Gladys Bentley
| Gladys Bentley | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Gladys Alberta Bentley |
| Also known as | Barbara "Bobbie" Minton |
| Born |
August 12, 1907 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | January 18, 1960 (aged 52) Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Genres | Blues |
| Occupation(s) | Singer |
| Years active | 1920s–1950s |
Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance.
Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience.
On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones.
Bentley was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of George L. Bentley, an American, and his wife, Mary Mote, a Trinidadian. In Bentley’s Ebony article, she wrote about trouble in the home as she was growing up and the relationship between her and her mother. She was the eldest of four children in a poor family and always felt unwanted or rejected, because her mother desperately wanted her to have been born a boy: "When they told my mother she had given birth to a girl, she refused to touch me. She wouldn’t even nurse me and my grandmother had to raise me for 6 months on a bottle before they could persuade my mother to take care of her own baby." She believed that growing up feeling rejected shaped her behavior; she never wanted a man to touch her, hated her brothers, wore boys’ clothes, and had a crush on one of her female teachers in elementary school. Sociologists and psychiatrists at the time called her case "extreme social maladjustment" due to her home dynamic.
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