Black History Month: Daily Updates

Gladys Bentley - Performer (1907-1960)

At the height of her career during the 1920s and 1930s, Gladys Bentley was the most well-known and financially successful black women in the United States. Born in working-class Philadelphia, Bentley moved to New York City at the age of 18 at a time when gay and lesbian nightclubs began to emerge and the Harlem Renaissance - a movement propelled by its many lesbian, gay, and bisexual luminaries - was transforming the Manhattan neighborhood into a haven for artists and scholars.

As a performer, Bentley stood out not only for her talents - she sang and played the piano - but for her appearance. “For the customers of the club, one of the unique things about my act was the way I dressed,” Bentley wrote in 1952. “I wore immaculate white full dress shirts with stiff collars, small bow ties, and skirts, oxfords, short Eton jackets, and hair cut straight back.” From her early days in Harlem, she began performing on Park Avenue, soon moving there to a luxury apartment with servants and chauffeur. Langston Hughes described Bentley as “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 1952, at the height of the repressive McCarthyism that ended the careers and livelihoods of many non-conforming artists and performers, Bentley penned an article for Ebony Magazine denouncing her life as a lesbian. As described in the Smithsonian Magazine, the piece is now largely seen to be a fictional account written out of desperation:

Scholars who have studied Bentley’s life said that the story Bentley told 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. . . Bentley, who was aging and no stranger to reinvention, was likely making deft use of the press. 

Gladys Bentley continued to perform into the 1950s, but less frequently. Although she had announced that she had written a book of her life story, it was never published before her death from pneumonia in 1960. Bentley was one of the many individuals memorialized in the New York Times’ Overlooked series featuring obituaries of “about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.”

In their words

“ … the world has tramped to the doors of the places where I have performed to applaud my piano playing and song styling. These people came to acclaim me as a performer and yet bitterly condemn my personal way of living.”

Learn more

READ: "How Does A Bulldagger Get Out of the Footnote?or Gladys Bentley's Blues" by Regina V. Jones, ninepatch

LISTEN: Singing the Gender-Bending Blues - Sidedoor podcast, Smithsonian (27 min)

WATCH: Before Stonewall, Episode 3: Gladys Bentley (16 min)

BONUS PERFORMANCES: 

• Watch Gladys Bentley on "You Bet Your Life" with Groucho Marx - (3 min)
• Listen to the album Ground Hog Blues by Gladys Bentley (24 mins)