A leading Harlem figure was jazz singer Gladys Bentley, who at 16 had run away from Philadelphia to seek fame, fortune and acceptance in New York. She sang and played piano at bars and parties in Harlems underworld before getting her big break as featured entertainer at the Mad House Club. Bentley - often resplendent in tweed suits or white tuxedo - became one of the best-known black female entertainers in America during the 1920s. Dressed in mens clothes, she went off to Atlantic City to marry her girlfriend. But after the Depression, Bentleys world began to crumble. In 1940, a nightclub had to apply for a special permit for her to wear trousers, instead of skirts in her act. During the 50s, in the repressive atmosphere of McCarthys anti-gay purges, Bentley started wearing dresses, had hormone treatment, wrote an article, I Am a Woman Again, in Ebony, in which she rejected her lesbianism and, in a last-ditch effort to save her career, married a man 16 years her junior. taken from the book Lesbian Portraits - Infatuations, by Rose Collins.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 00:15:34 +0000
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