop. The screen cap is real for certain values of real, but it originally said “Farber”. I don’t know who did the ‘shop.

The screen capture itself? That comes from a video you can see at Funny Or Die. It takes the form of a lengthy point-counterpoint between Ms. Farber and the comedian Louis CK, supposedly the only person they could find willing to come on the show to defend masturbation. This he does with passion:

“Masturbating keeps me sane! I’m a good citizen, I’m a good father, I recycle, and I masturbate. And I’m proud of it! And…and God’s happy! And later I’m gonna masturbate and I’m gonna think about you. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

And what is this video, actually? It takes place in front of the Fox News logos, but the production values are nothing like a typical Fox News show. Near the end, there’s a spot where you can see the following words in a sort of show logo: Red Eye with Greg Gutfield. There really is a Fox News Show by that name, according to Wikipedia. Could it be this was a real interview? Wikipedia calls Red Eye a “late-night/early-morning satirical talk show” so, maybe?

No, nope, nopers, nyet. According to the Wikipedia, the Red Eye show was being spoofed on an episode of Louie (Louis CK’s eponymous comedy drama). That episode, titled Come On, God, aired on August 11, 2011. The Ellen Farber character is being played by actress Liz Holtan.

So, it’s just a funny sight gag photoshopped by some unknown party from a screen capture of a segment on a comedy show that was in turn parodying a Fox News show that is itself supposedly satirical. Perhaps I’m the only person in the world who is interested in reconstructing these growth rings of accreted metadata so that I can look at them closely. But everybody needs a hobby, right?

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Christian Domestic Discipline…On TV

There’s an obscure branch of the spanking community that you’ll stumble on if you spend too much time on the internet, like me. It’s called “Christian Domestic Discipline” and it features spousal spankings (almost always for the wife) in the name of fostering marital harmony. Google it if you like; I am not making this up.

You should know…just for the record…that Christian DD proponents usually claim that these spankings are neither erotic nor sexual; the man in such a relationship typically claims that he does not enjoy administering these spankings and receives no erotic charge from doing so, considering it instead something of an onerous but worthwhile duty. Spend much time reading the forums and kinky websites where erotic spanking enthusiasts hang out, though, and you’ll find these claims treated with friendly derision. Spanking people assume that Christian DD practitioners are, not to put to fine a point on it, fooling themselves — cloaking a bog-standard spanking fetish in worthy-sounding rhetoric, so they don’t have to “own” their fetish, even to themselves.

I give you all that background so that you’ll understand why I found this YouTube clip so entertaining. In it, Australian TV comic John Safran flies to Alabama to interview some Christian DD practitioners and learn about Christian spanking. He brings along pretty actress Kristen Condon so that he’ll have someone to practice his spanking on, and he conducts the interview with that pretension of sincerity that got Steven Colbert his start, but without so much biting mockery. The result is, to my eye, just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on Australian TV (which is helped by the fact that I’ve never seen Australian TV before):

[YouTube embed broken and removed. Archive link here.]

Thanks to Spanking Flicks for finding this.

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