In both neighborhoods, artists and intellectuals flocked to this cheap housing in beautiful surroundings. In the 1920s a large part of the elegant town houses and apartment buildings in both Harlem and downtown in Greenwich Village had been converted into cheap rooming flats. Very open about her sexuality, Bentley also performed at lesbian bars and once told a gossip columnist she had married a white woman while in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She wowed audiences with her powerful voice and obscene parodies of blues standards and show tunes and was famous for her glamorous girlfriends. later she would headline the popular speakeasy the Clam House as well as the Ubangi Club. She began singing at rent parties and buffet flats and moved on to speakeasies and nightclubs.
At least, I always thought so….From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me…Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys clothes than in dresses”.īentley left Pennsylvania at 16 to be part of the Harlem Renaissance and come out as a bulldagger. As she would recall many years later in an Ebony Magazine Article, “It seems I was born different. For Gladys, her lesbianism made her need to strike out on her own all the more urgent.
Like many African Americans of her generation she ended up in New York City’s Harlem, the capital of “The New Negro “. She was the eldest of 4 children born to a Trinidad born mother, Mary Mote (Bentley) and an American born father, George L. Gladys Bentley was born on August 12, 1907.
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