Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)

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

Abstract: Mid-twentieth century pansy comedian and female impersonator Ray Bourbon's biography and stage materials suggest a disdain for "wide-open spaces" and queer ambivalences about the rural and the open road as sites of threat and danger. The performer's struggle reflected larger concerns for many queer men, especially traveling professional female impersonators. Often relying on long trips to small towns in order to find work, impersonators were vulnerable to a host of legal and socio-cultural repressions with little recourse. Examining how impersonators negotiated the natural and built environments of small towns and roadsides raises new questions about historical and contemporary understandings of the "natural" and "wide-open" as necessarily libratory sites, particularly for men. Understanding why Ray Bourbon would say "To Hell with the Range" highlights the need for nature and place to be treated as historically and culturally specific sites of gendered and sexualized power relations, countering America's universalizing masculinist romance with the open road and the rural.

<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 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 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 nineteenth and early twentieth 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 1981). 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 homogeneously familial, and, on the other, the urbanization and pathologization of homosexuality and male effeminacy.

<7> Late nineteenth and early twentieth 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 widespread popularity in both cities, as entertainment and subcultural expression, and in smaller towns as cosmopolitan spectacle "shipped in" for locals (Ullman 1997, Romesburg 2000). Female impersonation enjoyed an apex of success and respectability in early twentieth century vaudeville. Led by superstar Julian Eltinge in his heyday from 1905-15, 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 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 1979: 4, 76, 105, 107-12). 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 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 1966: 707-708; Ponte 1974). More than fifty per cent 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 2000). 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 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 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 1979: 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 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: 24)

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 1971; Cole 1970; State of Texas v. Bourbon 1971: 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 1983). 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 1994: 358). This intersected with a resurgence in published middle-class homosexual literati novels, homophile activist works, and homoerotic muscle magazines. All of these 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 (2000) 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 his book 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 1983: 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 1983: 75-91, 113-15). 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 businessmen, farmers, housewives and people like that" (Whearley 1965). 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 [6 ].

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 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. [7 ]

<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 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.

<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 1971: 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 1971: 923-25). 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 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 ]

<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 1978: 295). A highway 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 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" (1971: 17). Leitsch (1971) 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 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 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 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 1971: 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" 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 1971: 683-684, Cox 1969).

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 1971: 871, 990-91). [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.

<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 1971 : 928, 965-66). 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 shiftiness, recontextualized in the small-town courtroom as markers of inconsistency and deviance ( Texas v. Bourbon 1971: 923, 987-88).

<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 1971: 1124-26).

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, 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 nineteenth 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. Throughout the twentieth 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, 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 for 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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Notes

[1] Some of this article originally appeared in Don Romesburg, "Ray Bourbon: A Queer Sort of Biography," M.A. thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2000. Elements have been greatly enhanced following presentations at the 2000 Western Historical Association Annual Conference, the 2002 American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting, and the 2003 American Historical Association Annual Meeting. I thank Phil Deloria, Susan Johnson, Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Peter Boag, Sandy Runzo, Rod Romesburg, William Scott, Amanda Littauer, and Chris Agee for their insights. I am indebted to Randy Riddle for his contribution of Bourbon recordings and other materials. His website dedicated to Bourbon is at http://www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon-story.html. [^]

[2] In recognition of Bourbon's shifting transgendered identities, I will distinguish in both text and notes between "Ray" and "Rae" Bourbon in accordance with the performer's own usage. For reasons of space this essay will not elaborate upon Bourbon's supposed mid-1950s sex change and subsequent public and private transsexual and male homosexual proclamations and performances. Where I cannot avoid gender neutral terms in the period after the supposed surgery, I utilize "h/er" and "s/he" to mark this ambiguity. For a discussion of Bourbon's sex/gender identity in relation to transsexual claims and acts, see Romesburg, esp. ch. IV. [^]

[3] Historian Thomas Bolze found mention of at least fifty female impersonators in Variety from 1905 to 1930, and far more impersonators worked for less money in decidedly "low-brow" and working-class venues, including honky-tonks. See 28-29, 67. [^]

[4] As John Howard explains: "[C]ars and roads participated in synergistic processes of social, cultural, political, and economic development crucial in the formation of formulation of desire and difference. . . . Postwar road building was a boon to queer networking." Howard, 101. [^]

[5] See, for example, Program from The New Jewel Box Revue, 1949-1952?, Bowling Green State University Archives. I am indebted to Bill Schurk at Bowling Green for sending me a copy of this. See also Wallace. [^]

[6] For other rural correspondence with homophile organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, see Wilson; Meeker, esp. chs. 1-2.[^]

[7] For an excellent discussion of the Kinsey quote in relation to Brokeback Mountain, see Johnson.[^]

[8] This is to say that for both rural homosexuals and rural people who saw their space as counter to homosexuality, sexual object-choice definitions of gay identity (away from markers of gender inversion) became increasingly pervasive as well as invasive. See Wilson, esp. 200, 202. [^]

[9] For the easy discursive slippage between rural bestiality and rural sodomy, see Bell, "Eroticizing the Rural," 89. In a different context, see also Jens Rydstrom, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. [^]

[10] I draw upon anti-idyll as developed by David Bell in relation to "rural horror" as a genre of popular cinema since the 1970s. In these, the victim is coded as urban and both the setting and the "monster," who is often a "hick" male or family, are rural. See David Bell, "Anti-Idyll," esp. 95. [^]

[11] It is important to note that many people who were gender transgressive and/or had same-sex relationships did not move to big cities, instead forging their own kinds of networks in small towns and rural areas across the country. See, for example, Howard; Bell and Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Lesbian and Gay Lives"; Bell, "Eroticizing the Rural"; Valentine, "Making Space: Lesbian Seperatist Communities in the United States"; Wilson; Spurlin; Kennedy; Kramer. [^]

[12] For gay slang from the 1930s to the 1960s, see Gershon Legman, "The Language of Homosexuality" (1941), reprinted in Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, 571-584. [^]

[13] Another version appears on Rae Bourbon, "The Family: Bed-Time Story," Don't Call Me Madam, UTC-3 (1956). [^]

[14] Useful here is Meeker's discussion of "Do-It-Yourself homosexual communication networks" (Meeker, 197-224). [^]

[15] No one in the trial - including Bourbon - picked up on the performer's previous claims of transsexuality, so all participants referred to Rae with male pronouns. [^]

[16] It is difficult not to view Bourbon's compassion for the dogs, however mismanaged, as an extension of the performer's own conditions on the margins of society. [^]

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