- Born
- 12 August 1907Philadelphia, USA
- Died
- 18 January 1960Los Angeles, USA · aged 52
Gladys Bentley
A Harlem blues performer whose tuxedo, piano playing and desire for women challenged the rules of her time.
Gladys Bentley was born in Philadelphia in 1907. She left home as a teenager and found work in Harlem, performing at rent parties and in the clubs that flourished during Prohibition.
At Harry Hansberry’s Clam House she became known for her powerful piano playing, deep voice and comic rewritings of popular songs. Dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, she sang sexually explicit lyrics and flirted with women in the audience. Her success made a visibly masculine lesbian performer part of Harlem’s celebrated nightlife.
Bentley recorded for Okeh and later worked in California. The conditions that had allowed her stage persona to flourish changed, however, as economic pressures and restrictions on gender expression narrowed the spaces available to her.
In 1952 she published “I Am a Woman Again” in “Ebony”, claiming that treatment had changed her sexuality and that she had married. The article is best understood within the intense pressure placed on gay and lesbian people during the McCarthy era, rather than as evidence that sexuality could be medically “cured”. Bentley died in Los Angeles in 1960, aged 52.