Where one situates Gladys Bentley, a black woman of colour, openly lesbian and a singer of the blues, is down to taste. Sometimes known as ‘the Brown Bomber’ (deliberately or otherwise copying the nickname more usually associated with the hyper-masculine world heavyweight champ Joe Louis), her own focus seemed to be on her sexuality. She had, she claimed in 1952, begun identifying as a male in her childhood and near the end of her life described herself as having ‘inhabited that half-shadow no-man’s land which exist between the boundaries of the two sexes.’
As the Paris Review put it in 2019: ‘La Bentley was a star in Harlem’s Jungle Alley, one of its high priests. Bentley was abundant flesh, art in motion.’ (The full piece by Saidiya Hartman, from her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, is here: [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/28/the-wayward-life-of-gladys-bentley/]
The modern gay historian Eric Garber has written that she ‘earned her living – as an openly black lesbian – for decades. She had insisted on being herself during a time when others hid their difference. And she had increased public awareness about sexual variations and spoken for many who could not speak for themselves.’[5]
As singer she was one of the features of Harlem’s best-known gay speakeasy, Harry Hansberry’s Clam House at 146 W. 133rd St between 5th and 7th avenues better known as ‘Jungle Alley’ [6]. Here she took popular favourites and revised them, with her own indulgently obscene lyrics. No-one was taking down what must have been spontaneous riffing, but J.D. Doyle, of the online Queer Music Heritage, found one example [7].
The song ‘Alice Blue Gown’ was a hit for Judy Garland in the 1919 Broadway show Irene. A verse ran:
A new manner of fashion I'd found,
And the world seemed to smile all around.
'Til it wilted, I wore it,
I'll always adore it,
My sweet little Alice blue gown!
Ms Bentley had variations on that glutinous theme:
And he said, ‘Dearie, please turn around’
And he shoved that big thing up my brown
He tore it. I bored it. Lord, how I adored it.
My sweet little Alice Blue Gown.
Witty? Maybe not. Transgressive? Damn straight!
There were other songs, with sufficiently amusing lyrics not to require revision. ‘Big Gorilla Man’ (1929) tells of ‘That big gorilla, a woman killa, and I ought to know, / he mistreats me, knocks and beats me, still I love him so, / ’cause he's got that something that I need so bad.’ In ‘Red Beans and Rice’ (1929) Bentley has found herself an involuntary vegetarian: her man is playing away, and his ‘meat’ has left with him.
Ms Doyle adds that
In the Harlem nightclubs she was wildly popular, with both blacks and whites, and especially with the Harlem Renaissance literary crowd. Langston Hughes called her ‘an amazing exhibition of musical energy.’ Another club customer wrote to poet Countee Cullen, ‘When Gladys sings St. James Infirmary, it makes you weep your heart out.’ Bentley was the inspiration for characters in several books of the time, including a gay novel by Blair Niles called ‘Strange Brother.’ Carl Van Vechten, one of the homosexual literati, described someone obviously like her in his book ‘Parties.’ He wrote about his character, ‘when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder. She rocks the box, and tosses it...and jumps it through hoops.’ She was definitely a larger than life figure.
Another Bentley venue was the Ubangi Club (previously Connie’s Inn). Here, dressed as ever in full evening dress (white-tie-and-tails and a white silk topper) she worked with a chorus line of ‘eight liberally painted male sepians with effeminate voices and gestures.’ Or one newspaper put it ‘Jungleys Bentley and her “pansie” entertainment.’
Around 1940 she moved to the west coast, basing herself at Mona’s 440, San Francisco’s top lesbian nighterie [8]. The nudge-nudging songs continued, typically ‘Gladys Isn’t Gratis Anymore,’ ‘Lock and Key’ and ‘Jailbait.’
But as Eric Garber added, ‘The United States cold war society could not tolerate a strong, uncompromising, Afro-American bulldagger’. As the country’s Fifties-style moral panic, McCarthyism, shut down American freedoms, Bentley claimed to have renounced the lesbian life; she dressed straight, and rechristened herself as ‘Fatso’ Bentley. Writing under the headline ‘I Am a Woman Again’ she claimed to the readers of Ebony that after course of hormone injections she had returned to heterosexuality and was even married. Like all alleged converts she piled on the mea culpas as regarded her youthful ‘sins’. She died in 1960; there was supposedly an autobiography ‘If This be Sin’ which sounds as if the convert had regressed. It wasn’t published and we shall never know for sure.
Bentley was hardly alone in enjoying relationships with other women. Ma Rainey was perhaps less openly devoted to her girlfriends, but she too sang about such relationships, typically in Prove it on Me Blues (1928).
I went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go wrong
When I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone
Folks say I’m crooked
I don't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know
I went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men
It's true I wear a collar and a tie,
I like to watch the women as they pass by
They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
They sure gotta prove it on me
Rainey’s Bo-Weevil Blues (1923) is perhaps another ‘coming-out’ song.
I don’t want no man
To put no sugar in my tea,
I don’t want no man,
To put no sugar in my tea,
Some of them are so evil,
I’m ’fraid they might poison me.
I went downtown
and bought me a hat
I brought it back home,I put it on the shelf
Looked at my bed,I'm getting tired of sleeping by myself
As well as the typical blues image of ‘sugar in my tea’, it might be noted, though there is no way of proving a conscious connection, that hat in the slang of the time meant variously the vagina, a prostitute and sexual intercourse.
Bessie Smith, the lover of a married woman, also used lyrics to out herself:
When you see two women walking hand in hand,
Just look 'em over and try to understand:
They'll go to those parties - have the lights down low -
Only those parties where women can go.
You think I’m lying just ask Tacky Ann.
They took many a broad from many a man.[9]
In any case, if showbiz rumour was true, the openly bisexual Smith didn’t have much ‘out’ to come. As the story went, she was overheard one night on tour telling her lover Lillian Simpson, ‘The hell with you, bitch. I got twelve women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it.’
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[4] ‘Till the Cows Come Home’ (1935)
[5] in Outlook vol. 1 1988 p.61/2
[6] the street was the focus of interwar black jazz and a magnet for white cultural ‘tourists’; a less stereotyping name was ‘Swing Street’ which would also be used of a new jazz mecca, 52th street, after World War II.
Given the prevailing sexuality of the patrons, is it too obvious to link this clam to slang’s use: the vagina, the hymen; thus, by metonymy, a woman. Thus in 1929 in ‘Kitchen Man’ Bentley’s contemporary, Bessie Smith, sang ‘Oh how that boy can open clams / [...] / I can’t do without my kitchen man.’
[7] https://www.queermusicheritage.com/feb2013s.html accessed 19 Nov. 2018
[8] the club was sold around 1955 and renamed Ann’s 440 (from its new owner Ann Dee); it kept its lesbian wait-staff and its lesbian clientele but was happy to welcome mainstream entertainers, among them Johnny Mathis and a young Lenny Bruce
[9] Rainey sang it but the song was written in 1931 by George Hannah, an out gay bluesman; he entitled it ‘The Boy in the Boat’ (slang for the clitoris)