Thursday Open Thread: Harlem Renaissance Tea

Good Morning POU! Today’s tea time is a very interesting look at the life of entertainer Gladys Bentley.

Gladys Bentley, called the Dapper Diva, was one entertainer who openly flouted the gender and sexuality constraints of the 1920s and 30s. Bentley, who was the star performer at Harry Hansberry’s Clam House in the 1920s and the Ubangi Club in the early 1930s, became famous for performing in men’s clothing. She was known for singing raunchy songs about her female lovers while flirting with women in the audience.

In a highly publicized 1931 civil ceremony, Bentley married her then-girlfriend, a white woman. Bentley’s fame declined after the mid-1930s, but she left behind several excellent blues recordings on the Okeh, Victor, Excelsior, and Flame labels. Bentley’s artistry and courageous defiance of contention have made her an icon of early twentieth century LGBTQ history.

In 1934, a midtown Manhattan nightclub called King’s Terrace was padlocked by the police after an observer complained of the “dirty songs” performed there.

The after-theater club near Broadway was where a troupe of “liberally painted male sepians with effeminate voices and gestures” performed behind entertainer Gladys Bentley, who was no less provocative for early 20th-century America. Performing in a signature white top hat, tuxedo and tails, Bentley sang raunchy songs laced with double-entendres that thrilled and scandalized her audiences.

And while the performance of what an observer called a “masculine garbed smut-singing entertainer” led to the shutdown of King’s Terrace, Bentley’s powerful voice, fiery energy on the piano and bold lyrics still made her a star of New York City nightclubs.

Her name doesn’t have the same recognition as many of her Harlem Renaissance peers, in part, because the risqué nature of her performances would have kept her out of mainstream venues, newspapers and history books. Today though, Bentley’s story is resurfacing and she is seen as an African-American woman who was ahead of her time for proudly loving other women, wearing men’s clothing and singing bawdy songs.

Years before Bentley played midtown nightclubs, she got her musical career started at rent parties, where people in Harlem would cover the costs by charging admission for private parties with alcohol and live performances.

“She quickly made a name for herself as somebody who sang ribald songs,” says one historian. “She would take popular songs of the day and just put the filthiest lyrics possible. She took the songs ‘Sweet Alice Blue Gown’ and ‘Georgia Brown,’ and combined them and it became a song about anal sex.”

“For the customers of the club, one of the unique things about my act was the way I dressed,” Bentley wrote. “I wore immaculate full white dress shirts with stiff collars, small bow ties and shirts, oxfords, short Eton jackets and hair cut straight back.”

Langston Hughes praised Bentley as “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.”

As her star rose, Bentley began playing larger Harlem venues, like the Cotton Club and the iconic gay speakeasy the Clam House. Her act drew white patrons from outside of Harlem, including writer and photographer Carl van Vechten, who based a fictional blues singer in one of his novels off of her, writing that “when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder.”

By the late 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance and Gladys Bentley, had lost their allure. The Prohibition Era had come to an end, and now white pleasure-seekers frequented Harlem far less than before.

Bentley moved to California, where she continued recording music, touring and performing in upscale supper clubs and bars, but Wilson says her act was a “toned down” version of what it was at the height of her fame in New York.

By the 1950s, Bentley was approaching middle age and the roaring 20s of her youth and the Harlem Renaissance community that flirted with modernism was now a thing of her past.

In 1952, Bentley wrote her life story in an article for Ebony magazine, entitled “I Am A Woman Again.” In the article, she described the life of a glamorous performer who silently struggled with herself. “For many years, I lived in a personal hell,” she wrote. “Like a great number of lost souls, I inhabited that half-shadow no man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes.”

After a lifetime of loneliness, she wrote that she had undergone medical treatment that awakened her “womanliness.” She claimed to have married twice, though Wilson says that one of the men denied ever having been married to Bentley. The article was accompanied by photos of Bentley wearing a matronly white housedress and performing the role of homemaker—preparing meals, making the bed for her husband, wearing a dress and flowers in her hair.

By 1958, she said she had completed an autobiography, “If This Be Sin,” but it was never published. Bentley died in 1960, from complications of the flu, at 52, while studying to become a Christian minister.

Resources:

This Great Blues Singer Broke All The Rules

A gender-bending blues performer who became 1920s Harlem royalty.

Ebony Magazine, August 1952