Gladys Bentley

At the turn of the 20th century, men and women from the Caribbean, including Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic migrated to the United States in search of better living and working opportunities.

[Image courtesy of New York Public Library]

Gladys Bentley was born on August 12, 1907, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a working class family. She was the eldest of four children. Her mother was from Trinidad and her father was African American. 

[Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA]

Between 1915 to 1970, more than 6 million African Americans relocated from the rampant racism of the Jim Crow South to the North, constituting  the Great Migration. Blues music travelled with them, as they moved into metropolises now known for their rich musical traditions like St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Detroit. [Source: “The Evolution of Blues,” National Blues Museum] 

[Image courtesy of the Manuscript Collection, State Archives of Florida] 

The term homosexuality was coined in the late 19th century. During this time homosexuality was seen as deviant and sinful, and even considered a crime. During the 20th century there is a rise in the scientific study of sex and same sex desires, leading towards the labeling of homosexuality in medical terms. Several psychologists classified homosexuality as a mental illness, and based on different theories did experiments or employed therapies to try and “reverse” it. 

Sixteen-year-old Bentley, feeling misunderstood by her family, left Philadelphia for New York City and wound up in the heart of the city’s Black cultural hub: Harlem. She dreamed of becoming a musician and quickly made her way into the rent party circuit as a pianist. A result of low wages and expensive housing, rent parties were organized by tenants to pay their rent. A popular social gathering for African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, rent parties became a venue for jazz performers and emerging artists and musicians to establish themselves.  

[Image courtesy of Ebony/JD Doyle Archives]

The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural reverberation of the Great Migration, occurred throughout this decade in Harlem, New York, as well as in several urban communities across the U.S. It marked a flourishing of African American culture, manifesting in the arts, music, poetry, and literature.

Philosopher and writer Alain Locke (1885-1954) articulated the philosophical concept of the “New Negro” which captured the impetus of the Harlem Renaissance. He edited The New Negro, an anthology of poems, essays, music and art, in 1925. Locke was heralded as the father of the Harlem Renaissance and presented a unique approach to theorizing the Black aesthetic—as he saw the Black artist’s primary purpose as individualizing and thus humanizing the Black experience. [Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alain-locke/]

[Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh]

This time period was also defined by Prohibition. From 1920 to 1933, the 18th Amendment made it illegal to purchase alcohol, leading to a rich underground trade of bootlegged alcohol. This trade produced a complementary market of speakeasies where people could drink and take part in what were then considered illicit and non-traditional activities, such as same-sex and interracial mingling and dancing. “Jungle Alley,” a stretch in Harlem on 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, was the epicenter of dance halls, jazz, brothels, and after-hour clubs—what some called “the sporting life.” Prohibition gave rise to the Roaring Twenties nightlife, culture, and  spirit of sexual freedom that led to a new era of gay culture, called the “pansy craze.” 

[Image courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University]

Bentley was determined to make her mark in the Harlem club scene. When the pianist at a popular club, The Mad House, left on tour, Bentley auditioned. She was offered the job on the spot, later recalling her performance, saying “My hands fairly flew over the keys.” 

[Image courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

In this decade, which music historian Eileen Southern calls “the era of the Black female blues singer,” more than 200 Black women recorded original music and thousands more were employed in the nightclub circuits. Some notable figures were Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Ida Cox—all women who were pushing boundaries in their lyrics, performances, and powerful presences onstage. [Source: Queer Music Heritage]

[Image courtesy of the Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives]

After her stint at The Mad House, Bentley’s nightclub act soon became a staple around the neighborhood’s large theaters. In the mid-1930s, she headlined at the Ubangi Club. Her show, which featured a chorus line of 20 or more flamboyantly-dressed men dancing behind her, gained notoriety and drew disparaging comments about her chorus of “pansies” and her suggestive lyrics. She traveled and performed in clubs around the country, including Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

[Image courtesy of the San Francisco Examiner]

Bentley began a 20-year-long recording career. Unlike the bawdy lyrics in her performances, the songs she recorded presented more mainstream and palatable themes. 

[Image courtesy of Queer Music Heritage]

The infamous stock market crash of 1929 impacted the nation’s economy and hurt Harlem’s prosperity. At the same time, mainstream audiences that could pay for entertainment started preferring the sophisticated rhythms of swing, and the craze for the blues waned as a result. Bentley’s career survived, but her act was not as celebrated. Langton Hughes recalled, “The old magic of the woman and the piano and the night and the rhythm being one were gone.”

[Image courtesy of the Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center, The New York Public Library]

Bentley also served as the inspiration for several characters in the literature of the time, including a queer novel called Strange Brother written by Blair Niles. Carl Van Vechten, a photographer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance, created a larger-than-life pianist character in his novel, Parties, based on Bentley. And playwright and poet Langston Hughes’ 1935 play “Little Ham” featured a character called “Masculine Woman” who was described as looking “exactly like Gladys Bentley.” [Source: Queer Music Heritage]

It was around this time that Bentley told a gossip columnist, Wilson, that she had married a white woman. While there is no record of the union of the marriage, this demonstrated Bentley’s bold openness about her sexual orientation. “One of the frustrating and actually joyous things about Gladys Bentley was she was constantly inventing herself,” Wilson says. “Oftentimes when she mentioned something about her personal life, you had to take it with a grain of salt and not necessarily take it for truth.” [Source: The Smithsonian Magazine] 

[Image courtesy of Gay Man’s Press Publishers]

Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, regulation increased in the nightclub circuit and Bentley was not booked at many white clubs due to her blatant sexuality and the content of her performances. 

[Image courtesy of the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library]

The hardships of the Great Depression suppressed the openness of the 1920s and the ‘30s. Around the spring of 1937, Harlem’s pansy and queer craze had run its course. Authorities shut down a majority of the city’s queer night clubs, citing them as “disorderly,” and the  queer entertainment scene moved underground. The end of the Harlem Renaissance and the economic decline of Harlem during the Great Depression led to a seismic downward turn in Bentley’s career. 

In addition, during this time powerful Black preachers, such as Adam Clayton Powell, played a critical role in public opinion on homosexuality within the Black community. Similar to traditional mainline churches, Powell perceived homosexuality and acts like Bentley’s “sinful.” 

[Image courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University]

Bentley moved 3,000 miles away to Los Angeles into a small bungalow with her mother.

[Image courtesy of Popperfoto/Getty Images]

After performing in her usual attire of men’s clothing at Joaquin’s El Rancho in Los Angeles, Bentley experienced legal complications. The nightclub was forced to obtain a special police permit to “allow Gladys Bentley, 250 pound colored entertainer to wear trousers instead of skirts, during her act.” 

[Image courtesy of Ebony/JD Doyle Archives]

An insidious campaign of fear against homosexuality occurred amid McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Historian David K. Johnson defined the “Lavender Scare” as “a fear that permeated Cold War political culture, this fear that gay people were a threat to national security, that they had infiltrated the federal government, and that they needed to be systematically removed from government service.” 

Likely due to the prevailing  hostility toward homosexuality, Gladys Bentley changed her performances and lifestyle to stay employed and to keep doing her line of work. [Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged-gay-employees/] 

[Image courtesy of U.S. Senate Historical Office]

Bentley  wrote an article that was published in Ebony magazine with the title, “I Am a Woman Again.” In this self-exposé of sorts, she wrote, “For many years, I inhabited that half-shadow no man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes… Today I am a woman again through the miracle of modern medicine, living a normal existence.” Some scholars of this period suggest that in the highly repressive and homophobic era of the 1950s, Bentley spun a tale of relatability and respectability and went back into the closet.

In August of the same year, she married Charles Roberts, a cook 16 years her junior, although later he disputed that the marriage had in fact occurred. She continued to perform around Los Angeles, albeit never regaining her former fame. 

[Image courtesy of Ebony/JD Doyle Archives]

In 1958, Bentley appeared on comedian Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” show on NBC. This was her only TV appearance. Charming and confident as ever, Bentley wore a dress, sat at the piano and performed a song with the same vigor as she did throughout her career in Harlem. 

[Image courtesy of NBC Universal]

On January 18, 1960 at age 52, Bentley died of influenza. She was studying to become an ordained  minister.

[Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Sentinel]