April 6, 2026 • 40 mins
Gladys Bentley was a part of the Harlem Renaissance as a performer – she played piano and sang in ways that drew huge crowds starting in the 1920s, and she was completely out as a lesbian. But her story takes some surprising turns.
Research:
- Adkins, Judith. “These People Are Frightened to Death.” Prologue Magazine. National Archives. Summer 2016. Vol. 48, No. 2. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html
- Britannica Editors. "rent party". Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Nov. 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/rent-party
- Chase, Bill. “House Rent Parties Were an Institution.” New York Age. Oct. 29, 1949. https://www.newspapers.com/image/40993834/?match=1&terms=Gladys%20Bentley
- Church, Moira Mahoney. “If This Be Sin: Gladys Bentley And The Performance Of Identity.” University of South Carolia. (Theses and Dissertations.) 2018. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5705&context=etd
- “Colored Detective Lieutenant Acquitted of Murder Charge.” Philadelphia Tribune. Aug. 4, 1927. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1135383911/?match=1&terms=Maceo%20Sheffield
- The Doll House advertisement. Dec. 12, 1947. https://www.newspapers.com/image/580248504/?match=1&terms=Gladys%20Bentley
- “Gladys Bentley, Entertainer, Dies.” Alabama Tribune. Montgomery, Alabama. February 12, 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/image/554602763/?clipping_id=66402293
- “Harlem’s Gladys Alberta Bentley, Friend Of Cary Grant, Stanwyck, And Others, Way ‘Out’ Ahead Of Her Time.” Harlem World. June 24, 2023 https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/harlems-gladys-alberta-bentley-friend-of-cary-grant-stanwyck-and-others-way-out-ahead-of-her-time/
- “J.T. Gipson Dead.” California Eagle. July 17, 1952. https://www.newspapers.com/image/693556889/?clipping_id=172230200
- Levette, Harry. “Movie Lots Gossip.” The Call. Aug, 22, 1952. https://www.newspapers.com/image/957555211/?match=1&terms=%22Never%20Married%20to%20Gladys%20Bentley%22
- Moses, Alvin. “Alvin Moses Says.” Chicago Defender. Dec. 30, 1944. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1135809373/?match=1&terms=Gladys%20Bentley
- “New York Police Launch Drive on Harlem Cafes.” The Chicago Defender. March 17, 1934. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1136311398/?match=1&terms=Gladys%20bentley
- Onion, Rebecca. “An Affectionate 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem Nightlife.” Slate. April 15, 2016. https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/04/e-simms-campbell-s-1932-illustrated-map-of-harlem-nightlife.html
- Roy, Rob. “’8 to the Bar,’ Style Gladys Bentley Made Famous, a World Favorite Today.” The Chicago Defender. May 14, 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1135895140/?match=1&terms=Gladys%20Bentley
- Russonello, Giovanni. “Gladys Bentley.” New York Times. Overlooked. 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/obituaries/gladys-bentley-overlooked.html
- Shah, Haleema. “The Great Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke All the Rules.” Smithsonian. March 14, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-rules-180971708/
- “Wales Padlock Law Censors Risque Theater.” EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/wales-padlock-law-censors-risque-theater
- Wilson, James F. “Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies PERFORMANCE, RACE, AND SEXUALITY IN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE.” University of Michigan Press. 2010.
- Winchell, Walter. “On Broadway.” Evening Courier. Feb. 6, 1933. https://www.newspapers.com/image/480106281/?match=1&terms=%22Gladys%20Bentley%22
- Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Note: Bulldagger Sings the Blues.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 721–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614318
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
So today's topic was part of the Harlem Renaissance. As
a musician, she played piano and she sang in ways
that drew huge crowds starting in the nineteen twenties. She
was unique in that she was completely out as a lesbian,
unusual for the time, but her story takes some really
surprising turns. She is when she has talked about it's
(00:37):
often like gay icon Gladys Bentley. But then there are
some weird parts of her story that do get mentioned
by people, but they don't get picked apart as much
as I would like in terms of like really looking
closely at them. So we're going to do that, and
this one gets a couple of heads ups. So first,
there are some really sad aspects of Gladys's story regarding
(01:00):
her sexual identity and attempts at it's erasure by her
parents and even by Gladys herself. If that sounds painful
to you, just be prepared or maybe skip, because that
was part of an article that she wrote about herself
in the nineteen fifties. That article has been questioned when
it comes to whether she was purposely trying to redact
(01:21):
her queerness as a self protective ruse. Like I said,
we're going to pick that apart when we get to it.
There is also a very brief mention of police brutality,
and there are very brief discussions of song lyrics about
domestic abuse, one also about a sex act. Those are
all very quick though, so just know those are in
(01:42):
the episode. If those are things you might be sensitive
to you, or if you have a younger history buff
that listens, you might want to pre screen from the
very beginning. Gladys Alberta Bentley offers us some contradictions. She
was born on August twelfth, nineteen oh seven. Her place
of birth is almost always given as Philadelphia, and that
(02:04):
includes in obituaries, and she did grow up in Philadelphia.
But during an appearance on the television show You Bet
Your Life in nineteen fifty eight, Graucho Marx asked her
where she was from, and without any hesitation, she said
Port of Spain, Trinidad. Her mother Mary was from Trinidad,
(02:25):
and her father, George was from Philadelphia. If she was
actually born in Trinidad, it seems like the family must
have moved to Philadelphia when she was very young. She
always talked about her childhood as taking place in Philadelphia exclusively,
and never apparently mentioned anything about Trinidad publicly outside of
this one mention on one TV show, just starting.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It out, Gladys, Gladys, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Not always a reliable narrator of her own life. She
would write of her childhood many years later and how
difficult her relationship with her mother was as a kid.
She wrote, quote, many of us who have strayed from
the paths of what society calls normal were once children
in unhappy or broken homes. Children who are rejected, abused, unloved, exploited,
(03:16):
or overprotected do not have a chance to develop that
inner sense of security which will keep them from feeling
abandoned and afraid. However, not all children in situations of
this nature react by feeling alone or fearful. Some children
become aggressive, decide to take the reins of their destiny
(03:37):
in their own hands. That is the way I reacted
to being an unwonted child. So she continues to recount
how her mother really had her heart set on having
a boy. She wanted a boy. She wanted a boy
so much that when she learned she had given birth
to a girl, she actually refused to nurse or even
touch the baby, and for the first six months of
(03:59):
her life, Gladys was raised by her grandmother. Gladys also
described not liking men from the time she was very young,
noting quote, from the time I can remember anything, even
when I was toddling, I never wanted a man to
touch me. I would even run away for my own father.
He felt terrible about his own child avoiding him, but
(04:22):
I would never go to him. I acted the same
way with my uncles and all the rest of the
males who came into my home. She also described hating
her two brothers because they were celebrated while she was scorned,
and she said that she started stealing their suits to
wear when she was nine or ten, and her parents
got very upset about that. Yeah. Also, she ended up
(04:45):
with more brothers than that, but I think she had
two that were born immediately after her that were closest
to her in age. Gladys described herself as a large
and stocky child. Those are her precise words, and it
was something that other kids free equently teased her about.
She later told the press that she started writing songs
when she was eight years old just to keep herself
(05:07):
company because she was lonely and outcast among other kids.
But that was not the only thing that set her
apart from her peers. She also found herself developing a
crush on her teacher, noting quote in class, I sat
for hours watching her and wondering why I was so
attracted to her. At night, I dreamed of her. It's
(05:30):
unclear if Gladys's parents knew about this infatuation with her teacher,
but it does seem that they understood, at least on
some level, that Gladys did not align with the heteronormative
social mores of Philadelphia. The family soon moved to another neighborhood,
but still in the city, and Gladys's mother started taking
her to a series of doctors. Biographers have interpreted this
(05:54):
situation as attempts at conversion therapy. She noted later that
she if you believed that her parents meant well, but
that she didn't need a doctor. She needed love and affection.
Though she and her parents did try to come to
compromises on things like her wearing non frilly girls clothes
instead of her brother's suits. As glad As reached her
(06:16):
teenage years, things at home just got worse, and she
ran away at sixteen to New York, hoping to find
a career as a performer. In nineteen twenty seven, New
York passed a piece of legislation known as the Wales
Padlock Law. This was in response to Manhattan's growing community
of performers, and a lot of those performers were queer
(06:38):
and were pushing against the boundaries of propriety to explore
stories and music that mainstream audiences and the authorities thought
were indecent. One of the last straws that catalyzed the
Whales Padlock Law was May West's Place Sex, which she
starred in and also wrote under the pen name Jane Mast.
(06:58):
That play was rated and soon Senator b Roger Wales
had sponsored an amendment to the Penal Code that regulated
indecent materials to include, among other things, a provision that
the police could just shut down an establishment that was
staging purportedly in decent or sexually degenerate entertainment and then
(07:19):
literally padlocket shut for up to a year. So this
is the New York that Gladys started her career in,
and that law meant that a lot of the material
that she would eventually perform and become really well known
for could get her into trouble. But over the years,
as we'll see, she stayed booked and crowds continued to
(07:39):
show up to hear her play piano and sing her
often very raunchy songs. One of the main reasons for
this was just a matter of location. The police tended
to focus on Broadway in the theater district, and at
that point Gladys was playing venues in Harlem. The law
still applied there, but it was not really in forced
(08:00):
that far north in the city, and as a consequence
of vibrant queer culture flourished there. Drag balls and drag
performances were common, and Bentley, as a cross dressing out lesbian,
became a star. We'll talk about how Gladys Bentley got
started in New York after we pause for a sponsor break.
(08:28):
Gladys Bentley is often talked about for being transgressive, but
she wasn't just transgressive. She was also incredibly talented. When
she got to New York, she started performing at rent
parties in Harlem in the mid nineteen twenty so just
as the Whales padlock law was coming into play. So
our rent party was, as its name suggests, a way
(08:48):
for tenants to raise the funds needed to pay ever
rising rent costs. For a small door charge, people could
join the party and then they also paid for drinks.
Prohibition was effect from the beginning of nineteen twenty to
the end of nineteen thirty three, so the alcohol served
at these parties was home brewed and to draw crowds,
(09:09):
musicians were booked to play. And these parties became these
really boisterous community events where people would gather, drink and dance,
and it was all within the confines of a private residence.
Sometimes in places like brownstones, multiple units would hold the
party at the same time, so it got to be
this immense house party. Innovations in jazz and dances that
(09:31):
would become popular on the swing scene in the decades
that followed came directly out of these neighborhood gatherings, and
Bentley was a very popular draw. Gladys became well known
for performing songs in what was known as eight to
the bar style, meaning unlike the more standard four beats
per bar of music. Each bar would get eight beats,
(09:53):
so a very fast up tempo style. If you are
a musician, or if you talk to musician about music theory,
there's a way more complex discussion about how this can
be represented in time signatures and what actually comprises a
bar of music. But for a lay person, what you
(10:13):
need to know here is this was just a very fast,
super upbeat style. In nineteen fifty five, Rob Roy wrote
an article about what made Bentley's performances stand out, and
that was their uniqueness. Nobody was really doing this eight
to the bar style, aside from some copycats. Roy said
that the trade that being the theater district around New
(10:35):
York's Broadway in fifty second streets quote, preferred listening to
the original, and Gladys was the original. In addition to
being very skilled at uptempo playing and singing, Gladys was
also a very clever lyricist, and she would improvise new
words to popular songs. Often her new verses were very dirty.
(11:00):
In contrast, though to her body lyrics, she dressed like
a dandy. She usually performed in a white tailored men's
tuxedo and a white top hat. She wore her hair
very short, in what would be considered at the time
a very masculine cut. She normally had it slicked back,
and this combination of highly polished visual presentation, her musical talent,
(11:22):
and her very naughty lyrics made her just irresistible to audiences.
And she didn't confine this persona to performance only. She
dressed in men's wear all the time, and she was
as flamboyant and body offstage as she was on. She
self identified as a woman, and she's often referred to
as a drag king in modern discussion, but the term
(11:44):
drag king didn't really exist for almost a half century
after this. She was also not putting on this persona
just for performance the way a lot of drag artists do,
although her promoters did often bill her as a male impersonator.
So it's all little bit tricky here, As is always
the case when we're talking about someone who was queer
(12:05):
before the terminology that we would use today existed, It
is hard to know precisely how Gladys would identify today.
Booied by her popularity, she got an agent, and the
agent got her a record deal for eight recorded songs.
She got four hundred dollars, which she was very excited about,
but she knew she could not live off of that forever,
(12:27):
so she also started going to music clubs and bars
that had musical acts. She would basically ask if she
could play when the build musicians were on their breaks,
she would just play for tips while other people were
having downtime. Then she got a lead on a piano
player opening at a club called the Madhouse, and she
went for an audition. The club wanted a male player,
(12:50):
but when Gladys showed up, they let her play a
set and the audience really loved her, and she said
that after her first song, a white man handed her
a five dollar tip and said, quote, please play something else.
We don't care what it is, just play your terrific.
Bentley was hired on the spot, making thirty five dollars
a week, and those early days she went by the
(13:11):
stage name Barbara Minton or Bobby, and her act became
so popular that she drew huge Enbevor's crowds. Black and
white customers alike flooded into the club. Her pay was
soon raised to one hundred and twenty five dollars a
week plus tips. She was such a draw that the
club changed its name to Barbara's Exclusive Club so that
(13:33):
everybody in the city knew where to find her. A
nineteen forty nine write up by Bill Chase for The
New York Age recalling the Exclusive Club noted quote the
dynamite Gladys Bentley used to draw celebrities like flies to Syrup.
From there, Gladys goot bookings all around Harlem, including a
long run at a place called the Clamhouse. This was
(13:56):
a very well known speakeasy that catered to the queer community,
although straight people also flock to it just to hear Gladys' shows,
and she started making a lot of money because, as
Tracy just said, she appealed the audiences across just about
every demographic. As a consequence, she was able to move
into a luxury apartment on Park Avenue and she had
(14:17):
a full staff there. She also talked about driving a
very nice car. For a while, she had a live
in romantic partner named Beatrice Robert. In nineteen thirty two,
celebrated Black cartoonist E Sims Campbell, who is on my
short list if I can find enough material to research
for it, created this gorgeous illustrated map of Harlem's nightlife
(14:39):
in pen and brush, and this piece, which is now
in the collection of Yale's Benecky Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
features as one of the locations the clam House. It
is labeled as Gladys Clamhouse and you can see the
performer drawn seated at the piano and playing. And then
there's lettering next to this part of the map that
reads what is Bentley? Where's a tuxedo and high hat?
(15:03):
In Walter Winchell's gossip column on Broadway in February eight,
nineteen thirty three, there is just a one line mention
of Gladys and that reads only quote, Gladys Bentley's penthouse
on West fifty fourth is so naughty. While there are
zero details conveyed about exactly what that means, it indicates
(15:24):
that she was well known enough to make a gossip
column with no explainer needed of who she was. She
was so popular that she was also getting bookings in
midtown Manhattan, but this got her into legal trouble with
Harry Hansbury and Nat Palin, who were the owners of
the Clamhouse. They had a multi year contract with Bentley
and had made the club all about her and her acts,
(15:47):
so for her to start taking bookings somewhere else, they said,
was a breach of her contract. As legal maneuvering dragged
on with this, Gladys took other bookings anyway, and that
led to different legal problems. In nineteen thirty four, Gladys
was performing at a club in midtown Manhattan known as
King's Terrace. She had several drag queens performing with her
(16:09):
as backup singers, and she performed songs with lyrics that
some audience members found quite shocking. One song that she
sang pretty often was a riff on the song Alice
Blue Gown, which was written by Joseph McCarthy and Harry
Tierney for the musical Irene. And. While the original song
is a very sweet and innocent number about address that
(16:31):
is Alice Blue, inspired by the color of a dress
worn by Alice Roosevelt, do you want to hear the original?
There's a beautiful Judy Garland recording, but Gladys's version switched
up the lyrics to make this song about anal sex,
and she would often encourage the audience to sing along
with her, which a lot of people did, and they
(16:51):
loved this year reverent act, but some of them were
downright scandalized, and they recorded Gladys to the authorities. This
was the year immediately following the end of prohibition, and
as police were no longer kept busy trying to hunt
down illicit alcohol operations, they turned their attention to the
perceived problem of indecency, and that meant that they started
(17:14):
raiding gay clubs and clubs where gay people performed. So
King's terrorists became a target. One newspaper article about this
opens with kind of a run on sentence quote with
the New York City new deal in city government under
the aegis of Mayor Firilla H. LaGuardia comes at last
(17:35):
the secret police campaign to clean up the nightlife and
cabaret entertainment. It was revealed Thursday when Harold L. Allen's
second Deputy Police Commissioner, ordered almost thirty managers and entertainers
to appear before him to explain irregularities ranging from violation
of the curfew to presentation of lewd entertainment. And so
(17:56):
reform came at last, as it must to all. Once
hoses to Gladys Bentley Race entertainer at the King's Terrace.
So this article went on to quote Harold L. Allen
describing what police saw when they raided the club. Quote,
we have received complaints that the entertainment in certain places
is vile, and we have investigated. I am not easily shocked,
(18:20):
but some of these shows are certainly vile and they
should not continue. So he talked about the various clubs
that had been investigated, and then he described Gladys's act quote.
Following a commonplace song, Gladys Bentley begins a number entitled
There's a hell of a Situation up at Yale, which
is followed by a scene worthy of a Northwestern stag
(18:42):
lumber camp songfest. A chorus of eight liberally painted male
sepiens with effeminate voices and gestures assisted the singer in
throwing this piece of filth at a blushing audience. The
chorus men were dressed in vivid satin pajamas, only slightly
less extreme than the colors of their faces. The chief
(19:02):
and filthiest offering of the evening, however, is a personal
tour of the tables by miss Bentley. At each table,
she stopped to sing one or more versus of a
seemingly endless song in which every word known to vulgar
profanity is used.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
This sounds like the.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Parents in Footloose that don't want dancing to happen.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
He's just so worked up.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Alan then stated that the entertainment was so offensive that
some of the audience left, and also mentioned that Gladys
and her dancers accepted drinks from patrons and described this
as something that would normally happen in what he called
lower class clubs. King's Terrace was shut down by the police.
They literally put a padlock on the door to prevent
(19:50):
anyone from entering. They, of course, were invoking the Whales
Padlock Act. Incidentally, just for clarity, because you might be
wondering the issue with the song There's a hell of
a situation up at Yale, was that that song is
about masturbation. Gladys continued to live her life openly, although
for a while she was back to only playing in Harlem.
(20:11):
She booked a long run at the Ubangy Club at
the corner of one hundred and thirty first Street and
Seventh Avenue, but the white crowds just followed her back
to Harlem. She did not seem to change anything about
her act or about herself. She even told the press
that she had married a white woman in a civil
service in New Jersey. That claim has never been verified.
(20:33):
The woman's name has never been known. Same sex marriages
would not have been legal, so if Gladys and a
woman did get married, if they did find a judge
willing to marry them, that almost certainly would have required
a deception to suggest that one of them was a man.
Gladys probably could have pulled that off, but she was
also really well known, so she probably would have been
(20:56):
recognized unless it was a really blueless judge who wasn't aware.
This one remains kind of a history mystery. Yeah, nobody
has ever figured out if there was really a woman,
if they had maybe a service that wasn't illegal service
like what may have gone on, just big question marks. Eventually,
(21:17):
that King's Terrace scandal was all but forgotten, and Bentley
started getting booked in Midtown again. She headlined at Tondalo's
in Midtown as well as other venues. She still had
her rich alto voice and its range that passed from
these low growley segments to higher trills. She did this
cool thing where she would do the higher notes through
(21:38):
like a closed mouth, through her teeth with incredible skill.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
It was so cool.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
There's a video we'll talk about later that you can
see her playing was as good as ever as she
banged out blues numbers.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
A lot of the.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Songs that she was famous for, maybe surprisingly, in addition
to those filthy ones, had lyrics that were about heteronormative relationships,
although less surprisingly those relationships were not good, and they
often featured narratives of abuse. For example, in a song
called how Much Can I Stand, she sang the lyrics said,
(22:14):
I was an angel, he was born to treat me right?
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Who the devil?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Heard of an angel that gets beat up every night?
How much of that stuff? Can I Stand? In A
similar vein her song called Worried Blues, includes the lyrics
what made you men?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Folk? Treat us women like you do? I don't want
no man that I got to give my money to.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But songs like that, which she sang from the beginning
of her career, continued to be part of her act.
As she got more famous, she also got more and
more refined from a production value standpoint. She hired somebody
else to play the piano while she sang, and the
verve of her stage presence started to get a little
too smooth around the edges for people. It led to
(22:53):
a drop off in crowds. Additionally, as the Great Depression
war on, a lot of clubs started closing, and that
was especially true in Harlem. Still, Gladys was still being
written about with glowing praise. During her run at Tondalayo's
critic Alvin Moses wrote of her quote, if there is
any name on our morning patrol along the Broadway realto
(23:16):
that outrates Gladys Bentley as a draw, you call me
up and tell me who is the owner of it.
Gladys eventually decided to leave New York, and we will
talk about that and the infamous article we referenced at
the top of the show after we hear from the
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
(23:43):
As the nineteen forties wound down, Bentley headed to the
West Coast, and while she did get bookings there, the
audiences of California were less enthusiastic about her style of
presentation and music.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Outside of New.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
York, she had the sharp realization that not everyone was
as willing to let a performer buck against social norms
and basically make that the focus of their act. So
she started to tone her act down, and while she
still wore men's suit jackets and ties, they were more
increasingly paired with skirts instead of trousers. And this wasn't
(24:18):
just a matter of aligning with the Los Angeles attitudes
toward gender presentation. There was actually a legal element to this,
because at least at one of the venues she played,
which was Joaquin zel Rancho, they had to get a
special police permit for her to wear pants on stage.
Her billings sometimes also came off as really odd as well,
(24:40):
making her seem like a novelty act instead of an
accomplished performer. One ad for her run at a venue
called The Dollhouse on Adventura Boulevard touted quote the one
and only Gladys Bentley, She's fat, tan and terrific. I
would not want that as my billing. But whatever, her
(25:00):
days of doing whatever she pleased in terms of her
gender expression and identity really did seem to be coming
to a close, and her career was faltering. In August
of nineteen fifty two, an article written by Gladys appeared
in Ebony magazine with the title I Am a Woman Again.
This was the fascinating and also troubling read kind of
(25:23):
a rollercoaster of a narrative in which she shares the
story of her early life and her problems with her
family and her rise to fame, and then it describes
what she calls the miracle that made her a woman,
writing that it quote came about what I discovered and accepted,
the love and tenderness and true devotion of a man
who loved me unselfishly and whose love I could return,
(25:45):
the awakening in me of the womanliness I tried to suppress. So.
Bedley's account describes a man who she names only as Dawn,
that she met through friends and found that she had
feelings for. She described being confused and scared about these
feelings and not knowing what to do with them, but
(26:05):
also knowing that she wanted to marry him and he
was also very obviously interested in her, And she describes
reading about how if you are feeling doubt about being
with someone you truly love, that you have left God
out of the union. This was in like a religious
book that she had, and she also says that all
of this concern led her to visit a doctor. She
(26:27):
went to that appointment wanting, she said, to talk about
her weight. But when the doctor gave her a full examination,
she described feeling relieved because that was what she actually wanted.
And this doctor told her that she had a developmental
issue with her sex organs, and he started her on
a course of thrice weekly quote injection of female hormones,
(26:49):
and that she said, finally overcame the male hormones in
her body, and then she said she felt free to
get married to a man. This article has a lot
going on beyond that. After she describes this miracle, she
starts the next paragraph by saying flatly that her marriage
to Dawn did not last, but that she got married again.
(27:13):
Quote today I am happily married, and I hope and
pray this marriage will last to J. T. Gibson, well
known West Coast theatrical columnist. This is where it gets
even wilder. The ebony article must have actually come out
to news stands in July. A lot of publications put
out their monthly issues, in this case the August issue.
(27:35):
They actually dropped the month prior, because not only did J. T.
Gibson die in July of nineteen fifty two, but one
of his friends, photographer Masseoh Sheffield, gave a statement to
the press saying that Gibson was really angry about this
article because it was not true. According to Sheffield, one
(27:56):
of the last things Gibson said to him was quote,
I am I am not and have never been married
to Gladys Bentley. I'm going to sue the Blank magazine
for publishing a story stating that I am her husband
in that confession article of hers. And then Gibson was
found dead in a friend's car a few hours after
(28:16):
this conversation. He had parked and then he had an
aneurysm rupture while he was getting out of the vehicle.
So this denial of the marriage is also a mystery
because Gibson was dead and we cannot verify Sheffield's account,
And that account is problematic for a couple of reasons.
So one, it first appeared in a Hollywood gossip column
(28:40):
written by Harry LaVette. Then it got kind of picked
up and repeated in a lot of places, but that
was the earliest mention I could find. And two, Messeo.
Sheffield was a very problematic figure It's sort of interesting
that he's described as a photographer in every reference to him,
because he was a disgraced LAPD detective who then transitioned
(29:01):
into the film industry and became an actor. He also
produced a few films, but photography never appears in his
professional credits. He was actually charged with murder in nineteen
twenty seven when he raided a home on a tip
of illicit alcohol and he shot a young man named
Samuel Faulkner there, which sparked protests in the city. Sheffield
(29:22):
was tried for that murder but acquitted. Several LAPD cops
who testified against him lost their jobs, and soon after
Sheffield also left the force to pursue a film career.
So we don't know if he just managed to somehow
get out from under that if people didn't realize that
(29:43):
he was that detective that had been part of that scandal.
So we don't know. Was Sheffield just trying to get
his name in the paper with his claim about J. T.
Gibson's denial of a marriage to Gladys. The alternative there
is that Gladys did lie in her story, which was
printed in a very large publication, or there's also the
(30:03):
possibility that she and Gibson had some sort of understanding
that Sheffield either didn't know about, or that he was
trying to posthumously distance his friend from Gladys for some reason.
We are never gonna know, but just know that there's
a whole lot of murkiness around this whole part of
her story. In addition to all of the writing about
(30:24):
her life, this multi page article also included a number
of photos of Gladys. She wasn't in her tuxedo or
dapper suits anymore. She's in a dress in every picture,
and some of them she's shown with other well known musicians,
including Louis Armstrong. The other photos, though, show her doing
(30:45):
domestic chores typically associated with women. Each of them has
a short caption about the activity that's being featured, and
then an additional piece of information, so one of them
reads quote, taste testing dinner she has prepared for husband
Jay T.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Gibson.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Miss Bentley enjoys domestic role, which she shunned for years.
She lives in modest, tastefully appointed home directly in rear
of similar homes she purchased for her mother. And another
photo she's making the bed and then yet another she's
selecting jewelry. There are no pictures of either of the
(31:22):
husbands that she mentioned in this piece, So this entire
article seems like such a departure from the life Gladys
Bentley lived in the years prior that it seems confusing
and almost shocking. But this is also an instance where
context really really matters. This article came out in the
(31:42):
middle of the lavender scare, when homosexuality was not just
seen as deviant, it was criminalized. In nineteen forty seven,
five years before Bentley shared this story in Ebony, the
US Park Police, which is part of the National Park Service,
had instituted a sex perversion al elimination program, and there
(32:02):
was also legislation introduced in Congress that labeled homosexuals as
sexual psychopaths. Most of these laws targeted gay men, but
somebody like Gladys, who was a very well known and
very out lesbian performer, wasn't going to fly under the
radar in a country that was gripped by this misguided
notion that same sex attraction was criminal and dangerous. Most
(32:26):
modern queer scholars and historians, when looking at this article
and thinking about all of its nuance, see it as
an effort on Gladys Bentley's part to straightwash her reputation
to try to save her music career. Yeah, this was
really I mean, we've talked about like laws about obscenity
and earlier laws about things like cross dressing, but this
(32:49):
was a time when more queer people were becoming more
visible and there was a big backlash against that. So, like,
as a movement for equal rights was growing and developing, Like,
there was just an onslaught of laws and social mores
and all of that that she would have been targeted by. Yeah,
(33:10):
and a lot of people willing to stoke fear of
anyone who was not heteronormative.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
In September of nineteen fifty two, Gladys got married again,
and this time there were pictures. Her new husband was
Charles Roberts, a twenty eight year old cook from Sacramento.
Gladys was forty five at the time. Newspaper reports said
that they had been dating for only five months, and
if that's the case, that means that they were seeing
each other while she claimed that she was married to
(33:38):
her second husband. But also we just don't have a
lot of information about Charles or about their life together,
and so that has led to some speculation that it
too might have been for show. In the nineteen fifties,
Gladys wrote a book about her life titled If This
Be Sin, but it was never published and there doesn't
appear to be a surviving manuscript article. There is also
(34:01):
a photograph of her typing on a typewriter allegedly working
on this book. She mentioned the book in that same
You Bet Your Life appearance that we mentioned at the
top of the show, and Bentley also played piano on
that program as she sang them their eyes and you
can find this video online. It is so clear why
(34:21):
she was a beloved performer. This is, to the best
of my knowledge, the only actual footage that we have
of her performing. Her presence and her energy just incredibly compelling.
Her vocal style and the way she phrased the verses
with her breath was really unique. She would sing lines
in this sort of staccato style, with each word given
its own very brief, punchy moment. It is one hundred
(34:44):
percent easy to see why people would have flocked to
her shows. At the beginning of February nineteen sixty, Gladys
got a cold and that quickly got worse. She developed pneumonia,
and she died at home on February the eighth. She
was only fifty ten two. Her obituary mentions that she
lived with her mother. No husband was mentioned as next
(35:06):
of ken, so we don't really know what happened regarding
her third marriage. When her mother, Mary died six years later,
she was buried next to Gladys.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
I'd love Gladys.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I have so much to talk about on Friday.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, but right now I have listener mail that's not
about anything this serious at all, but I love it
so much. It's not even really about history. Okay, it's
about Blue. Yeah, I know this email. I read it
this morning, was delighted. I'm excited for people to hear
it now.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
It also validates some feelings I've had about Bluie and
real estate for a while. This is from our listener Ian,
who writes High Ladies. In a recent behind the scenes episode,
one of you mentioned you like watching Blue as escapism.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I watched it this morning while I had coffee. This
letter continues, so I thought you might find this new
story for twenty twenty interesting. A real estate agent who
must have watched too many Bluey episodes. No such things
with their kids realized that the Bluey or Healer Family
Home is a Queenslander style house. It has at least
fifteen rooms, has a massive backyard with a full size
(36:16):
tree in it, and is in a major suburb of Brisbane.
They calculated the Healer Family Home would be worth at
least four million dollars Australian. That's about US two point
eight million. Listen that was six years ago. I bet
it's worth a lot more now. Queenslander style of home
was developed in tropical Queensland, Australia and the age before
air conditioning. They're made out of wood, they have wrap
(36:37):
around verandas to keep sun out and improve cooling, and
they are elevated off the ground to provide extra cooling
and avoid flooding. For a while, you could have stayed
in the real Bluey House. A real Queenslander home was
decorated as the Healer Family Home and was available on Airbnb.
But I think that home has now become a regular
family home that Lucky family. Whilst we are at Pepa
(37:00):
Pig is another TV show which has been popular in Australia.
There was However, one episode which was not played on
Australian TV. In it, Pepa told her friends that spiders
cannot hurt you. This episode was not banned. It is
just that ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, decided it was
not a good idea to show this episode in a
country where spiders can actually hurt you. As for pet tax,
(37:24):
I have attached a couple of pictures of our cat
Trim and our dog Ringo. Ringo sadly died of old
age over a year ago. In one picture you have
Trim cuddling up to Ringo. The other picture you have
Ringo next to a statue of the original Trim, who
was Matthew Flinder's cat and was the first cat to
circumnavigate Australia. Thanks for keeping me going at the gym Ian. Okay,
(37:45):
I love everything about this email.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I also love this can of dog. They are the
cutest things on the planet.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That dog.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
I just know that dog got kissed on this new
twenty seven times a day minimum, well deserved. I think
Pepa Pig is a British show. I don't know, yes,
but like, but I don't know, but like there are
also spiders that can hurt you in North America.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah's huge here.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
I don't think I would say that there are more
spiders that can hurt you worse in Australia. Yeah, I mean,
but most house spiders are most spiders you're gonna see
are fine, Listen.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I live with in North America.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Significant level of rachnophobe, so I understand the fear of spiders,
even though yeah, I love them. It's my job to
corral them and escort them outside. I do not dislike them,
but I do know what black widows and brown recluses
look like, and those are the kinds that live in
places I have lived. Yeah, you are right, Papa Pig
(38:52):
is British. By the way, you could tell that that's
the show. I've never glommed onto you, and I have
no idea what the venomous spider situation is in Britain.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
It isn't. I think that's what It's okay.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
To the best of my knowledge, I don't think they
have any dangerous ones, but I could be wrong. Correct
me if I'm wrong, anybody. If you want to correct me,
you can do that in an email. If British listeners
want to write in about whether they're venomous spiders. Yeah,
I feel like I have heard a factoid that they
don't have them, but I may have a false memory.
If you want to correct us, you can do that
(39:24):
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want
to look up our show notes to see any of
the articles, papers, et cetera that got used for this
episode in any other you can find those at mystinhistory
dot com. We also would love it if you would
(39:44):
subscribe to the show. You can do that on the
iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
So today's topic was part of the Harlem Renaissance. As
a musician, she played piano and she sang in ways
that drew huge crowds starting in the nineteen twenties. She
was unique in that she was completely out as a lesbian,
unusual for the time, but her story takes some really
surprising turns. She is when she has talked about it's
(00:37):
often like gay icon Gladys Bentley. But then there are
some weird parts of her story that do get mentioned
by people, but they don't get picked apart as much
as I would like in terms of like really looking
closely at them. So we're going to do that, and
this one gets a couple of heads ups. So first,
there are some really sad aspects of Gladys's story regarding
(01:00):
her sexual identity and attempts at it's erasure by her
parents and even by Gladys herself. If that sounds painful
to you, just be prepared or maybe skip, because that
was part of an article that she wrote about herself
in the nineteen fifties. That article has been questioned when
it comes to whether she was purposely trying to redact
(01:21):
her queerness as a self protective ruse. Like I said,
we're going to pick that apart when we get to it.
There is also a very brief mention of police brutality,
and there are very brief discussions of song lyrics about
domestic abuse, one also about a sex act. Those are
all very quick though, so just know those are in
(01:42):
the episode. If those are things you might be sensitive
to you, or if you have a younger history buff
that listens, you might want to pre screen from the
very beginning. Gladys Alberta Bentley offers us some contradictions. She
was born on August twelfth, nineteen oh seven. Her place
of birth is almost always given as Philadelphia, and that
(02:04):
includes in obituaries, and she did grow up in Philadelphia.
But during an appearance on the television show You Bet
Your Life in nineteen fifty eight, Graucho Marx asked her
where she was from, and without any hesitation, she said
Port of Spain, Trinidad. Her mother Mary was from Trinidad,
(02:25):
and her father, George was from Philadelphia. If she was
actually born in Trinidad, it seems like the family must
have moved to Philadelphia when she was very young. She
always talked about her childhood as taking place in Philadelphia exclusively,
and never apparently mentioned anything about Trinidad publicly outside of
this one mention on one TV show, just starting.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It out, Gladys, Gladys, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Not always a reliable narrator of her own life. She
would write of her childhood many years later and how
difficult her relationship with her mother was as a kid.
She wrote, quote, many of us who have strayed from
the paths of what society calls normal were once children
in unhappy or broken homes. Children who are rejected, abused, unloved, exploited,
(03:16):
or overprotected do not have a chance to develop that
inner sense of security which will keep them from feeling
abandoned and afraid. However, not all children in situations of
this nature react by feeling alone or fearful. Some children
become aggressive, decide to take the reins of their destiny
(03:37):
in their own hands. That is the way I reacted
to being an unwonted child. So she continues to recount
how her mother really had her heart set on having
a boy. She wanted a boy. She wanted a boy
so much that when she learned she had given birth
to a girl, she actually refused to nurse or even
touch the baby, and for the first six months of
(03:59):
her life, Gladys was raised by her grandmother. Gladys also
described not liking men from the time she was very young,
noting quote, from the time I can remember anything, even
when I was toddling, I never wanted a man to
touch me. I would even run away for my own father.
He felt terrible about his own child avoiding him, but
(04:22):
I would never go to him. I acted the same
way with my uncles and all the rest of the
males who came into my home. She also described hating
her two brothers because they were celebrated while she was scorned,
and she said that she started stealing their suits to
wear when she was nine or ten, and her parents
got very upset about that. Yeah. Also, she ended up
(04:45):
with more brothers than that, but I think she had
two that were born immediately after her that were closest
to her in age. Gladys described herself as a large
and stocky child. Those are her precise words, and it
was something that other kids free equently teased her about.
She later told the press that she started writing songs
when she was eight years old just to keep herself
(05:07):
company because she was lonely and outcast among other kids.
But that was not the only thing that set her
apart from her peers. She also found herself developing a
crush on her teacher, noting quote in class, I sat
for hours watching her and wondering why I was so
attracted to her. At night, I dreamed of her. It's
(05:30):
unclear if Gladys's parents knew about this infatuation with her teacher,
but it does seem that they understood, at least on
some level, that Gladys did not align with the heteronormative
social mores of Philadelphia. The family soon moved to another neighborhood,
but still in the city, and Gladys's mother started taking
her to a series of doctors. Biographers have interpreted this
(05:54):
situation as attempts at conversion therapy. She noted later that
she if you believed that her parents meant well, but
that she didn't need a doctor. She needed love and affection.
Though she and her parents did try to come to
compromises on things like her wearing non frilly girls clothes
instead of her brother's suits. As glad As reached her
(06:16):
teenage years, things at home just got worse, and she
ran away at sixteen to New York, hoping to find
a career as a performer. In nineteen twenty seven, New
York passed a piece of legislation known as the Wales
Padlock Law. This was in response to Manhattan's growing community
of performers, and a lot of those performers were queer
(06:38):
and were pushing against the boundaries of propriety to explore
stories and music that mainstream audiences and the authorities thought
were indecent. One of the last straws that catalyzed the
Whales Padlock Law was May West's Place Sex, which she
starred in and also wrote under the pen name Jane Mast.
(06:58):
That play was rated and soon Senator b Roger Wales
had sponsored an amendment to the Penal Code that regulated
indecent materials to include, among other things, a provision that
the police could just shut down an establishment that was
staging purportedly in decent or sexually degenerate entertainment and then
(07:19):
literally padlocket shut for up to a year. So this
is the New York that Gladys started her career in,
and that law meant that a lot of the material
that she would eventually perform and become really well known
for could get her into trouble. But over the years,
as we'll see, she stayed booked and crowds continued to
(07:39):
show up to hear her play piano and sing her
often very raunchy songs. One of the main reasons for
this was just a matter of location. The police tended
to focus on Broadway in the theater district, and at
that point Gladys was playing venues in Harlem. The law
still applied there, but it was not really in forced
(08:00):
that far north in the city, and as a consequence
of vibrant queer culture flourished there. Drag balls and drag
performances were common, and Bentley, as a cross dressing out lesbian,
became a star. We'll talk about how Gladys Bentley got
started in New York after we pause for a sponsor break.
(08:28):
Gladys Bentley is often talked about for being transgressive, but
she wasn't just transgressive. She was also incredibly talented. When
she got to New York, she started performing at rent
parties in Harlem in the mid nineteen twenty so just
as the Whales padlock law was coming into play. So
our rent party was, as its name suggests, a way
(08:48):
for tenants to raise the funds needed to pay ever
rising rent costs. For a small door charge, people could
join the party and then they also paid for drinks.
Prohibition was effect from the beginning of nineteen twenty to
the end of nineteen thirty three, so the alcohol served
at these parties was home brewed and to draw crowds,
(09:09):
musicians were booked to play. And these parties became these
really boisterous community events where people would gather, drink and dance,
and it was all within the confines of a private residence.
Sometimes in places like brownstones, multiple units would hold the
party at the same time, so it got to be
this immense house party. Innovations in jazz and dances that
(09:31):
would become popular on the swing scene in the decades
that followed came directly out of these neighborhood gatherings, and
Bentley was a very popular draw. Gladys became well known
for performing songs in what was known as eight to
the bar style, meaning unlike the more standard four beats
per bar of music. Each bar would get eight beats,
(09:53):
so a very fast up tempo style. If you are
a musician, or if you talk to musician about music theory,
there's a way more complex discussion about how this can
be represented in time signatures and what actually comprises a
bar of music. But for a lay person, what you
(10:13):
need to know here is this was just a very fast,
super upbeat style. In nineteen fifty five, Rob Roy wrote
an article about what made Bentley's performances stand out, and
that was their uniqueness. Nobody was really doing this eight
to the bar style, aside from some copycats. Roy said
that the trade that being the theater district around New
(10:35):
York's Broadway in fifty second streets quote, preferred listening to
the original, and Gladys was the original. In addition to
being very skilled at uptempo playing and singing, Gladys was
also a very clever lyricist, and she would improvise new
words to popular songs. Often her new verses were very dirty.
(11:00):
In contrast, though to her body lyrics, she dressed like
a dandy. She usually performed in a white tailored men's
tuxedo and a white top hat. She wore her hair
very short, in what would be considered at the time
a very masculine cut. She normally had it slicked back,
and this combination of highly polished visual presentation, her musical talent,
(11:22):
and her very naughty lyrics made her just irresistible to audiences.
And she didn't confine this persona to performance only. She
dressed in men's wear all the time, and she was
as flamboyant and body offstage as she was on. She
self identified as a woman, and she's often referred to
as a drag king in modern discussion, but the term
(11:44):
drag king didn't really exist for almost a half century
after this. She was also not putting on this persona
just for performance the way a lot of drag artists do,
although her promoters did often bill her as a male impersonator.
So it's all little bit tricky here, As is always
the case when we're talking about someone who was queer
(12:05):
before the terminology that we would use today existed, It
is hard to know precisely how Gladys would identify today.
Booied by her popularity, she got an agent, and the
agent got her a record deal for eight recorded songs.
She got four hundred dollars, which she was very excited about,
but she knew she could not live off of that forever,
(12:27):
so she also started going to music clubs and bars
that had musical acts. She would basically ask if she
could play when the build musicians were on their breaks,
she would just play for tips while other people were
having downtime. Then she got a lead on a piano
player opening at a club called the Madhouse, and she
went for an audition. The club wanted a male player,
(12:50):
but when Gladys showed up, they let her play a
set and the audience really loved her, and she said
that after her first song, a white man handed her
a five dollar tip and said, quote, please play something else.
We don't care what it is, just play your terrific.
Bentley was hired on the spot, making thirty five dollars
a week, and those early days she went by the
(13:11):
stage name Barbara Minton or Bobby, and her act became
so popular that she drew huge Enbevor's crowds. Black and
white customers alike flooded into the club. Her pay was
soon raised to one hundred and twenty five dollars a
week plus tips. She was such a draw that the
club changed its name to Barbara's Exclusive Club so that
(13:33):
everybody in the city knew where to find her. A
nineteen forty nine write up by Bill Chase for The
New York Age recalling the Exclusive Club noted quote the
dynamite Gladys Bentley used to draw celebrities like flies to Syrup.
From there, Gladys goot bookings all around Harlem, including a
long run at a place called the Clamhouse. This was
(13:56):
a very well known speakeasy that catered to the queer community,
although straight people also flock to it just to hear Gladys' shows,
and she started making a lot of money because, as
Tracy just said, she appealed the audiences across just about
every demographic. As a consequence, she was able to move
into a luxury apartment on Park Avenue and she had
(14:17):
a full staff there. She also talked about driving a
very nice car. For a while, she had a live
in romantic partner named Beatrice Robert. In nineteen thirty two,
celebrated Black cartoonist E Sims Campbell, who is on my
short list if I can find enough material to research
for it, created this gorgeous illustrated map of Harlem's nightlife
(14:39):
in pen and brush, and this piece, which is now
in the collection of Yale's Benecky Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
features as one of the locations the clam House. It
is labeled as Gladys Clamhouse and you can see the
performer drawn seated at the piano and playing. And then
there's lettering next to this part of the map that
reads what is Bentley? Where's a tuxedo and high hat?
(15:03):
In Walter Winchell's gossip column on Broadway in February eight,
nineteen thirty three, there is just a one line mention
of Gladys and that reads only quote, Gladys Bentley's penthouse
on West fifty fourth is so naughty. While there are
zero details conveyed about exactly what that means, it indicates
(15:24):
that she was well known enough to make a gossip
column with no explainer needed of who she was. She
was so popular that she was also getting bookings in
midtown Manhattan, but this got her into legal trouble with
Harry Hansbury and Nat Palin, who were the owners of
the Clamhouse. They had a multi year contract with Bentley
and had made the club all about her and her acts,
(15:47):
so for her to start taking bookings somewhere else, they said,
was a breach of her contract. As legal maneuvering dragged
on with this, Gladys took other bookings anyway, and that
led to different legal problems. In nineteen thirty four, Gladys
was performing at a club in midtown Manhattan known as
King's Terrace. She had several drag queens performing with her
(16:09):
as backup singers, and she performed songs with lyrics that
some audience members found quite shocking. One song that she
sang pretty often was a riff on the song Alice
Blue Gown, which was written by Joseph McCarthy and Harry
Tierney for the musical Irene. And. While the original song
is a very sweet and innocent number about address that
(16:31):
is Alice Blue, inspired by the color of a dress
worn by Alice Roosevelt, do you want to hear the original?
There's a beautiful Judy Garland recording, but Gladys's version switched
up the lyrics to make this song about anal sex,
and she would often encourage the audience to sing along
with her, which a lot of people did, and they
(16:51):
loved this year reverent act, but some of them were
downright scandalized, and they recorded Gladys to the authorities. This
was the year immediately following the end of prohibition, and
as police were no longer kept busy trying to hunt
down illicit alcohol operations, they turned their attention to the
perceived problem of indecency, and that meant that they started
(17:14):
raiding gay clubs and clubs where gay people performed. So
King's terrorists became a target. One newspaper article about this
opens with kind of a run on sentence quote with
the New York City new deal in city government under
the aegis of Mayor Firilla H. LaGuardia comes at last
(17:35):
the secret police campaign to clean up the nightlife and
cabaret entertainment. It was revealed Thursday when Harold L. Allen's
second Deputy Police Commissioner, ordered almost thirty managers and entertainers
to appear before him to explain irregularities ranging from violation
of the curfew to presentation of lewd entertainment. And so
(17:56):
reform came at last, as it must to all. Once
hoses to Gladys Bentley Race entertainer at the King's Terrace.
So this article went on to quote Harold L. Allen
describing what police saw when they raided the club. Quote,
we have received complaints that the entertainment in certain places
is vile, and we have investigated. I am not easily shocked,
(18:20):
but some of these shows are certainly vile and they
should not continue. So he talked about the various clubs
that had been investigated, and then he described Gladys's act quote.
Following a commonplace song, Gladys Bentley begins a number entitled
There's a hell of a Situation up at Yale, which
is followed by a scene worthy of a Northwestern stag
(18:42):
lumber camp songfest. A chorus of eight liberally painted male
sepiens with effeminate voices and gestures assisted the singer in
throwing this piece of filth at a blushing audience. The
chorus men were dressed in vivid satin pajamas, only slightly
less extreme than the colors of their faces. The chief
(19:02):
and filthiest offering of the evening, however, is a personal
tour of the tables by miss Bentley. At each table,
she stopped to sing one or more versus of a
seemingly endless song in which every word known to vulgar
profanity is used.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
This sounds like the.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Parents in Footloose that don't want dancing to happen.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
He's just so worked up.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Alan then stated that the entertainment was so offensive that
some of the audience left, and also mentioned that Gladys
and her dancers accepted drinks from patrons and described this
as something that would normally happen in what he called
lower class clubs. King's Terrace was shut down by the police.
They literally put a padlock on the door to prevent
(19:50):
anyone from entering. They, of course, were invoking the Whales
Padlock Act. Incidentally, just for clarity, because you might be
wondering the issue with the song There's a hell of
a situation up at Yale, was that that song is
about masturbation. Gladys continued to live her life openly, although
for a while she was back to only playing in Harlem.
(20:11):
She booked a long run at the Ubangy Club at
the corner of one hundred and thirty first Street and
Seventh Avenue, but the white crowds just followed her back
to Harlem. She did not seem to change anything about
her act or about herself. She even told the press
that she had married a white woman in a civil
service in New Jersey. That claim has never been verified.
(20:33):
The woman's name has never been known. Same sex marriages
would not have been legal, so if Gladys and a
woman did get married, if they did find a judge
willing to marry them, that almost certainly would have required
a deception to suggest that one of them was a man.
Gladys probably could have pulled that off, but she was
also really well known, so she probably would have been
(20:56):
recognized unless it was a really blueless judge who wasn't aware.
This one remains kind of a history mystery. Yeah, nobody
has ever figured out if there was really a woman,
if they had maybe a service that wasn't illegal service
like what may have gone on, just big question marks. Eventually,
(21:17):
that King's Terrace scandal was all but forgotten, and Bentley
started getting booked in Midtown again. She headlined at Tondalo's
in Midtown as well as other venues. She still had
her rich alto voice and its range that passed from
these low growley segments to higher trills. She did this
cool thing where she would do the higher notes through
(21:38):
like a closed mouth, through her teeth with incredible skill.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
It was so cool.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
There's a video we'll talk about later that you can
see her playing was as good as ever as she
banged out blues numbers.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
A lot of the.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Songs that she was famous for, maybe surprisingly, in addition
to those filthy ones, had lyrics that were about heteronormative relationships,
although less surprisingly those relationships were not good, and they
often featured narratives of abuse. For example, in a song
called how Much Can I Stand, she sang the lyrics said,
(22:14):
I was an angel, he was born to treat me right?
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Who the devil?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Heard of an angel that gets beat up every night?
How much of that stuff? Can I Stand? In A
similar vein her song called Worried Blues, includes the lyrics
what made you men?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Folk? Treat us women like you do? I don't want
no man that I got to give my money to.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But songs like that, which she sang from the beginning
of her career, continued to be part of her act.
As she got more famous, she also got more and
more refined from a production value standpoint. She hired somebody
else to play the piano while she sang, and the
verve of her stage presence started to get a little
too smooth around the edges for people. It led to
(22:53):
a drop off in crowds. Additionally, as the Great Depression
war on, a lot of clubs started closing, and that
was especially true in Harlem. Still, Gladys was still being
written about with glowing praise. During her run at Tondalayo's
critic Alvin Moses wrote of her quote, if there is
any name on our morning patrol along the Broadway realto
(23:16):
that outrates Gladys Bentley as a draw, you call me
up and tell me who is the owner of it.
Gladys eventually decided to leave New York, and we will
talk about that and the infamous article we referenced at
the top of the show after we hear from the
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
(23:43):
As the nineteen forties wound down, Bentley headed to the
West Coast, and while she did get bookings there, the
audiences of California were less enthusiastic about her style of
presentation and music.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Outside of New.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
York, she had the sharp realization that not everyone was
as willing to let a performer buck against social norms
and basically make that the focus of their act. So
she started to tone her act down, and while she
still wore men's suit jackets and ties, they were more
increasingly paired with skirts instead of trousers. And this wasn't
(24:18):
just a matter of aligning with the Los Angeles attitudes
toward gender presentation. There was actually a legal element to this,
because at least at one of the venues she played,
which was Joaquin zel Rancho, they had to get a
special police permit for her to wear pants on stage.
Her billings sometimes also came off as really odd as well,
(24:40):
making her seem like a novelty act instead of an
accomplished performer. One ad for her run at a venue
called The Dollhouse on Adventura Boulevard touted quote the one
and only Gladys Bentley, She's fat, tan and terrific. I
would not want that as my billing. But whatever, her
(25:00):
days of doing whatever she pleased in terms of her
gender expression and identity really did seem to be coming
to a close, and her career was faltering. In August
of nineteen fifty two, an article written by Gladys appeared
in Ebony magazine with the title I Am a Woman Again.
This was the fascinating and also troubling read kind of
(25:23):
a rollercoaster of a narrative in which she shares the
story of her early life and her problems with her
family and her rise to fame, and then it describes
what she calls the miracle that made her a woman,
writing that it quote came about what I discovered and accepted,
the love and tenderness and true devotion of a man
who loved me unselfishly and whose love I could return,
(25:45):
the awakening in me of the womanliness I tried to suppress. So.
Bedley's account describes a man who she names only as Dawn,
that she met through friends and found that she had
feelings for. She described being confused and scared about these
feelings and not knowing what to do with them, but
(26:05):
also knowing that she wanted to marry him and he
was also very obviously interested in her, And she describes
reading about how if you are feeling doubt about being
with someone you truly love, that you have left God
out of the union. This was in like a religious
book that she had, and she also says that all
of this concern led her to visit a doctor. She
(26:27):
went to that appointment wanting, she said, to talk about
her weight. But when the doctor gave her a full examination,
she described feeling relieved because that was what she actually wanted.
And this doctor told her that she had a developmental
issue with her sex organs, and he started her on
a course of thrice weekly quote injection of female hormones,
(26:49):
and that she said, finally overcame the male hormones in
her body, and then she said she felt free to
get married to a man. This article has a lot
going on beyond that. After she describes this miracle, she
starts the next paragraph by saying flatly that her marriage
to Dawn did not last, but that she got married again.
(27:13):
Quote today I am happily married, and I hope and
pray this marriage will last to J. T. Gibson, well
known West Coast theatrical columnist. This is where it gets
even wilder. The ebony article must have actually come out
to news stands in July. A lot of publications put
out their monthly issues, in this case the August issue.
(27:35):
They actually dropped the month prior, because not only did J. T.
Gibson die in July of nineteen fifty two, but one
of his friends, photographer Masseoh Sheffield, gave a statement to
the press saying that Gibson was really angry about this
article because it was not true. According to Sheffield, one
(27:56):
of the last things Gibson said to him was quote,
I am I am not and have never been married
to Gladys Bentley. I'm going to sue the Blank magazine
for publishing a story stating that I am her husband
in that confession article of hers. And then Gibson was
found dead in a friend's car a few hours after
(28:16):
this conversation. He had parked and then he had an
aneurysm rupture while he was getting out of the vehicle.
So this denial of the marriage is also a mystery
because Gibson was dead and we cannot verify Sheffield's account,
And that account is problematic for a couple of reasons.
So one, it first appeared in a Hollywood gossip column
(28:40):
written by Harry LaVette. Then it got kind of picked
up and repeated in a lot of places, but that
was the earliest mention I could find. And two, Messeo.
Sheffield was a very problematic figure It's sort of interesting
that he's described as a photographer in every reference to him,
because he was a disgraced LAPD detective who then transitioned
(29:01):
into the film industry and became an actor. He also
produced a few films, but photography never appears in his
professional credits. He was actually charged with murder in nineteen
twenty seven when he raided a home on a tip
of illicit alcohol and he shot a young man named
Samuel Faulkner there, which sparked protests in the city. Sheffield
(29:22):
was tried for that murder but acquitted. Several LAPD cops
who testified against him lost their jobs, and soon after
Sheffield also left the force to pursue a film career.
So we don't know if he just managed to somehow
get out from under that if people didn't realize that
(29:43):
he was that detective that had been part of that scandal.
So we don't know. Was Sheffield just trying to get
his name in the paper with his claim about J. T.
Gibson's denial of a marriage to Gladys. The alternative there
is that Gladys did lie in her story, which was
printed in a very large publication, or there's also the
(30:03):
possibility that she and Gibson had some sort of understanding
that Sheffield either didn't know about, or that he was
trying to posthumously distance his friend from Gladys for some reason.
We are never gonna know, but just know that there's
a whole lot of murkiness around this whole part of
her story. In addition to all of the writing about
(30:24):
her life, this multi page article also included a number
of photos of Gladys. She wasn't in her tuxedo or
dapper suits anymore. She's in a dress in every picture,
and some of them she's shown with other well known musicians,
including Louis Armstrong. The other photos, though, show her doing
(30:45):
domestic chores typically associated with women. Each of them has
a short caption about the activity that's being featured, and
then an additional piece of information, so one of them
reads quote, taste testing dinner she has prepared for husband
Jay T.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Gibson.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Miss Bentley enjoys domestic role, which she shunned for years.
She lives in modest, tastefully appointed home directly in rear
of similar homes she purchased for her mother. And another
photo she's making the bed and then yet another she's
selecting jewelry. There are no pictures of either of the
(31:22):
husbands that she mentioned in this piece, So this entire
article seems like such a departure from the life Gladys
Bentley lived in the years prior that it seems confusing
and almost shocking. But this is also an instance where
context really really matters. This article came out in the
(31:42):
middle of the lavender scare, when homosexuality was not just
seen as deviant, it was criminalized. In nineteen forty seven,
five years before Bentley shared this story in Ebony, the
US Park Police, which is part of the National Park Service,
had instituted a sex perversion al elimination program, and there
(32:02):
was also legislation introduced in Congress that labeled homosexuals as
sexual psychopaths. Most of these laws targeted gay men, but
somebody like Gladys, who was a very well known and
very out lesbian performer, wasn't going to fly under the
radar in a country that was gripped by this misguided
notion that same sex attraction was criminal and dangerous. Most
(32:26):
modern queer scholars and historians, when looking at this article
and thinking about all of its nuance, see it as
an effort on Gladys Bentley's part to straightwash her reputation
to try to save her music career. Yeah, this was
really I mean, we've talked about like laws about obscenity
and earlier laws about things like cross dressing, but this
(32:49):
was a time when more queer people were becoming more
visible and there was a big backlash against that. So, like,
as a movement for equal rights was growing and developing, Like,
there was just an onslaught of laws and social mores
and all of that that she would have been targeted by. Yeah,
(33:10):
and a lot of people willing to stoke fear of
anyone who was not heteronormative.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
In September of nineteen fifty two, Gladys got married again,
and this time there were pictures. Her new husband was
Charles Roberts, a twenty eight year old cook from Sacramento.
Gladys was forty five at the time. Newspaper reports said
that they had been dating for only five months, and
if that's the case, that means that they were seeing
each other while she claimed that she was married to
(33:38):
her second husband. But also we just don't have a
lot of information about Charles or about their life together,
and so that has led to some speculation that it
too might have been for show. In the nineteen fifties,
Gladys wrote a book about her life titled If This
Be Sin, but it was never published and there doesn't
appear to be a surviving manuscript article. There is also
(34:01):
a photograph of her typing on a typewriter allegedly working
on this book. She mentioned the book in that same
You Bet Your Life appearance that we mentioned at the
top of the show, and Bentley also played piano on
that program as she sang them their eyes and you
can find this video online. It is so clear why
(34:21):
she was a beloved performer. This is, to the best
of my knowledge, the only actual footage that we have
of her performing. Her presence and her energy just incredibly compelling.
Her vocal style and the way she phrased the verses
with her breath was really unique. She would sing lines
in this sort of staccato style, with each word given
its own very brief, punchy moment. It is one hundred
(34:44):
percent easy to see why people would have flocked to
her shows. At the beginning of February nineteen sixty, Gladys
got a cold and that quickly got worse. She developed pneumonia,
and she died at home on February the eighth. She
was only fifty ten two. Her obituary mentions that she
lived with her mother. No husband was mentioned as next
(35:06):
of ken, so we don't really know what happened regarding
her third marriage. When her mother, Mary died six years later,
she was buried next to Gladys.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
I'd love Gladys.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I have so much to talk about on Friday.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, but right now I have listener mail that's not
about anything this serious at all, but I love it
so much. It's not even really about history. Okay, it's
about Blue. Yeah, I know this email. I read it
this morning, was delighted. I'm excited for people to hear
it now.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
It also validates some feelings I've had about Bluie and
real estate for a while. This is from our listener Ian,
who writes High Ladies. In a recent behind the scenes episode,
one of you mentioned you like watching Blue as escapism.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I watched it this morning while I had coffee. This
letter continues, so I thought you might find this new
story for twenty twenty interesting. A real estate agent who
must have watched too many Bluey episodes. No such things
with their kids realized that the Bluey or Healer Family
Home is a Queenslander style house. It has at least
fifteen rooms, has a massive backyard with a full size
(36:16):
tree in it, and is in a major suburb of Brisbane.
They calculated the Healer Family Home would be worth at
least four million dollars Australian. That's about US two point
eight million. Listen that was six years ago. I bet
it's worth a lot more now. Queenslander style of home
was developed in tropical Queensland, Australia and the age before
air conditioning. They're made out of wood, they have wrap
(36:37):
around verandas to keep sun out and improve cooling, and
they are elevated off the ground to provide extra cooling
and avoid flooding. For a while, you could have stayed
in the real Bluey House. A real Queenslander home was
decorated as the Healer Family Home and was available on Airbnb.
But I think that home has now become a regular
family home that Lucky family. Whilst we are at Pepa
(37:00):
Pig is another TV show which has been popular in Australia.
There was However, one episode which was not played on
Australian TV. In it, Pepa told her friends that spiders
cannot hurt you. This episode was not banned. It is
just that ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, decided it was
not a good idea to show this episode in a
country where spiders can actually hurt you. As for pet tax,
(37:24):
I have attached a couple of pictures of our cat
Trim and our dog Ringo. Ringo sadly died of old
age over a year ago. In one picture you have
Trim cuddling up to Ringo. The other picture you have
Ringo next to a statue of the original Trim, who
was Matthew Flinder's cat and was the first cat to
circumnavigate Australia. Thanks for keeping me going at the gym Ian. Okay,
(37:45):
I love everything about this email.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I also love this can of dog. They are the
cutest things on the planet.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That dog.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
I just know that dog got kissed on this new
twenty seven times a day minimum, well deserved. I think
Pepa Pig is a British show. I don't know, yes,
but like, but I don't know, but like there are
also spiders that can hurt you in North America.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah's huge here.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
I don't think I would say that there are more
spiders that can hurt you worse in Australia. Yeah, I mean,
but most house spiders are most spiders you're gonna see
are fine, Listen.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I live with in North America.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Significant level of rachnophobe, so I understand the fear of spiders,
even though yeah, I love them. It's my job to
corral them and escort them outside. I do not dislike them,
but I do know what black widows and brown recluses
look like, and those are the kinds that live in
places I have lived. Yeah, you are right, Papa Pig
(38:52):
is British. By the way, you could tell that that's
the show. I've never glommed onto you, and I have
no idea what the venomous spider situation is in Britain.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
It isn't. I think that's what It's okay.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
To the best of my knowledge, I don't think they
have any dangerous ones, but I could be wrong. Correct
me if I'm wrong, anybody. If you want to correct me,
you can do that in an email. If British listeners
want to write in about whether they're venomous spiders. Yeah,
I feel like I have heard a factoid that they
don't have them, but I may have a false memory.
If you want to correct us, you can do that
(39:24):
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want
to look up our show notes to see any of
the articles, papers, et cetera that got used for this
episode in any other you can find those at mystinhistory
dot com. We also would love it if you would
(39:44):
subscribe to the show. You can do that on the
iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
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