Gladys Bentley

 "It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought I was." 

Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. 

Bentley was born August 12, 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of George L. Bentley, an American, and his wife, Mary Mote, a Trinidadian. She was the eldest of four children, and the family were low-income. However, she later described her upbringing as difficult owing to her difficult relationship with her mother. Gladys always felt unwanted and rejected because her mother desperately wanted her to have been born a boy: "When they told my mother she had given birth to a girl, she refused to touch me. She wouldn't even nurse me and my grandmother had to raise me for 6 months on a bottle before they could persuade my mother to take care of her own baby." She believed that growing up feeling rejected shaped her behaviour; she never wanted a man to touch her, hated her brothers, wore boys' clothes, and had a crush on one of her female teachers in elementary school (although she said at the times she was confused about her feelings and did not know what they meant).  

Thus, Bentley defied gender norms from an early age. She was large for her age and preferred to borrow her brothers’ suits than wear girls’ dresses or blouses. Her gender non-conformity ostracised her from her family, and she was bullied at school. In an attempt to “cure” her “abnormal and unladylike behaviour”, her family sent her to a doctor and psychiatrists later diagnosed her behaviour as symptomatic of “extreme social maladjustment”. It breaks my heart that such “treatment facilities” still exist in the world today.  

Unsurprisingly, Bentley ran away from home at the age of 16, seeking to start a new life in New York City.  (1/8) 

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‘Miss Bentley was 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’ – Langston Hughes.  

In 1925, Bentley arrived in Harlem, a community that was home to other sexually-fluid entertainers like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. even described the Harlem Renaissance being “surely as gay as it was black” 

According to Jim Wilson, author of the book Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem was also a community that the police turned a blind eye to during the Prohibition Era. People, many of whom were white, seeking entertainment and covert access to alcohol crowded into Harlem nightclubs, speakeasies and parties. 

Bentley initially performed at rent parties, where people in Harlem would cover the costs by charging admission for private parties with alcohol and live performances. Her performances were extremely lewd, and while dirty songs were not ground-breaking, it was much more acceptable for men to sing them than women.  

Soon hearing that Harry Hansberry's Clam House on 133rd Street (one of the city's most notorious gay speakeasies) needed a male pianist, she dressed up in men’s attire and sought employment there. She later wrote that Harry was reluctant to give her a job, until he heard her play. In Bentley’s account of her life, her audience was as fascinated by her style as it was by her music. 

She was advertised as a “male impersonator” and proved to be a real hit. (2/8) 

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This marked the start of her career performing in men’s clothing ("white full dress shirts, stiff collars, small bow ties, oxfords, short Eton jackets, and hair cut straight back"). She honed her skills and soon became popular and successful.  

Her salary started at $35 per week plus tips, but rose dramatically to $125 per week, and the club was soon renamed Barbara's Exclusive Club, after her stage name at the time, Barbara "Bobbie" Minton. She then began performing at the Ubangi Club on Park Avenue, where she had an accompanist pianist. She was now successful enough to own a "$300/month apartment in Park Ave. With servants and a nice car" Popular with audiences of all races and sexualities, she toured the country and had some A-list celebrity fans including Cary Grant.  

Bentley had great talent as a piano player, singer, and entertainer. Her performances were "comical, sweet and risqué" for the era. She openly called out men through her music and sang about sexual relationships which was taboo for her day. She sang about her lesbian affairs and flirted with women in the audience. She had a talent for making promiscuous parodies of popular songs, but she also sang the blues. Her music ‘mocked 'high' class imagery with 'low' class humour, she applied aspects of the sexually charged 'black' blues to demure, romantic 'white' ballads, creating a culture clash between these two music forms".  

Vocally, her voice was deep, loud and booming (although able to hit high notes too), sometimes imitating a horn through growling. In August 1928, she signed with Okeh Records company and recorded eight sides over the course of the next year up until 1929. In 1930 she recorded a side with the Washboard Serenaders for Victor, and later recorded for the Excelsior, and Flame labels. (3/8) 

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In 1933, Bentley found herself in the middle of a Supreme Court battle with Harry Hansberry who sued Bentley to prohibit her from taking her musical to the Broadway division. Hansberry insisted that the club had been built around the popularity of Bentley's success and that he owned a five-year contract over Bentley and her raunchy songs. The club insisted that Bentley left them high and dry at the rise of the club and wanted to pursue other interests that she could financially benefit from. 

Despite the legal challenge, Gladys attempted to move her act to Broadway. However, she received many complaints about her raunchy performances and the police even boarded up the doors of the places she performed. Thus restrained, she was forced to move back to Harlem in 1937 where she played at the Ubangi Club until its closure in 1937. 

On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, Bentley relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She tried to continue her musical career by playing in a number of gay nightspots, albeit performing a “toned down” version of her former material. However, she failed to recapture her past success.  

By the 1950s, Bentley was approaching middle age. Wilson notes: “The 1950s were even more conservative than the early part of the 20th century. We see a real change so that somebody who is identified as lesbian or gay is considered a national menace. It's up there with being a communist. So Gladys Bentley abandoned that and seems to want to restart her career as a more traditional black woman performer.” This is really interesting as we often assume that human rights follow a linear progress, but Gladys’ life shows that they have wavered throughout history, even within the same country and a short space of time.  (4/8) 

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Bentley’s fame was  as much a product of her scandalous love life as her scandalous music.  

She once told a gossip columnist that she had just gotten married. The gossip columnist asked, ‘well, who's the man?’ And she scoffed and said, ‘Man? It's a woman.”’. While Wilson finds no evidence of such a union, the story still proves her remarkable openness about her sexuality and her unapologetic attitude.  

According to Bentley’s testimony, in 1930 she lived with a woman named Beatrice Robert. A year later, Bentley had a public marriage to an unknown white woman during a civil ceremony in New Jersey. In a world where gay marriage and interracial marriages were still taboo, this was a major statement and says a lot about the LGBT history of America that is often forgotten. She also claimed to have married a white woman in Atlantic City.  

However, as laws became more controlling, Bentley eventually had to carry special permits giving her permission to perform in male attire, and she was frequently harassed for doing so.    

Sadly, Bentley’s pride in her sexuality seems to have been worn down by repressive society. Despite being openly lesbian for much for her career, she started wearing dresses during the McCarthy Era. When she relocated to Los Angeles, she married J. T. Gipson, who died in 1952,  the same year in which she married Charles Roberts, a cook in Los Angeles. She and Charles were married in Santa Barbara, California and went on a honeymoon in Mexico. However, the pair quickly divorced and Roberts later denied that he had ever married her, suggesting that the marriage was not a genuine connection based on a new found love but rather doomed from the start. (5/8) 

“For many years, I lived in a personal hell,” she wrote. “Like a great number of lost souls, I inhabited that half-shadow no man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes.” 

In 1952, Bentley wrote her life story in an article for Ebony magazine. After a lifetime of loneliness, she wrote that she had undergone medical treatment that awakened her “womanliness. The article was accompanied by photos of Bentley wearing a matronly white housedress and performing the role of homemaker—preparing meals, making the bed for her husband, wearing a dress with` flowers in her hair. 

Bentley’s biographers believe that Bentley’s tale about being “cured” in the Ebony article was likely a response to the McCarthy Era and its hostile claims that homosexuality and communism were threats to the country. Wilson also says that Bentley, who was aging and no stranger to reinvention, was likely making deft use of the press. “I like to believe that Gladys Bentley had her thumb on the pulse of the time. She knew what was popular, what she could do, and what people would pay to see,” he says. He said:  

“One of the frustrating and actually joyous things about Gladys Bentley was she was constantly inventing herself. 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.” 

True or not, it’s heartbreaking that a woman who had not only accepted her gender non-conformity and sexuality, but embraced it publically one day came to reject her identity and believe that she needed “cured”. But given the trauma of her childhood and the increasingly racist and homophobic society in which she lived, it is perhaps unsurprising that she sought refuge in heteronormativity.  (6/8) 

 

In 1958, Bentley, who grew up in Philadelphia, appeared on Groucho Marx’s game show “You Bet Your Life” where she said she was from Port-au-Spain (her mother happened to be Trinidadian). She took a seat at the piano on the set and performed a song that showed a vocal range and confidence that hadn’t diminished since her days in Harlem. 

She had been living in California with her mother and was waiting to be ordained as a minister in the Temple of Love in Christ, Inc. 

Bentley died unexpectedly of of pneumonia at her home in Los Angeles on January 18, 1960, aged 52. Interestingly, given their difficult relationship, she is buried beside her mother at Lincoln Memorial Park in Carson, California. (7/8) 

 

Aside from her musical talent and success, Bentley is a significant and inspiring figure for the black/LGBT community/ies, and a prominent figure during the Harlem Renaissance. She was revolutionary in her masculinity: "Differing from the traditional male impersonator, or drag king, in the popular theater, Gladys Bentley did not try to 'pass' as a man, nor did she playfully try to deceive her audience into believing she was biologically male. Instead, she exerted a 'black female masculinity' that troubled the distinctions between black and white and masculine and feminine". 

Her name doesn’t have the same recognition as many of her Harlem Renaissance peers, in part, because the risqué nature of her performances would have kept her out of mainstream venues, newspapers and history books. Today though, Bentley’s story is resurfacing and she is seen as an African-American woman who was ahead of her time for proudly loving other women, wearing men’s clothing and singing bawdy songs. 

Dwandalyn Reece, curator of music and performing arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture says: “I think not only of the performative side but that Bentley was a working woman”. Reece described a letter in the collection which shows that Bentley reprimanded a club owner who failed to pay her. “It makes you wonder and ask more questions about what her challenges were in the professional arena and if this was all easy for her,” Reece says. 

Portraits of Bentley are now held in the music collections of the African American History museum, where the performer is both a face of the Harlem Renaissance and an example of a woman who on her own terms navigated the entertainment business during the Great Depression and Prohibition Eras. 

I agree with Wilson that: “Gladys Bentley should be remembered for being a gender outlaw. She was just defiant in who she was, and for gender and sexuality studies today, she shows the performance of gender.”