Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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to fall, and where they were slow to fall they were kicked over by people like Lenny Bruce. No longer verboten, the jokes seemed less funny and many of these careers faded and died. Madame, of Waylon & Madame (who started at The Academy in Los Angeles), was perhaps the last in this line of comics. With her pearls and feathered boas, Madame was a dressed up version of the working class bawd, a puppet Rae Bourbon.
Bourbon’s records could sometimes be found under the counter in the fifties, if you knew someone. The best known of these LPs was An Evening in Copenhagen, which featured such numbers as “The Stipend Must Rally Round Here,” and “Sisters of Charity” (“And don’t be stingy, give it all, what do you care what you are called, be a sister of charity”) and “The Wedding,” a long and hilarious account of a far underground gay wedding in San Francisco; “The one who was performing the ceremony—oh, he looked so lovely, you couldn’t tell who was the bride with him standing there—he looked down at the two who were getting married and said, Do you…? And before they could deny it, the law came in.…” The comedy is raw, but for its type it stands up pretty well today, though the differences in the gay culture over the intervening years are immediately apparent.
I was part of a sad postscript, by the way, to the Rae Bourbon story. In the seventies Earl Kemp, my editor at Greenleaf Classics, called me to ask if I had ever heard of Rae Bourbon, and when I said that I certainly had, he wanted to know if I thought there were enough fans to make a success of an autobiography. He had gotten a manuscript, badly written, and wondered if it was worth the time and trouble it would take to make it publishable.
I had to say in all honesty that I doubted there was much of a market for such a book. Bourbon’s heyday had been twenty years earlier—he was already old when I saw him in Washington, D.C., in the mid-fifties, and indeed I had heard nothing of him for a decade or more. Earl passed on the book and it wasn’t until later that I learned that Rae Bourbon at that time had been in jail in a small Texas town charged with murder, and was trying to raise money for his defense.
The circumstances of the murder were as bizarre as any of the stories he told in his nightclub act. It seems he had been touring in an old van with his “children,” an entire pack of dogs (I have heard estimates ranging from seven or eight up to fourteen of them) and playing gigs where he could find them. The van broke down and he boarded the dogs with a local vet. Time passed. The dogs were old and many of them ill. Convinced that Bourbon was never coming back to claim them, the vet eventually put the dogs to sleep.
Bourbon did return, however, and was so enraged at what he regarded as the murder of his “children” that he attacked the vet and beat him so severely that the man died from his injuries. Bourbon was arrested for murder.
Eventually Rae Bourbon died in his Texas jail before his case could be resolved. Would it have made any difference if I had advised differently regarding his manuscript? Maybe not, but it’s one of those things I’ve always wished I could go back and do differently. That’s not to say I condone what he did, but any gay who grew up before the sixties can understand it.
Whip a dog often enough and he will learn to bite.
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I have to say, though, that there was a world of difference between these drag queen legends of the past and most of today’s performers. For one thing, too many contemporary performers feel that performing means that they need only lip-synch to a record and twirl about in yards of tulle. Each of the “old girls” developed her own character, often brilliantly realized. Most of them spoke and sang with their own voices, but often they trained and practiced for long hours to develop a voice convincingly female, not quite falsetto and not their usual masculine voice either. A third voice, as one performer once described it to me. How many drag queens today are willing to invest the time and effort to develop that third voice?
They had stage routines, usually with lots of funny patter, and many of them were very good at song and dance. All of which is to say, they were true entertainers who just happened to be wearing wigs and dresses.
Of course, there have been some very talented drag queens in recent years. Divine was special—his drag persona was certainly unlike any other.
Barry Humphries (so far as I know, straight) has created a readily identifiable character in Dame Edna Everage. This is far beyond just dressing up and he is as popular with straight audiences as with gay.
And I don’t want to sound either like I’m set against lip-synching, per se. If you are creative, if you have talent, you can make an asset of almost anything. Lypsinka has taken that all-too-common lip-synching to hysterical extremes, lip-synching not only song lyrics but dialogue as well, an entire show patched together from what must be a hundred different sources. For the record, by the way, his frantic stage persona is a far cry from his own quiet, laid back personality as John Epperson.
Charles Pierce, though his stand up routines were in his own voice (or one of several of his voices) lip-synched parts of his routines too, to wonderful effect. Anyone who saw him at the old Gilded Cage, soaring over the heads of the patrons on a flowered swing while tootling Jeanette’s recording of “San Francisco,” is not likely to forget the experience.
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I suppose it is the fantasy of all cross dressers to be truly mistaken for the real thing. Drag queens tell me that the highest compliment they can be paid is for someone to say “I thought you were a real woman.” Drag is all about illusion, naturally, and on the stage it often works. D.L.E., as we used to say—distance lends enchantment. One even hears about impersonators functioning as women in the world outside the theater, but I’ve seen scant evidence of that.
Oddly, there have been a couple of famous instances of women living successfully as men, the most famous being that of Teena Brandon, whose story is told convincingly in Kimberly Peirce’s movie Boys Don’t Cry (1999). What for many people makes this story even more astonishing is that, far from avoiding the super-macho young men of the town, the ones who might have been perceived as the biggest threat to her, Brandon actually hung out with the toughest of them.
I myself don’t find that quite so surprising. As an effeminate young man who was always at risk of violence at the hands of straights, I very early on adopted a policy of setting out to woo the toughest of the toughs. If I came into a room, a bar, a party full of straights, I made it a habit to look around and find the meanest looking son of a bitch in the place and I made a bee line for him. I knew that if I could win him over the rest would be cream puffs. And if I was going to get the shit beat out of me, I might as well get it over with up front.
Most of the time my strategy worked and you would be astonished how many of those mean sons of bitches went on to become good friends, even after they knew the truth about me (or maybe some of them knew all along and just wanted to be wooed; men are funny that way).
Tragically Brandon’s ploy ultimately failed; it was two of those tough guy pals who, when they learned the truth, raped and eventually killed her—in large part, it seems, from anger that she had so successfully fooled them.
Why does it seem to be easier for a woman to create the illusion of being a man than vice versa? I think in part that may be because those women who have dressed and lived as men have often been content to assume an androgynous sort of masculinity rather than the super macho sort. It is not so much a matter of playing an effeminate man as a slick one.
The man’s world, after all, is filled with a wide range of “types.” Look at the men who have been movie superstars. Though both Ronald Coleman and David Niven are perceived as being heterosexual there is a great chasm between their sort of masculinity and, say, Bruce Willis’ or Steve McQueen’s. Even James Dean had an androgynous quality about him, which indeed was why he could appeal so powerfully to both men and women.
On the other hand, men dressing as women rarely try to appear as tom-boyish women, which would seem an easier act to pull off, but go for the ultra, the exaggeratedly feminine, which is harder to do successfully (older performers, such as Rae Bourbon, often go for the harridan look, which in fact is easier to make convincing). My friend John Beard performed regularly as Johnnie Adonis in the taverns in small Midwestern towns and cities such