Gladys Bentley was known as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player."
Courtesy of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Born: August 12, 1907, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died: January 18, 1960, in Los Angeles, California
Known For: Blues singer and entertainer
The risk-taking Blues singer Gladys Bentley, who went by the stage name “Bobbie Minton,” pioneered androgyny by pushing the limits of gender, sexuality, class, and race in her personal and performance life. Gladys was constantly sent home from school during her childhood for wearing her younger brothers’ suits, and her parents tried to find remedies for her. At the age of sixteen, Gladys moved to Harlem, where she found more acceptance in a community. She began her singing career at buffet flats and speakeasies in Harlem’s Jungle Alley, an area filled with nightclubs and cabarets where the white and black community intermingled, singing popular white ballads and changing the lyrics to ones with lewd messages. In 1928, Bentley released eight singles and headlined nightclubs like The Ubangi Club, The Apollo, The Cotton Club, and Harry Hansberry’s Clam House. She created a show with her playing the piano adorning tuxedos and a top hat, with a chorus of drag queens accompanying the lively performances. Bentley spent her last decades in California where she occasionally wrote songs and performed, but never at the level she was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Notable Works:
Notable Works:
Nights at the Ubangi Club and Harry Hansberry's Clam House
At the height of her stardom, Bentley wowed the audience with her piano playing, flirtatious attitude with women in the audience, deep, masculine voice, and sexual-innuendo-filled lyrics to popular songs. Harry Hansberry’s Clam House on 133rd Street was a well-known gay speakeasy where people all over New York come to enjoy entertainment and alcohol. Some reports say that the Clam House was looking for a male piano player, so Gladys filled the position by dressing as a male. As a headliner at the Ubangi Bar, Gladys performed her gender-bending blues performances with a chorus full of eight male drag queens. The club attracted a mixed straight and gay clientele and did not segregate the audiences based on race. In 1937, the Ubangi Club faced citations after a law prohibited cross-dressing entertainment and serving alcohol during the Prohibition era.
Matchbook from the Ubangi Club circa 1930s with an advertisement of Bentley's performance.
A map of "Jungle Alley," W. 133rd St. between Lenox and Seventh avenues in Harlem, featuring landmark clubs from the Harlem Renaissance, 1933.
Map courtesy of the Library of Congress
"You Bet Your Life" Performance
Nearing the end of her life, Bentley performed on Groucho Marx’s Television show, “You Bet Your Life,” in May 1958. She performed a version of the song “Them There Eyes,” dressed differently than her previous performances. Though her stage appearance changed, her confidence on stage and mighty vocal range never changed.
An advertisement of Gladys Bentley from "The New York Amsterdam News" in 1928 announcing her new recordings.
Courtesy of JD Doyle Archives
"Worried Blues"
In 1928, Bentley recorded the song “Worried Blues” for Okeh Records. The lyrics serve the message of how men treat women with lyrics that express that women can tend to themselves.
“What made you men folk treat us women like you do?
I don’t want no man that I got to give my money to.”
Though she was open with her homosexuality, the record label often made her record songs that were “undeniably and audaciously heterosexual…the women in these songs define themselves in relation to men” (James Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies, 171). These songs never reflected what Bentley portrayed on the stage of clubs with her foul-mouthed, cross-dressing, and sexually explicit lyrics.
Impact:
Impact:
Gladys Bentley embraced her sexuality and “bulldagger” (masculine) identity and finally felt free to express herself on stage. She is considered one of the first drag kings, and people adored her for her openness.
Langston Hughes once wrote: “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.”
White patron of Harlem clubs, author, and photographer, Carl van Vechten wrote, “when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder.” He also modeled an outgoing piano player on Bentley in the novel, Parties (1930).
Excerpt from Langston Hughes' autobiography "The Big Sea" from 1940.
Gladys Bentley before a performance in New York City, circa 1940.
Courtesy of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
"I Am A Woman Again" article in Ebony Magazine.
Courtesy of Digital Transgender Archives
Bentley and her husband, Charles Roberts, 1952.
Courtesy of Jet Magazine and Queermusicheritage.com
Ashtray from Mona's Club 440, the first lesbian bar that opened in 1936. Bentley was a frequent headliner at the club.
Courtesy of Digital Transgender Archives and Queermusicheritage.com
During the Lavender Scare in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a mass interrogation and firing of LGBT-identifying people. In 1952, an article by Gladys Bentley titled “I Am a Woman Again” was published in Ebony magazine. Bentley claimed in the article that she received conversion therapy through the form of hormonal treatments that enabled her to stray away from women and find love in men. The article was filled with photographs of Gladys performing wifely duties for her new husband, Charles Roberts, a cook from California. Bentley claims to seek redemption for her violating “the accepted code of morals” and renounces her lesbianism.
Many women and men reviewed the article and shared similar experiences of being homosexual, but finding love in heterosexual relationships that tended to their needs. With others upset that she changed herself with the climate of society, especially with claims of marrying a white woman in Atlantic City, New Jersey civil ceremony in 1931.
Courtesy of Digital Transgender Archives
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