She Can't Be a Woman! Gladys Bentley's Lesbian Identity

Shelby Mickler

Mar 15, 20204 min read

Sexual-divergency was old new to this blues singer who brought self-expression to 1930s Harlem, NYC.

Much of Gladys Bentley's personal life is somewhat of a mystery. We only know snippets based off of what sensationalizing magazines and newspapers published about her, along with some sparse anecdotes she herself provided.

After running away from home at age 16 due to a bad family life, Gladys heard that Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a notorious gay speakeasy in Harlem, New York City, was looking to hire a male pianist. So, she changed her name to "Bobbie Minton," put on a top hat and tux, played piano, and belted classic blues tunes for them.

Bobbie quickly rose to stardom as a comical and risqué performer while working for the Clam House. She primarily performed covers of existing songs, and often put a promiscuous and sexual twist on the classics. Her songs featured references to relationships with both men and women, and she even flirted with all audience members regardless of gender while she sang. She even shocked the world with a public marriage to another (white!) woman in 1931.

“Some of us where the symbols and badges of our non-conformity.” —Gladys Bentley

Gladys's presence alone was important in the LGBT community. You probably don't need to be told that the 1920s and 1930s were no safe space for any LGBT person—yet Harlem had a somewhat loud gay community of performers, and Gladys outshone them all. She is now recognized as one of the most famous black performers of her time.

Gladys struggled with her lesbianism, as well as her gender, for much of her life (as anyone would, if they were gay and lived in the '20s-'30s). Even with her fame, she was constantly a victim of homophobia, racism, and sexism. She was required to carry a permit in order to wear men's clothes in public, and the Clam House kept her from taking her act to Broadway. Her shows often received so many complaints that the police locked the doors to her building keep people from showing up.

When she moved to California in the '40s, she began to experience much worse oppression as federal laws were put in place to make women conform to feminine expectations. Finally, in a tell-all article in Ebony magazine published in 1952, Gladys claimed she had been "cured" of her "afflictions" by undergoing hormone therapy in an infamous article titled, "I Am A Woman Again." In the article, Gladys explains that she was miserable leading a life "between sexes" and experienced radical change when she was administered estrogen shots. Images in the article show a domesticated Gladys, cooking dinner for her husband and keeping house. These images seem to emphasize the submissive role she has now taken, compared to her non-conforming identity as a drag performer. It uses the words "domestic" and "modest," obvious opposites to her "former life."

Images of Gladys from the Ebony article she authored, titled "I Am A Woman Again"

The article itself is riddled with homophobia, both on Gladys' and the magazine's part. But Gladys was living in a time where homosexuality was believed to be a disease of the mind, as something that needed to be "cured" and "fixed," and many modern day scholars sympathize with Gladys' obvious turmoil over her sexuality.

But now, historians argue that Gladys was actually transgender, and believed herself to be a man through much of her life—thus, erasing her critically important lesbian identity.

Julia Diana Robertson, award-winning author of the groundbreaking article "Bentley Was Pushed to Admit Lesbians aren’t Women…A Stance Now Eerily Echoed," explains how these "same regressive ideas that pushed [Gladys] over the edge while she was alive, are now being used to revise her story, long after her death." Robertson certainly does not negate the fact that there was obviously some element of gender confusion in Gladys's life—but she attributes this to Gladys's attraction to women and how homosexuality alone often causes gender confusion.

We now know that gender is not black and white. However, Robertson insists that we cannot allow this to erase Gladys's lesbianism and the impact her specifically lesbian identity had on the time period.

"It’s 2019," she writes, addressing the erasure of lesbians in media and in history, "and rather than moving away from the 'she’s really a man' trope that’s been obsessively maintained by the male-dominated media forever, we’re still stuck here." Gladys was a victim of a homophobic and sexist time period, and even now she cannot simply exist as a lesbian and a woman—our male-centric history wants to "fix" her, to put her into an "other" box because she, as a tux-wearing, woman-loving "tomboy," does not fit the stereotypical female identity. As Robertson says, "Bentley never needed correcting. In fact, the only thing that’s ever needed correcting, is the persisting and absurd idea, that there’s a wrong way to be female."