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Camping Out with Ray Bourbon: Female Impersonators and Queer Dread of Wide-Open Spaces

Prepublication for Reconstruction 7.2 (2007) http://reconstruction.eserver.org/072/romesburg.shtml

Keywords: Gender, Sex, & Sexuality; Ecocriticism; U.S. History

<1> While driving from Kansas City to Denver under a hot July sun in 1935, female

impersonator Ray Bourbon’s old Ford clattered to a halt. Ray looked under the hood and

eventually announced to the passengers that he would have to drive limping back to the last town

they had passed in order to get a part. Unhitching the trailer full of the four performers’ luggage

and wardrobes, Bourbon took off. As the hours stretched out on the lonely plains highway, the

remaining men hauled out impersonator Billy Richards’ sewing machine and placed it on the

side of the road. With the occasional car whizzing by, Richards used the unexpected delay to

work on a dress for his routine (Wright and Forrest interview) [1].

<2> U.S. roadsides and wide-open spaces have historically been terrains both fraught with

peril and rich with potential for gender-transgressive and gay people. To unpack our

contemporary sense of novelty in the idea of a drag queen setting up a sewing bee on a remote

Great Plains roadside is to appreciate the apparent dissonance of person and place. This

incongruity situated the necessary use of roadsides and wide-open spaces by impersonators in

conflict with the historically specific but naturalized masculine heterosexual imaginary of such

sites. Ultimately, this tension could make such spaces treacherous for those caught in between,

informing a queer dread that Bourbon and others articulated about roadsides and wide-open

spaces. The performers’ general sense of queer dread came not through some inherent

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disinclination of impersonators toward the rural—indeed, many, like Bourbon, came from rural

roots. Rather, temporally and culturally contingent circumstances that constituted female

impersonators as anti-rural and anti-natural made their mid-twentieth-century tours of roadsides,

small towns, and wide-open spaces hostile, even if such spaces simultaneously accommodated

impersonators by providing venues to perform and means of getting to them.

<3> By the 1930s, life on the road was part of being an impersonator. The death of vaudeville

made jobs scarcer, although the end of Prohibition and the still relatively successful burlesque

circuit opened new doors. Improved roads and increased automobility made it more feasible for

female impersonators to accept gigs hundreds and even thousands of miles apart. Legal and

social changes also forced many queer entertainers to keep hitting the highway as clubs suddenly

closed or local authorities threatened arrest.

<4> For impersonators like Bourbon, any reluctance to engage with roadsides and wide-open

spaces was thus countered by the need to inhabit and pass through them. From Prohibition

through the 1960s, impersonators performed everywhere from New York City’s chic Blue Angel

to small-town taverns such as the Cheerio Club in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The list of towns Bourbon

mentions includes Albuquerque, New Mexico; Central City, Colorado; Deadwood City, South

Dakota; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Tucson, Arizona, to name a few. Other

impersonators of the 1940s and 1950s performed at venues in Fairbanks, Alaska; Eureka,

California; Great Falls, Montana; and Oakridge, Oregon. From the mid-1940s through the mid-

1960s tourist clubs solely devoted to female impersonation proliferated around the country. One

performer recalled that in the late 1940s, “There were many clubs all over California—also

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Portland and Seattle. It was like a circuit. You played twelve weeks in each spot and then moved

to another.” (“Gay life”; Bourbon, Around the World; Wallace). Such occupational opportunity

did not, for the most part, lead performers to enthusiastically embrace travel over wide-open and

rural spaces to get to new jobs [2].

<5> The disaffiliation of roadsides and wide-open spaces with certain kinds of men was fairly

well established by the time Bourbon and his companions set out on their 1935 cross-country

trip. As historian Gail Bederman (1995) has suggested, the combination of nature, travel, and

the rural as redemptively masculinizing and heterosexualizing came about in the late 19th and

early 20th centuries, in the same period when homosexuality and flamboyant gender

transgression increasingly came to be seen as distinctly urban pathologies. She explains that the

exploits of Teddy Roosevelt in the West and the novels of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs

were widely popular expressions of a more generalized compulsion for striking out into wide-

open spaces as a rite of passage into white bourgeois manhood. In the next few decades, the

growth of the Boy Scouts and institutions such as summer camps also tied proper male

maturation to intergenerational, homosocial nature-bound experiences.

<6> This sacralization of the rural journey occurred in conjunction with both an idealization

of the homogeneous rural community and the rise of new technologies of mass entertainment and

leisure, including vaudeville and the automobile (Lears). These two, in particular, also

facilitated professional female impersonation in the first decades of the twentieth century. They

straddled the boundary between, on one hand, the construction of the rural, the roadside, and

wide-open spaces as organically homosocially masculine and/or heterosexually and

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homogeneously familial, and, on the other, the urbanization and pathologization of

homosexuality and male effeminacy.

<7> Late-19th and early 20th-century European and U.S. constructions of “natural” white,

bourgeois (heterosexual) manhood relied upon an opposition to sexological and cultural

formations of modern homosexuality and gender inversion. Often, homosexuality and inversion

were understood as excesses of metropolitan modernity. This is perhaps best illustrated by the

host of qualities (effeminacy, aesthetic attentiveness, irony, camp, same-sex desire, same-sex

sexual acts, moral deviance) that popularly came to be seen as “homosexual” in the wake of the

trials of Oscar Wilde (Sinfield). In the U.S. context, urban decadence through racial mixing and

commercialized leisure were often located as influential on “perversely” gendered and sexually

oriented people (Sommerville). On the other hand, some medical and juridical professionals

viewed sexual inversion as a form of “primitive” physiological degeneracy—that is to say, as

nature’s excess in Darwinian/Lamarckian terms (Terry; Katz). During the twentieth century, this

contradiction became the mechanism through which homosexual and gender-transgressive

people could be seen, as Greta Gaard (1997) has explained, as both “against nature,” or perverse,

and “closer to nature,” or degenerating toward a “bad” primal, anti-moral state.

<8> Certainly by the 1920s, homosexuality and effeminacy were generally understood to be

urban phenomena. As such, they were also viewed as markers of potential disruption within the

homosocially masculine and/or procreative familial “nature” of rural and wide-open spaces. In

this context, female impersonation—which was not yet necessarily conjoined with

homosexuality in the popular imagination but was certainly affiliated with it—enjoyed

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widespread popularity in both cities, as entertainment and subcultural expression, and in smaller

towns as cosmopolitan spectacle “shipped in” for locals (Ullman, ch.3; Romesburg, ch.2).

Female impersonation enjoyed an apex of success and respectability in early 20th-century

vaudeville. Led by superstar Julian Eltinge in his heyday from 1905 to 1915, countless

(especially but not exclusively) male performers donned clothing and enacted mannerisms

identified with the “opposite” sex. While the most successful could work primarily in big cities,

most spent the bulk of their time traveling from one small town venue to the next [3]. Small-

town audiences embraced impersonators onstage, even if they had ambivalent or hostile attitudes

toward homosexuality and/or gender transgression offstage.

<9> By the mid-1930s, hitting the road as a queer-identified performer meant negotiating a

host of contested meanings about rurality, nature, sexuality, gender, modernity, technology, and

commercialized leisure. Bourbon and his traveling companions enjoyed an evolving network of

new venues. Rapidly improving highway systems connected one venue to the next.

Unfortunately there were also more hostile local, state, and federal attitudes towards automobile

nomadism, coupled with an increasing suspicion of sexual difference and gender transgression.

<10> Bourbon’s ownership of used cars and work-related use of “leisure” motor vehicles

(passenger automobiles) was part of a larger confusion of the proper role of the automobile in

long-distance travel by the 1930s. Migrant seasonal workers and displaced agricultural families,

famously represented by the Okies piled with all their belongings into an old, beat-up truck, had

complicated white bourgeois idyllic aspirations about back-to-nature “car camping.” As

historian Warren Belasco explains, in the 1920s increasing forms of architectural and social

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control of roadside space was sparked by middle-class motorists’ desire to separate themselves

from migrants, truckers, and other diverse work-related travelers, who represented a rootless

betrayal of “job, home, and family” (Belasco, 4, 76, 105, 107-112). Bourgeois travelers may

have viewed traveling entertainers like Ray Bourbon as colorful characters one might meet on

the road. On the other hand, gender transgressive performers could also represent the dangerous

mobility of migrant work, gender rootlessness, and sexual vagrancy. By the time Bourbon and

Richards made their cross-country trip, camping in an undesignated roadside spot had become a

crime. Motels, often priced outside the range of low-income Americans, took a serious bite out

of the budgets of even somewhat successful queer performers like Bourbon. Moreover, the real

cost of being a migrant impersonator seems to have increased from the 1930s through the 1960s,

as wages stagnated and then declined in relation to cost of living, while transportation costs

continued to remain relatively expensive. The cast of the traveling Jewel Box Revue and other

touring groups of impersonators were able to economize on gas, food, and lodging by sharing

costs, vehicles, and rooms, but life for a solo act was harder.

<11> The roadside could never be completely controlled, despite ongoing systematic efforts. It

was a contested site of diversity: a place where civic authorities drew and redrew boundaries

around appropriate and unlawful behavior, where criminals could often evade law enforcement,

and where female impersonators could even set to sewing themselves a new dress. Mobility

fostered queer networking across spaces and regions. [4] The roadside was a place, like

impersonators’ various performance venues, where people like Bourbon could flourish by

adapting themselves as the situation required. But the consequences for reading a situation

wrong could be dangerous. The threat of physical harm, legal persecution, and psychic pain was

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great in impersonators’ cross-country travel. Rural violence and vulnerability were central

aspects of the lives of Bourbon and other traveling impersonators, particularly in the postwar era.

<12> Legal institutions in urban and rural areas stepped up scrutiny of (auto)mobile queer

people in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in one mid-1960s Los Angeles study of gay-related

arrest cases approximately twenty percent took place in cars (Consenting Adult, 707-708; Ponte).

More than fifty percent occurred in meeting places made easily accessible by automobility (such

as parks, rest stops, beaches, and streets). The widely publicized 1955 anti-gay witch hunt in

Boise, Idaho was only one of a number of small-town sex panics that viewed homosexuality as a

“monster” to be “crushed.” In the initial case that set off that scandal, a man had supposedly

driven teenage boys to the wilderness, plied them with liquor, and paid them for sex. As the

hysteria expanded, a “homosexual underworld” of teenage boys getting paid for sex with men

made national headlines. A December 1955 Time explained that “[m]any of the boys wanted

money for maintenance of their automobiles.” Via sexual transgression, nature and mobility

came together in ways that seemed to both undermine rural community homogeneity and

threaten the masculinizing and heterosexualizing function nature and mobility were meant to

play in ushering adolescent boys toward adulthood (Gerassi). In such contexts, impersonators

passing through town likely represented a heightened threat.

<13> Queer and gender transgressive people responded to such surveillance and persecution in

a variety of ways. Through letters, telegraphs, phone calls, and backstage gossip, impersonators

kept one another abreast of current conditions in various locales. Regional and national bar

guides and homophile publications identified particularly anti-homosexual hot spots and tactics

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for avoiding arrest and/or violence while out cruising or passing through rural places. One 1965

magazine for transvestites, for example, warned of the dangers of being “read” as male by police

in small-town Midwestern America and suggested how to respond to minimize violence and

legal detainment (Addair, 1964; 1965).

<14> Through the 1950s and 1960s, camp served as another key tool for performance and

survival. Camp relied upon the different understandings of the material that various audiences

would take as a way of negotiating the levels at which audiences and communities might reject,

tolerate, or embrace a gender-transgressive queer in their midst. It playfully combined the

double entendres of sexual innuendo with both gender transgression and a simultaneous

highlighting and trivialization of serious issues of oppression. Performers like Bourbon urged

audiences to view the world from new, sometimes radical, perspectives. Performers no doubt

sometimes hedged the force of such subversive perspectives through camp’s ambiguity. If an

audience took too great an offense to something Bourbon did, he could attempt to obscure the

meaning further, thereby lessening its impact. Camp, with its reliance on ambiguity and even

confusion, was the ideal style of performativity in this hazy space of multiple interpretations and

intentions, facilitating both queer provocation and self-preservation.

<15> It was also a tactic that overlapped with the adept negotiations required of an

impersonator offstage, particularly in areas where, once outside of a club, they ostensibly did not

“belong.” This could mean “butching it up” while on the road. Unlike the drag queens in the

Hollywood fantasy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), impersonators,

unless they identified as female and performed a daily offstage womanhood, did not wear their

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work clothes while traveling. But more than that, use of a deeper register voice, consciously

normative attire, and a contained range of physicalities, language, and tone could be deployed.

Performers also had clever ways of justifying their feminine wardrobes and effeminate

professions in case of discovery, from simply passing it off as comedic to claming

impersonation’s highbrow theatrical heritage [5]. It could also mean gauging sexual interest

and/or subcultural affinity with people met on the road, while simultaneously masking that

homoeroticism or campiness to avoid a violent reaction to unwelcome recognitions. Finally, and

perhaps most grimly, it meant sometimes redefining the physical and sexual violence

impersonators had to endure, either through indifferent silence or by making an amusing

anecdote out of it. Legal reprisal was rarely an option.

<16> In this context, it seems that traveling put a queer performer at increased risk. Describing

Midwestern impersonators in the 1960s, Esther Newton writes, “Female impersonators dislike

being ‘on the road’ in small-town America. Audiences and entire towns can be ‘unsophisticated’

and aggressively hostile. . . . Most female impersonators have to perform in small towns at one

time or another, and they unanimously refer to this as an unpleasant experience” (Newton, 120,

125). This may be an overstatement—some impersonators have fond memories of performing in

smaller communities during the late 1940s and 1950s—but it does seem that by the 1960s, when

knowledge and fear of homosexuality and gender transgression were pervasive and persistent,

getting to and from smaller town gigs could be terrifying. One impersonator with the Jewel Box

Revue recalled a number of degrading and harrowing experiences from the late 1950s and early

1960s:

You can’t imagine the bigotry we had to put up with on the road. For instance, we would make reservations ahead. When we arrived, tired and hungry from traveling, we would

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be turned down flat when they saw that we were gay. Restaurants would refuse to serve us. . . . It was frequently heartbreaking. Punks would wait for us to beat us up. Cars would try to run us off the road. We were even shot at. (“Jewel Box”)

During these years, Bourbon was robbed, beaten, and shot. The performer’s advanced age, poor

health, poverty, and increasing time on the roadside left h/er increasingly vulnerable. By the

1960s, Bourbon lived frequently out of a car, sleeping in the cab while the performer’s many

“kids”—dozens of stray dogs and cats—slept in a rickety trailer. Rae mostly called suburban

and rural trailer parks home while working gigs across the country (Freedom of Information Act

Document; Leitsch; Cole; State of Texas v. Bourbon, 878-880).

<17> Social, cultural, and political factors led to heavy policing of female impersonation and

homosexuality from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s (D’Emilio). Throughout this period

communities across the country enacted new laws against cross-dressing (or began enforcing

preexisting ones). Some clubs had to close and others shied away from drag entertainment.

Female impersonation was culturally and politically marginalized during the 1950s and 1960s—

though, paradoxically, it also flourished as a “naughty” lowbrow spectacle for primarily

heterosexually identified audiences, especially in bigger cities. The increased hostility came

from both predictable and unexpected sources, including homosexuals.

<18> Many gay people did not appreciate female impersonators’ performances, or even their

existence, in the postwar era. Young, urban, especially middle-class white gay men of the 1940s

and 1950s donned jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets, and boots as part of the “new virile look”

(Chauncey, 358). This intersected with a resurgence in published middle-class homosexual

literati novels, homophile activist works, and homoerotic muscle magazines. All of these

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phenomena, to some degree, reinscribed gender transgression as “unnatural” by aligning

masculine homosexuality with both the “natural” (that is, proper manhood) and rural nature (as a

constructed space of organic male homosociality). As David Shuttleton suggests, the postwar

U.S. iterations of a “gay pastoral” by authors such as Gore Vidal and Mary Renault claimed the

rural and natural to restore “manly love” to a spiritual, genuine place. These writers, harking

back to the gay pastoral of such authors as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, contrasted

rural homosocial homoerotic masculinity with urban, campy effeminacy. In City and the Pillar

(1948), Vidal highlights nature as the place where, as literary critic Bryan Fone writes, “a

moment of wrestling, near rape, near love,” transforms homosexuality into a spiritual union, “the

divided self reunited” (Fone, 20). Vidal’s deployment of pastoralism against camp seems to

authenticate a form of homosexuality that denigrates gender transgression, which in these novels

has no presence in the wide-open spaces “real” homosexuals occupy. Transcendence came

through the purifying of rural masculine male homosexuality, in part by distancing it from

gender transgressive types such as the largely poor and working-class impersonators who often

labored in and through rural places.

<19> Homophile activists frequently urged respectability and gender conformity as important

tactics for achieving equal rights (D’Emilio, 75-91, 113-115). At times, they attempted to link

conformity with the rural as a means of normalizing homosexuality. As one example, Reverend

Taylor McConnell, program director for the Rocky Mountain Methodist Conference, sought to

legitimize “respectable homosexuals” to the Denver Post by juxtaposing them with more gender

transgressive and flamboyant queers. “The fruits, the queens and the fairies are a very small and

very obvious group,” he explained, adding, “The majority of homosexuals are decent, respected

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businessmen, farmers, housewives and people like that” (Whearley). McConnell’s deployment

of farmers alongside other properly gendered “people like that” inserted homosexuals into the

rural while containing the kind of homosexual (“decent, respected”) one might tolerate. As

homophile publications and organizations became information nodes to rural gay people, some

rural readers agreed with the need to purge the community of its more visible, gender

transgressive elements. In November 1964, for example, B.J., of Vermilion, South Dakota, sent

the following letter to the Janus Society’s magazine, Drum:

I feel that the homophile organizations should actively seek to control homosexuals who make pests of themselves by soliciting straight people. Those individuals (and the effeminate, bleached, sashaying belles) do more to counteract the good done by the Janus Society than is popularly admitted [7].

Homophile activists and membership thus pushed for a legitimate relationship of normatively

gendered homosexuality to the rural, further marginalizing impersonators and other gender

transgressive queer people who had to pass through such places.

<20> Finally, the rise of homoerotic mass distribution magazines like those of the Athletic

Models Guild further promoted the connection between wide-open spaces and masculine

homosexuality. Alongside Roman gladiator scenes were clean-cut boys on the beach, loin-cloth-

clad lads in the woods, and the ever-popular semi-nude dudes on the grassy hills around

Southern California. Homoerotic pulp fiction, such as Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon (1966),

further deployed the redemptive, secure masculinity of nature-space homosexuality (Norton;

Waugh).

<21> All of this met up somewhat awkwardly with actual same-sex activity among some

masculine-identified men in rural areas. On the one hand, the “homosexual” came to be feared as

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both more widespread but less easily identified than ever before, so could be ferreted out

anywhere, not just in big cities. At the same time, cultural, social, and psychological forces

demanded increasingly that people choose clear homosexual or heterosexual self-identities based

on not gender performance but sexual object choice. Unlike the earlier sexual system that

juxtaposed effeminate “fairies” with their “normal” masculine sex partners, by the mid-century,

the dominant sexual order insisted a man identify himself (or be identified) as a homosexual

because he had sex with other men, regardless of either his or his sex partners’ gender identities.

This had the potential to wreak havoc on rural men who had sex with other men or who were

gender transgressive. According to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948),

in which he insisted on a sex-act-based definition of homosexuality,

The highest frequencies of the homosexual we have ever secured anywhere have been in particular rural communities in some of the remote sections of the country. . . . Today it is found among ranchmen, cattlemen, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general—among groups that are virile, physically active. . . . They live on realities and on a minimum of theory. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had. (457, 459)

Like Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain (2005), such cowboys might (or might not) have

lived on a “minimum of theory,” but their lived sexual experiences intersected increasingly with

a homo/hetero sexual order demanding their complicity. [6]

<22> Kinsey’s telegraphing of rural same-sex acts as homosexual placed these men (and not

just their acts) under the category of “the homosexual.” By the time Kinsey’s work became

widely known in the mid-1950s, rural men who had sex with other men increasingly were seen

by society—and potentially saw themselves—as homosexuals. As Angelia Wilson has

suggested, while Kinsey’s work may have had some normalizing effect on urban attitudes toward

homosexuality, it did not necessarily have the same meaning to rural audiences, where “[e]very

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peaceful country image was tainted . . . by the knowledge of conservatism lurking beneath the

surface, ready to isolate, if not annihilate, difference” [8]. On top of all this, rural men’s acts and

identities were being further top-loaded from within the gay community, through the consumerist

homoerotics of physique magazines, homophile political efforts toward normalization, and the

middle-class homosexual male literary imaginaries of both homosexual gender normativity and a

redemptive masculine homosexual homosociality within wide-open spaces.

<23> In such a context, it is little wonder that those who could easily be marked as

“homosexuals,” such as impersonators passing though, could in the postwar period increasingly

become targets. Their attackers might be local folk seeking to strike out at the newly articulated,

potentially pervasive, homosexuality in their midst. Dangerous, too, could have been some of

the men who had sex with men on a “minimum of theory,” who may have felt arriving

impersonators might, by association, implicate their own desires as perverse, exposing them to

local hostility or the psychic struggle of confronting the “theoretical” implications of their own

sexual identities in relationship to notions of community and belonging.. In this era,

impersonators on the road thus had to address the changing context of their relationship to

straight- and gay-identified audiences, as well as the heightened threat of homosexual

“exposure” that might be associated with audience members who either desired or even simply

enjoyed impersonators. By the late 1950s and 1960s, the dangers of being on the wide-open road

or at rural venues seemed to be mounting as impersonators came to be more explicitly

disaffiliated from the rural or the natural.

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<24> Ray had recognized the threat of wide-open space long before then, however. Raised on

a ranch below Sierra Blanca, Texas, rurality played a major role in his childhood and the state

would be a place of ambivalent homecoming for the rest of his life (Texas v. Bourbon, 863-864;

William Bell interview). Bourbon apparently enjoyed some aspects of life on the range, and

learned how to care for the livestock and ride horses. The animal husbandry may have instilled

his lifelong passion for pets. In the trial near the end of his life, Bourbon recalled an incident

when he was six or seven in which the family was preparing for a large picnic and he caught the

adults slaughtering his pet calf. In that moment, he explained, “I discovered that an animal has

far more capacity and far more love for a human being than a human being has for another, and

everyone who’s ever owned a pet can testify to that. . . . People is an entirely different thing”

(Texas v. Bourbon, 923-925). Throughout life, Bourbon found comfort in picking up stray and

sick dogs and cats and nursing them back to health. This love of animals would prove crucial in

the series of events leading up to Bourbon’s death. In a tragic and curious way, Ray’s

connection to rural Texas would travel full circle from life’s beginning to end.

<25> As a gender transgressive performer, Bourbon throughout his career sought to

differentiate himself fundamentally from the bland cruelty he saw in Texas and wide-open

spaces. His hostility suggests both the masculinized codes saturating mainstream constructions of

wide-open spaces and a queer critique of them. In the middle of his “The Railroad’s Coming

Thru” routine on the 1956 album A Girl of the Golden West, for example, Bourbon, as a self-

described “big faggot,” sings, “I love it down in Texas, man, there’s such a crazy view/Acres and

acres of nothing, plenty of nothing to do/And if you look for me in Texas, then there’s something

wrong with you.” Bourbon seems to underscore the widespread belief that queer people do not

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belong in Texas or rural, wide-open spaces. Rather than blaming this disaffiliation on some

pathology Bourbon might embody as gender transgressive and/or homosexual, though, the

performer suggests that the wide-open spaces themselves should be rejected for their total lack of

interesting activity.

<26> Bourbon also complains, “You can’t get a good lookin’ cowhand—they’re hung up on

the herds.” The issue is not so much that “good lookin’ cowhands” are opposed to

homosexuality as it is that they are “hung up” on bestiality, implying that the space of nature

itself provokes “unnatural” interspecies lust. Bourbon manipulates a widespread urban joke

about farm boys having sex with livestock to differentiate bestiality explicitly from

homosexuality, despite an urban discourse that tended to conflate the two as (too) “close-to-

nature” degeneracies [9].

<27> Finally, when Bourbon sings, “I’ll take a city cowpoke, money in his jeans/ When he

says, ‘I’m gonna drill you,’ at least you know what he means,” Rae declares urban culture as

more plain spoken than rural culture. The “city cowpoke” shares with “you”—the second-person

subject of this stanza—a common cosmopolitan understanding that eludes the misrecognitions

caused by rural folk. In a few short lines, Bourbon takes the audience from a pastoral idyll of

“loving” Texas and its vistas to “anti-idyll,” evoking a kind of rural horror with which audiences

were persuaded to identify [10]. Bourbon, besieged by rural spaces’ “plenty of acres” and a

related state of mind, called upon audiences to revise their own rural imaginaries [11].

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<28> Bourbon’s and other impersonators’ work also inserted gay and gender transgressive

people into roadsides and open spaces. Bourbon’s routines recognized the force of alienation

some queer people faced as they negotiated material livelihood and sometimes hostile terrain. In

one 1940s number, “To Hell with the Range,” Bourbon envisioned an urban space where he

could get free from aggressively rural men, nosy small-town familiarity, and perilously wide-

open spaces:

Now you can all go sit on a cactus and nuts to the Lonely Ranger From now on I’ll do my riding with a boulevarding stranger. . . . I'm going back to Hollywood where a gal can get a change Where men are men (laughs) Oh, to hell with the range. I don't need the hills and plains and the great wide-open spaces I can exercise my bronco in some very narrow places. . . . I thought a ranch might give me a chance for romance and allure But one gets so bucolic when they frolic in manure.

Bourbon yearned for the more urban, cosmopolitan world beyond the sunset. Yet Bourbon’s

urban yearnings could never be fully realized, in large part because his performances and life had

so little immediate impact on the far more powerful forces that created society’s “official” maps.

<29> What Bourbon could do, though, was identify the queer sites of respite and pleasure—

rest stops, if you will—along roadsides. Queer entertainers helped inform gender-variant and

gay people in various urban and rural worlds of their shared sensibilities and experiences. A

performer like Bourbon could elevate comedy to an education of identity, a celebration of

marginality, and an empowerment of community, claiming a sense of belonging and tactics for

survival in the rural and roadside spaces from which gender transgressive and queer people had

been deterritorialized. A keen listener in one of Bourbon’s audiences could learn of any number

of roadside gay gathering spots. These places, most commonly public spaces where men could

have sex with other men, were “queer spaces” (Ingram, Bouthillette, Retter, 295). A highway

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rest stop, for example, served the “straight” function of providing a place to picnic and go to the

bathroom, but became “queer” when men utilized it for sexual encounters. Unfortunately, thugs

who preyed on gay men and local authorities often knew about such places and their queer uses.

<30> Bourbon identified roadside queer spaces in numbers regularly performed onstage and

distributed on various “party” records. In “The Fortune Teller,” Bourbon provided gay men in

his audiences with a whole list of possible meeting places. Assuming a gypsy seer role, Bourbon

asked the audience, “Do you sleep alone? Waste not the magnificent opportunities that can

confront you on almost any corner.” In case his double entendre was missed, he continued with

a more explicit one: “Don’t wait for something to turn up and then not know what to do with it.

Grasp your opportunity by the forelock. If the forelock has been done away with, grasp it

anywhere you can get hold of it.” Advising the audience to “stay out of all bad weather,” he

suggested men seek “shelter” in “hard times” at bus stations, which were common meeting

places for men to have sex in both rural and urban areas. However, he cautioned, “Be careful

with whom you associate. . . . Notice everything about people, even their feet. If their shoes

are heavy and square-toed—(giggles) Mary, keep your hair up!” (Around the World). Bourbon’s

use of gay slang educated audience members about possible queer spaces and their associated

dangers. An audience member was reminded to “keep his hair up”—that is, not let on that he

was gay, especially around the “heavy and square-toed” shoes of a police officer seeking to

entrap someone [12].

<31> Even in his “family” numbers, Bourbon gave clues to queer spaces, mediated through his

satire of the heterosexual family. When Bourbon-as-mother in “Sunday Ride” suggests that the

19

kids “use the bushes” on a country roadside to relieve themselves, he is also announcing roadside

shrubbery and rest stops as queer sexual spaces for men. In “Bedtime Story, Part 1 and Part 2,”

Mother reads Peter and Emma a bedtime story about Little Red Riding Hood’s brother, “Little

Blue Dungarees,” who went “through the woods with his basket over his arm to meet an old

auntie, but he met a wolf instead—now he runs with a whole pack of wolves. (Laughs) Lucky

him!” [13] A masculine youth’s walk through the woods—perhaps to have paid sex with an

effeminate older man—becomes an initiation into gay male sex between “wolves,” or masculine

tough men. Bourbon appeals to the homosexual idyll of erotic masculine homosociality in

nature, but suggests that this kind of masculine sex is only one gendered possibility in a wide

range of same-sex encounters one might have in the woods.

<32> For men in audiences, Bourbon’s performances also highlighted numerous possibilities

for coming together and identifying with experiences of cruising, police harassment, gender

transgression, and camp. Particularly for rural homosexuals and gender transgressive people,

entertainers like Bourbon served as a connection to a larger network. Friend Jim Gardner

commented, “Probably no other homosexual, and certainly no other performer, has had the effect

on America’s gay community that Bourbon did. . . . Rae went all over the country, appearing

everywhere, and people remember him because he was there once.” Reporter and gay activist

Dick Leitsch wrote, “For many people, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas, he was

the only gay performer they’d ever seen.” Leitsch recalled being closeted and with a friend in a

“homosexual panic” at a straight party in Kentucky in 1958, where someone played “The Raid”

from Bourbon’s LP An Evening in Copenhagen. “We, the two uptight, just-out hicks, literally

got sick from laughing. . . . Later homosexuality never again seemed so tragic. Once you’ve

20

laughed at something you were afraid of you lose the fear” (Leitsch). For some, Bourbon’s

routines introduced new possibilities for seeking out queer affinities or reaffirmed already

understood gay gathering places. In doing so, he contributed to individual, regional, and national

queer territorializations [14].

<33> For all Bourbon’s queer savvy and hard-earned agility to pass through a variety of spaces,

the wide-open roadside, as it turned out, played a critical role in Bourbon’s demise. In

November 1967, while en route from a gig in Kansas City to one in Tulsa, Bourbon’s latest

jalopy broke down on a highway near Big Spring, Texas. Rae was forced to kennel the now

seventy castaway dogs lodged in the trailer. Bourbon then went on from job to job, trying

desperately to get enough money to get the animals out of hoc. The kennel owner, Mr. A.D.

Blount, got rid of the pets in February 1968, apparently selling them to a medical research lab.

On December ninth, two young men close to Bourbon shot and killed Blount. In their escape,

they threw the gun onto the roadside outside of town. Police recovered the gun and traced it

back to Bourbon. The two young men were arrested in Kansas City, shipped to the Big Spring

jail, and put on trial. One of the two young men got linked with Bourbon as a homosexual lover.

Both were convicted of murder.

<34> Bourbon was put on trial for conspiracy to murder. The dense cultural juxtapositions of

wide-open spaces, rurality, and roadsides with gender transgression and homosexuality collapsed

upon the performer. Key to the narratives of both the prosecution and the public defender’s

cases were recognitions of three ways in which the rural imaginary disallowed the natural

presence of a person like Bourbon. First, the “not from around here” claim painted the performer

21

as an outsider. Second, the issue of Bourbon’s caretaking and affection for the many dogs was

represented as both effeminate (that is, failing paternally) and insufficient maternally. Finally,

Bourbon, as a female impersonator, was portrayed as “fake,” and thus untrustworthy, as opposed

to the straightforward honesty and integrity of “real” rural folk.

<35> Throughout the trial, prosecutor Wayne Burns continually emphasized Bourbon’s

profession as a female impersonator as counter the values and life of the jurors, downplaying the

performer’s deep Texan roots. Meanwhile, public defender William Bell put Bourbon on the

stand to tell the story of a rural Texan childhood. By closing arguments, however, Bell seems to

have given up on trying to convince the jury of any kind of regional affinity they shared with

Bourbon. He began his closing statement by acknowledging the foreignness and desperateness

of Bourbon, saying, “Rae Bourbon, he sits as a stranger in this courtroom. . . . Rae’s background

is not like yours and mine. It is probably not like anyone we know, or anyone we have ever

known” (Texas v. Bourbon, 1124).[15] Using the inclusive “we,” Bell perhaps sought to

establish his own proximity to the local jury by distancing himself from Bourbon’s otherness.

Still, the (mis)recognition of Bourbon by both prosecution and defense of Bourbon as a complete

“stranger” to Texas and its people, as someone its people would have never “even known,” had

embedded within it the broader cultural disaffiliations of queer and gender transgressive people

with rural and wide-open spaces. In contrast, the victim, a family man, was taken for granted as

belonging, although he had only lived in Texas since 1963.

<36> Throughout the trial, lawyers and witnesses also invoked dissonance between what were

seen as rural humans’ properly gendered relationships to animals and Bourbon’s own “perverse”

22

relationship to the “kids.” Idealized rural masculine relationships between men and animals

came in the models of either livestock management or hunting—that is, men could enjoy either

animal husbandry or the sport and/or control in killing wild animal populations. Bourbon’s

maternal love for roadside strays was an affront to both types of rural human-animal interaction.

<37> In the trial, Bourbon defended h/er treatment of the strays, despite their clearly dire

conditions. Mrs. Blount, wife of the victim, testified about seeing the animals for the first time:

Just mixed breed dogs. . . not a purebred in the bunch. . . . [The cats were] . . . what we’d term alley cats. . . . Some of them were in bad shape, ears chewed off, legs chewed off, big old inch sores on them, waste matter about an inch or an inch and a half thick on the floor. There were two or three dead carcasses where they’d eaten each other; some of them were there with their insides eaten out of them. It was just a bad scene (Texas v. Bourbon, 683-684; Cox).

When later asked about the roadside condition of the “kids,” Rae denied the cannibalism but not

the waste. Bourbon insisted that a loving home, even if it was mobile and dirty, was better than

the alternative fate of death awaiting such creatures. The performer countered Mrs. Blount’s

attack on “mixed breed” dogs, saying, “They were not blooded dogs, they were the kind of dogs

that people had thrown away and left dying on the highways. . . . A blooded animal and a fine

breed dog don’t need a home, they usually have them” (Texas v. Bourbon, 871, 990-991).[16]

The contrast of the testimonies of Mrs. Blount and Bourbon suggested both the authority granted

the victim’s wife’s (properly) female authority over domestic child and pet care (she ran a fixed

rural household with children and a kennel with dogs) and the denigration of Bourbon’s

transgendered mobile failure to adhere to a masculine relationship to the animals (s/he called

them h/er “kids”) or even to be properly maternal in h/er care of them.

23

<38> Both testimonies led to the prosecution’s suggestion that Bourbon had a pathological love

of dogs: Rae, the argument went, valued animal life over human life, and didn’t even do that

well. This ostensibly made Bourbon capable of killing a man who had done away with the

“kids.” Again, this connected back to Bourbon’s implied homosexual deviance. Stable,

sedentary human family units served as the backbone of rural American heterosexuality.

Bourbon’s mobility, coupled with an unstable (excessive) love of dogs, could signify the sort of

queer definition of “family” that a “perverse” individual might harbor. Whereas Bourbon

onstage had mocked Texan ranchers for being “hung up on the herds,” Burns, in the courtroom,

portrayed a homosexual hung up on his dogs. Bourbon, in early testimony, had recalled the story

of his family slaughtering the calf he thought was his pet. When Burns used this testimony to

push Rae to admit to loving and wanting to help dogs more than people, Bourbon cried, “Isn’t it

bad enough that the dogs were dead that this man had to die, too? The dogs are all gone, and he

is too” (Texas v. Bourbon, 928, 965-966). Bourbon’s tears, like a career full of sharp critiques of

rurality, could do little to help in a place where both were viewed with suspicion.

<39> Compounding the representations of Bourbon as a stranger to Texas and the rural and a

pathological, gender transgressive animal lover were Burns’ insinuations about Bourbon’s

homosexuality and female impersonation as indicators of the performer’s untrustworthiness. He

declared that Bourbon’s adeptness as a female impersonator and actor was based on the ability to

deceive. Holding up a program from the Jewel Box, a Kansas City venue Bourbon had been

working at the time of arrest, Burns told the jury, “All of these . . . entertainers are dressing in

female clothes. . . . [I]n truth and fact they are really men.” The ambiguity at the heart of all

female impersonation and camp in Bourbon’s career and life, now served as a sign of Rae’s

24

shiftiness, recontextualized in the small-town courtroom as markers of inconsistency and

deviance (Texas v. Bourbon, 923, 987-988).

<40> Bell was not much help in countering this reading. By closing arguments he suggested

that Bourbon became a female impersonator at a desperate career low. He said,

[Bourbon] is on his way down, and has been for twenty years. You meet a lot of people on the way down that you have seen along the way. He is down to the point of being a female impersonator, in the Jewel Box Lounge, in Kansas City. . . . [H]e wears a dress in his act. We know he plays a boozy dame. But that is not what we are trying now. We are not trying this man on his background, or the fact that he plays a character of a boozy dame, or is a female impersonator. . . . I do not justify what [impersonators] do as right…but I do not know that it is so wrong (Texas v. Bourbon, 1124-1126).

As a Texan boy gone astray (and afield) who now played a “boozy dame,” Bourbon’s stage

personae and life seemed to be an affront to small-town Baptist masculinity. Bell attempted to

make Bourbon pathetic in order to preserve the plausibility of the performer’s testimony.

Ultimately, Bell and Bourbon were struggling against the greater claim that an urbanized gender

transgressive queer could not speak in a straightforward way when compared with rural people.

Bourbon’s campy “Railroad’s A-Comin’ Thru” routine had insisted on the clarity of urban

language, and revealed the confusion of rural translation, but Bell had to labor against

mainstream cultural authority to plead that even an old, degraded urban queer might be taken at

his word.

<41> All three modes of discrediting Bourbon—painting the performer as an outsider who

failed to properly gender the care of animals and could not be trusted because of the “deception”

of cross-dressing—thus relied upon the very constructions of rural and wide-open spaces upon

which Bourbon, like other impersonators, had fostered a queer dread. The dread, in other words,

25

went both ways. Just as many queer and gender transgressive people felt alienation and fear in

wide-open spaces, small towns, and rural roadsides, so too many rural people dreaded the queers

who passed through but did not belong. After a quick deliberation, the jury handed Rae a life

sentence. Within about a year, on July 20, 1971, Rae Bourbon died under confinement in a

small-town hospital of the state the performer had fled so many years before.

<42> Clearly, not all gay and gender transgressive people in the twentieth century felt a dread

of wide-open spaces, just as not all rural people felt a dread of queers in wide-open spaces.

Various literary gay pastoral articulations from the late 19th century onward sought to rework

mainstream narratives about gender, sexuality, the rural, and the natural in order to claim either

spiritual, sexual, or practical belonging in wide-open spaces and on roadsides. Example?

Throughout the 20th century, as a growing body of scholars are showing, queer and gender

transgressive people inhabited the rural because it was their home, either in childhood, or

adulthood, or both. In the decade after Bourbon’s death, the growth of lesbian feminism and gay

liberation sparked the lesbian land and radical fairy movements, bringing queer people into day-

to-day retreat upon “natural” land in part to claim their own organicism. Yet these movements,

like the presence of individual queer and gender transgressive people in rural and nature spaces,

should not obscure the very real manifestations of queer dread, and dread of queers, in wide-

open spaces that still persists.

<43> In the recent past, films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks

for Everything, Julie Newmar, and TransAmerica (2005) have provided a utopian vision of an

integrated rural space in which the “anti-natural” of the queer might meld, after small conflict,

26

with the “natural” of nature, the road, and the wide open. On the other hand, the brutal and

ritualistic tortures and murders of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena, and Brokeback

Mountain’s ambivalence of masculine homosexual love and fears of homophobic violence serve

to underscore the ways in which queer dread is intact today. Together, the films and the murders

provide a cautionary reading of the dread felt today by both those queer and gender transgressive

people inhabiting the rural and those who feel compelled to police the boundaries of the wide-

open and eliminate those they believe “don’t belong.” Unless we mark the more aggressively

exclusionary sides of the natural, the rural, and wide-open spaces, any claim of organicism,

freedom, health, and empowerment attached to such terms and places serves only to obscure the

intense fear and violence they also embody.

<44> Rae’s story, despite the desperate ending, testifies to survival, negotiation, and mobility

throughout nearly eight decades. Bourbon’s and other impersonators’ travel, presence, and

routines helped create and promote queer space and affinity through campy performances in

venues small and large around the country. Bourbon’s camp was a rebellious, subversive, and

political act of building community and queer identity through the displacement of fixed

concepts of gender and sexuality, as well as the natural, the rural, and the wide open. The

performer’s visibility and identification of roadsides and open spaces as potentially queer spaces

also underscored the gaps within more dominant claims about nature. Still, as an openly queer

and gender-transgressive entertainer with few financial resources, Bourbon could transgress, but

not ultimately transcend, the wide-open spaces so dreaded.

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