Gladys Bentley (1907-1960) was perhaps her truest self onstage, in her top hat and tuxedo, belting out the blues and flirting with the audience. She defied gender conformity, becoming a truly idiosyncratic performer.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s musician was perhaps her truest self onstage, in her top hat and tuxedo, belting out the blues and flirting with the audience. Amid a cultural moment of creative exploration, she defied gender conformity, becoming a truly idiosyncratic performer.
Let’s talk about Gladys Bentley.
Gladys Bentley was born on August 12, 1907, to a Trinadadian mother and an American father. Gladys’ birthplace has often been listed as Philadelphia, where she grew up.
But in a rare television appearance in 1958, she told Groucho Marx she’d been born in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
The oldest of four, Gladys weathered an unhappy childhood. From a young age, she refused to play along with gender conformity. Her family resisted her early attraction to women. Gladys poured much of her frustration and confusion into music, emerging as a talented singer and piano player.
At 16, Gladys ran away to New York City. It was the dawn of the Prohibition Era, and speakeasies -- establishments that illegally sold liquor -- sprang up across the city. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing.
Gladys immediately began performing at house parties and illegal brownstone basement clubs. When the Clam House, Harlem’s immensely popular gay speakeasy, announced an opening for a male piano player, Gladys jumped at the chance.
It was there, at 133rd street and seventh avenue, that Gladys’ career skyrocketed.
In a top hat and perfectly tailored tuxedo, Gladys belted out original blues numbers and lewd parodies of popular songs. She often tangled with male entitlement and abuse, simultaneously declaring her own sexual autonomy and flirting with women in the audience. In tackling the patriarchy, Gladys was continuing the legacy of performers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.
But Gladys also incorporated her own sexuality and gender presentation into her act. While her pronouns were publicly feminine, Gladys became one of the first performers to embrace a non-binary identity.
“Even though they knew me as a male impersonator,” she later wrote, “They still could appreciate my artistry as a performer.”
Gladys drew crowds from around the country with her performances, becoming Harlem’s most famous lesbian entertainer -- a feat, given the Renaissance’s thriving queer community.
Gladys was also a muse. She appeared in Langston Hughes’ autobiography, in now-public letters between Harlem socialites, and as a character in at least three novels.
Hughes wrote that she 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.”
In the mid-1930s, Gladys began performing at the Ubangi Club, just a few blocks away from the Clam House. There, it was said, Gladys commanded a cast of 30, often appearing onstage with a backup crew of drag queens.
But post-Prohibition, Gladys struggled to find her footing. Her fame, in New York and elsewhere, had grown, but she herself had become less acceptable as the Depression trudged on.
In 1937, Gladys moved out to California. Some of the venues there made her wear a skirt, but she was still Gladys, still talented and clever and bawdy. For a while, she built a home base out of Mona’s 440 Club, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco.
Then, the Lavender Scare swept across the country. Creatives and artists came under attack. And in 1952, Gladys penned an essay called “I Am A Woman Again” for Ebony Magazine, writing that she’d been taking hormones to turn her heterosexual. She never stopped touring, but she began appearing in women’s clothing, and even claimed to have been married twice to men (though at least one of them denied it).
Gladys Bentley died in 1960, at the age of 52, from the flu. For a time, she was the reigning monarch of Harlem. On an old map tracing the city’s speakeasies, you can still find her old haunts. Gladys’ Clam House sits snugly between Lenox and Seventh. A dashing figure pounds away at the Piano. “Gladys Bentley,” it reads, “Wears a tuxedo and highhat.”
All month we’ll be talking about Musicians. For more on why we’re doing what we’re doing, check out our newsletter, Womannica Weekly. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram @EncyclopediaWomannica and you can follow me directly on twitter @jennymkaplan.
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