Dressed in drag, this Harlem Renaissance entertainer wowed audiences with all-night performances
After decades as an out lesbian, Gladys Bentley claimed she was “cured” of homosexuality
“Gladys Bentley and her sophisticated group were seen in Jones’s Bar and Grill on last Wednesday night,” wrote New York gossip columnist Marcus Wright. “They solidly beat it up, and carried on.” Bentley, a dashing, larger-than-life Harlem performer, was a regular in the gossip columns of the 1930s, and as James F. Wilson writes in Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, she seemed to enjoy the notoriety.
Bentley first sang at The Mad House, a Harlem club where she was known by the stage name Bobbie Minton. She then got a regular gig at the gay-themed Harry Hansberry’s Clam House, where Bentley, in drag, was backed by a chorus line of drag queens. Later, she performed uptown at the Ubangi Club on 131st Street, which boasted no cover charge and promised “the hottest colored show in New York.” It was just part of the ambisexual nightlife culture that had captured the city’s attention and wouldn’t let it go. Along with other bawdy, genderbending blues crooners like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Bentley was upending viewers’ expectations, sometimes offending their tastes, and making them laugh all the while.
Bentley, in particular, was a draw. Performing in a white tuxedo, top hat, and tails, she was known as the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs,” and she embodied an almost entirely outmoded “entertainer” figure, a jack of all trades who with equal aptitude and charisma cracked jokes, sang songs, and thrilled audiences with virtuosic, marathon piano playing. By the early 1930s, she was highly paid, summoned to perform at star-studded cocktail parties, and headlining musical revues in Midtown Manhattan, where her antics raised even more eyebrows. She was also often seen with a pretty girl — or three — on her arm.
Harlem literary giant Langston Hughes expressed amazement that Bentley could play the piano “literally all night” and called her show “an amazing exhibition of musical energy — a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard — a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”
In Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies, Wilson writes that press reports about Bentley’s later shows describe not only an entertaining and funny musician, but also a “linguist and composer” who performed songs in French, Spanish, and Yiddish. She was also known as a nimble dancer, no small feat considering her weight reportedly fluctuated between 200 and 300 pounds.
She was born Gladys Alberta Bentley in Philadelphia to a Trinidadian mother and American father. Bentley would later say she was rejected at birth by her mother, who had desperately wanted a son; she even credited her lesbianism to this early trauma. Though it’s easy to think women like Bentley were ruthlessly ostracized, they showed tenacity in carving out their social niches. In a radio interview about his documentary T’aint Nobody’s Bizness, filmmaker Robert Philipson says that performers like Bentley “created a space for themselves in the sexual economy” during a time when there were considerable challenges to and punishments for black self-expression. “They were powerful women,” Philipson says, “and they were powerful black women at a time when probably the worst situation you could be born into was to be a black woman.”
But it would be a dramatic oversimplification to argue that performers like Gladys Bentley actualized their personal ambitions without consequences. Bentley was always up against the prejudices of others. Vere Johns, a theater critic for the New York Age, writing dismissively of Bentley’s show when it debuted at the Lafayette, lamented “I, personally, could not enjoy their part of the show as I had a burning desire to rush out and get an ambulance backed up against the stage door to take them all to Bellevue for the alienists to work on.”
Indeed, “alienists” (psychiatrists) and the entire medical establishment still saw crossdressing and homosexuality in strictly pathological terms. Though the culture at large may have enjoyed watching performers flirt with danger and transgress social norms onstage, many of their behaviors were still categorized as “deviant” and “perverted.” Bentley was subject to the forces of a deeply bigoted world. As numerous scholars would later note, the queer black female blues singers of the 1920s and ’30s were in fact triply oppressed, and though their work at times made light of their struggles (and at times was simply art for art’s sake), performers like Bentley were forced to negotiate an often hostile world, and were carrying a tremendous weight.
In the 1940s, as Harlem and its entertainers fell unceremoniously out of vogue, Bentley went west, living with her mother in Los Angeles for a time, and performing at gay nightclubs in the city. She also did a stint at Mona’s 440 Club, San Francisco’s legendary first lesbian club, “where girls will be boys,” according to its cocktail napkins.
Bentley surprised fans in 1952 when she did a complete about-face with regard to her sexuality. She’d long been known for her outspoken commitment to dressing like men and loving women, but that year she published a first-person account in Ebony magazine claiming she’d been “cured” of homosexuality.
In the piece, “I Am A Woman,” Bentley describes her difficult childhood, weaving an origin story for what she, surprisingly after decades of open lesbianism, casts as a moral failing. “I have been featured as the star in the swankiest supper clubs in the nation,” she writes. “I have earned the distinction of being the first, and in some cases the only performer of my race to crash the star dressing rooms of the most plush glitter spots….But, while I bowed before the loud applause of well-heeled, free-spending audiences, while I earned large sums of money and thrilled to recognition, still, in my secret heart, I was weeping and wounded because I was traveling the wrong road to real love and true happiness.”
It was a far cry from early Bentley, whose gift for obscene humor and urge to make salacious headlines had hitherto known no bounds. But she vowed in the piece that the “tragedy and heartbreak” of her “abnormal life” were set right by her adherence to heterosexual marriage, and her relationship with her husband, a journalist named J.T. Gipson. In the photos accompanying the article, Bentley can be seen making a bed (preparing to “make homecoming husband comfortable”) and in the kitchen among dishes (“taste-testing dinner” for him). Gone, of course, is the tuxedo, the slicked back hair, the bravado. Instead, Bentley sports a women’s hairdo and a humble house dress.
Though she wrote songs and occasionally performed into her later years, she was never able to recapture the energy or the fans she’d enjoyed at the height of her out drag persona during Harlem’s heyday. Bentley died in 1960 at the age of 53.
It’d be easy to argue her legacy was tempered by her capitulation to the pressure to be straight, but, as Angela Y. Davis put it in her 1998 study Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, the recorded performances of this generation of singers “divulge unacknowledged traditions of feminist consciousness in working-class black communities.” Bentley’s dazzling iconoclasm stands as a fascinating example of the ways Harlem Renaissance performers played with the categories used to define and constrain them.
