Gladys Bentley: A Stud to Remember
Gladys Bentley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1907. Like many African Americans of her generation she ended up in New York Citys’ Harlem , the capital of “The New Negro “. For Gladys , her lesbianism made her need to strike out on her own all the more urgent. As she would recall many years later in an Ebony Magazine Article , “It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so….From the time I can remember anything ,even as I was toddling , I never wanted a man to touch me…Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys clothes than in dresses”.
Gladys Bentley carved out a place for herself, playing at rent parties and the legendary speakeasies of “Jungle Alley” at 133 between Lenox and Seventh Avenue. She would transform popular tunes of the day with raunchy naughty playful lyrics. Dressed in her signature tux and top hat , she openly and riotously flirted with women in the audience. Although on her recordings she did not dare have lesbian lyrics , she certainly played up this image in the clubs and in public.
Bentley associated with many famous gay and lesbian African-Americans of the time, including author Langston Hughes, poet Countee Cullen and comedian Moms Mabley, and was rumored to have had an affair with singer Bessie Smith. She lived for a time in a Park Avenue apartment, complete with servants, and tooled around in a beautiful car, when she wasn’t parading down fashionable 7th Avenue dressed in men’s clothing.
Bentley was such a colorful cultural figure that characters based on her appeared in numerous novels of the time. She was also fodder for the gossip columns: Lois Sobel, a wannabe Hedda Hopper, claimed that the outrageous singer had even staged a “bull dagger wedding,” marrying an unnamed white lesbian lover in a ceremony in Atlantic City. Of course, Bentley was the one wearing the tux.
Beyond the wild aspects of her personal life, Bentley is an important historical figure for the way she integrated elements of lesbian and gay desire into her public performances. In 1930, a performer named Gene Mailin created an act in which he appeared as an openly gay man, igniting what came to be known as the “Pansy Craze” in New York’s speakeasies. Prohibition audiences, emboldened by their disregard of liquor laws and titillated by sexual differences, had an insatiable curiosity for nightclub novelty acts. Bentley rode the wave and flaunted her lesbianism in shows such as the Ubangi Club Revue, in which she was supported by a chorus of men dressed in female drag.
Audiences of politicians, European royalty, and high society followed Black and gay customers from Greenwich Village to Harlem just to experience La Bentley from 1925 to 1940. Then McCarthyism swept the United States and Bentley’s trademark lesbian act became a liability. Bentley , who for so long had been one of THE most open as regards her homosexuality , was of course a sitting duck for persecution. Out of desperate fear for her own survival( particularly with an ageing mother to support) she started wearing dresses , and sanitizing her act. In 1950 , Bentley wrote a desperate , largely fabricated article for Ebony entitled “I am Woman Again” in which she claimed to have cured her lesbianism via female hormone treatments and was finally at peace after a “hell as terrible as dope addiction”. She claimed to have married a newspaper columnist named J.T. Gibson ( a man who soon after publicly denied that the two had ever wed). These desperate attempts to survive do not diminish her previous accomplishments. For many years ,on a daily basis , she took risks that would not be common until the Stonewall era. Living as a lesbian must have been hard for a Black woman at that time. Near the end of her life Bentley became a devout member of The Temple of Love in Christ. She died of influenza in 1960.
