LISTEN: This mysterious mid-century queen shook audiences up with her outrageous stories
Note: For this article, we’ll be using he/him pronouns for the performer, in keeping with the archivists at raebourbon.com.If there’s one thing Rae (and/or Ray) Bourbon was, it’s a storyteller.
The details on his date of birth, hometown, and original name were all largely obfuscated by a lifetime of unreliable, inventive narration.It’s known that he had success from the 1920s and ’30s on as an actor, a vaudeville performer, and mostly famously, a female impersonator.
He performed in gay clubs across the country for decades, performed his own sold out show at Carnegie Hall, and was even hired by Mae West to tour an original show she’d written.On top of these more documented accomplishments are his apparent claims to have started his career working as a stunt double for silent movie actresses and modeling dresses for department stores, among other things.
Even his sex and sexuality are difficult to pin down; translating early queerness into modern identity frameworks doesn’t often work, but his is particularly complicated by his storied “sex change” operation that many believe to have been faked entirely.In the 1950s, Bourbon capitalized on the recent notoriety of things like Christine Jorgensen’s famous transition and the Ed Wood film Glen or Glenda?
