Feb. 27, 2006: Gladys Bentley

 Gladys Bentley:

Profiles in Courage for Black History Month

Gladys Bentley was born on August 12, 1907. She was the eldest of 4 children born to a Trinidad born mother, Mary Mote (Bentley) and an American born father, George L. Bentley. Gladys left home at 16 years old. Like many African Americans of her generation she ended up in New York City's Harlem, the capital of "The New Negro ".

Bentley left Pennsylvania at 16 to be part of the Harlem Renaissance. She began singing at rent parties and buffet flats and moved on to speakeasies and nightclubs. later she would headline the popular speakeasy the Clam House as well as the Ubangi Club.

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".

She wowed audiences with her powerful voice and obscene parodies of blues standards and show tunes and was famous for her glamorous girlfriends. Very open about her sexuality, Bentley also performed at lesbian bars and once told a gossip columnist she had married a white woman while in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Advertisement for Mona's Club 440 in 1942, with the explicit use of the word "gay" featured prominently. The word "gay" during the 1940s also denoted "happy," and to the casual reader even the reference to "butch," meaning masculine in gay argot, might have escaped attention.

However, the discerning, sophisticated, 1942 reader would quickly understand that Mona's Club 440 catered to an almost exclusively woman audience during World War II.

Gladys Bentley carved out a place for herself amidst this curiosity, 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 signature tux and top hat , she openly and riotously flirted with women in the audience. Her popularity and salary was ever increasing as she was frequently mentioned in many of the entertainment columns of the day.

During the McCarthy era, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohen and possibly McCarthy himself became social dictators. Although gay and lesbian organizations like The Daughters Of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society were formed at this time, the lives of many homosexuals were ruined. Bentley, who for so long had been one of THE most open about her homosexuality, was of course a sitting duck for persecution. Out of desperate fear for her own survival (particularly with an aging mother to support) Gladys Bentley 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). In 1952 she does seem to have married a man named Charles Roberts. He was a cook and 16 years younger than Bentley, who lied on the marriage certificate, stating her age as 36 rather than 45. The two eventually divorced. Bentley did manage to still perform, usually at the Rose Room in Hollywood.

She recorded a single on the Flame label and appeared twice on Groucho Marx's' television show. At this stage, Bentley became an active and (truly) devoted member of "The Temple of Love in Christ, Inc.". She was about to become an ordained minister in the church when she died of a flu epidemic in 1960 at the age of 52.

For her total acceptance of who she was and her perception of the times, NBJC salutes, Gladys Bentley, a true, African American Shero.