There’s probably no one who personifies the history of the LGBTQ+ community in the US better than Gladys Bentley, once one of the biggest superstars in the country and a real trailblazer. At a time highly constrained by norms and taboos for the black community, queer people, and women, Bentley managed to thrive. But how did this woman, who came from a very poor background and had basically all odds against her to claim a position of privilege, change the status quo?
Bentley was born in 1907 to a very poor family. As the eldest of four children, she experienced rejection from the very first moment of her life. According to her, her mother had always wanted a boy, and her being a girl made her mom reject her automatically, to the point that her grandma had to feed her for months until the family convinced the mother to take care of her baby. That emotional and physical neglect was followed by sixteen years of rejection, during which she was forced to visit several doctors to “cure” her unfeminine nature. From quite an early age, she knew she was different. She felt more comfortable wearing her brothers’ suits, and even developed a crush on one of her elementary school teachers.
Her family’s insistence pushed her to leave her house and move to New York; to Harlem, to be precise. And the timing couldn’t be better. At that time, Harlem was flourishing culturally and economically. Over the past few decades, the black community had made the neighborhood become one of New York’s most populated ones. By 1923, the time Gladys moved there, Harlem was already one of the hottest spots in Manhattan, mainly thanks to the Prohibition and the many speakeasies in the area. These represented not only a very profitable business for locals but actually many different venues for musicians and artists to perform and display their art, thus giving way to the Harlem Renaissance.
Bentley was finally in a place where she wasn’t only accepted for who she was, but actually praised. She learned to play the piano and had a very powerful voice that soon got her tons of jobs at these venues. She would also perform at private parties and rent events that gave her enough to survive. Perhaps one of the key moments in her life and career was when there was an opening for a pianist at The Mad House, a famous club. They were looking for a male musician and, according to legend, she just replied “there’s no better time for them to start using a girl.” And they did, making her one of their signature shows.
Soon later, Bentley was a hit in the area, but her big outbreak came when she started performing at The Clam House n West 133rd Street, racistly called Jungle Alley. Dressed in male suits (mainly a white one that became her iconic look), she would do parody covers of famous songs with raunchy lyrics about sexuality and race that sometimes went a little too far. Just to give you an idea, one of her most popular numbers was called “Nothing Now Perplexes Like the Sexes, Because When You See Them Switch, You Can’t Tell Which is Which.” Still, people loved her style and confidence both on and off the stage.
Gladys Bentley became a queer icon of her time not only because of her sexual openness, but also her daring attitude against social conventions. She never tried to hide who she was; on the contrary, she loved speaking about it since it was the way to normalize identity. In the thirties, when she was at the peak of her fame, she decided to do the unthinkable for LGBTQ+ members of the time: marry her partner. Though it’s not clear who she was, we do know that she was a white woman and that their marriage was a civil ceremony in New Jersey.
As her success and fame kept growing, so did her ambition. By the thirties, she was constantly on the newspapers. She had her own radio special in Hoboken and even became the inspiration for various literary characters. But, as we said before, her fame brought more ambition, and the iconic venue that gave her everything became too little for her. She moved her show from Harlem to Broadway in an attempt to bring her act to other audiences. However, it didn’t work out very well.
Not only did she have to change some of the numbers that were seen as obscene (at many of her shows, police had to lock the doors of the venues where she performed), but her show also lost some of the powerful traits it had. She eventually returned to perform at Harlem, where her fans remained as loyal to her as when she first started. However, the Harlem Renaissance was starting to fade and the repeal of the Prohibition Act in 1933 ended up killing some of the music and entertainment scene.
In 1949, an article from the Pittsburgh Courier claimed that the Harlem Renaissance icon had been married to a man and sent to an institution to “cure” her . Three years later, she published a piece in Ebony magazine in which she confirmed she had married a man and that she was “a woman again” thanks to “the miracle” of hormone treatment. Regarding the marriage, it’s unclear whether she did get married or not, since the alleged husband, Charles Roberts (a 20-year-old cook) later on denied the marriage. However, what was more striking about her article was his declaration about her sexuality and identity.
Many believe she had to play it safe due to the changing times the country was experiencing. By the early fifties, McCarthyism made of the US a highly conservative country that persecuted those who didn’t align with the government’s ideas. Homosexuality was one of those differences that could even put people in prison. Another theory is she became an extremely religious woman who was even about to be ordained as a minister in the Temple of Love In Christ, Inc. just when she passed, in 1960, from pneumonia.
We started by saying that she was the embodiment of LGBTQ+ history in the US, and she was. She took advantage of the freedom she experienced at a rare and exceptional moment in history. But when things got more difficult and even dangerous, like many, she hid her identity. Either way, she managed to break barriers and live freely not caring about anything or anyone else but her. And for that, she should be praised and honored.
