This Harlem Renaissance star dressed in drag, sang dirty songs, and hit the town with three ladies on her arm
Gladys Bentley proudly married a woman, then said she was ‘cured’ and married a man
Gladys Bentley was a phenom — a larger-than-life entertainer whose skills seemed to know no end. She was a bawdy singer, a nimble dancer, a virtuosic, a marathon piano player (Harlem literary giant Langston Hughes said Bentley played the piano “literally all night”), and she could reportedly perform songs in French, Spanish, and Yiddish. By the end of the 1920s, Bentley was a Harlem Renaissance star, though her act offended the sensibilities of many audiences. In 1934, the Chicago Defender referred to her as a “masculine-garbed, smut-slinging entertainer” who sang “lewd ballads.”
She also loved the ladies, and could be seen dressed in drag at the city’s bustling nightlife spots with a gal — or three — on her arm. In 1931, Bentley married her white lover in a ceremony in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As Steven J. Niven writes in The Root, Bentley was later investigated as a possible “subversive” by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities because of the civil marriage ceremony.
As the Harlem Renaissance waned and her fame faded, Bentley made her way west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, performing at a few famous gay clubs. In 1952, the singer surprised fans when she did a complete about-face with regard to her sexuality. In a spread in Ebony magazine, she lamented that she’d spent her life as a lesbian and announced that she’d married a man. “I was traveling the wrong road to real love and true happiness,” Bentley said.
