Apparently, I haven’t posted on here in 76 days or about two and a half months. I did miss it and I came up with some really great ideas and titles for posts that I plan to make one day.

Where have I been? I’ve been writing an honor’s thesis. It’s about 9,500 words of solid gold in my opinion. However, my dear Substack readers, you get the opportunity to be the judge of my thesis. I won’t post it all at once, but it will be split up into five or so sections as it is in the official paper. I recognize no one really wants to read a 9,500-word academic paper in their free time.

Writing a thesis is hard work. Who knew? It’s not the kind of essay you can write laying on your stomach with your feet in the air. It’s very early mornings and general deliriousness. You don’t just get to post it and go. It lives with you. It becomes you. Maybe a thesis is a monster. I can’t say.

I could lie and say I don’t care about academic validation, but I do. It’s not the most important thing though. I care much more about spiritual fulfillment and research does give me fulfillment. I knew this in fall 2021, at least. I read Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and it changed my life. I knew then I was going to be an Africana Studies major.

I feel incredibly privileged to write about subjects very close to me like Blackness, lesbianism, transness, fashion, history, art. As I write close to me, not steeped in objectivity, I write to create a more understanding world. And I get what Audre Lorde meant, and maybe writing a really long essay is better than sex or at least comparable.

I mention this in the acknowledgements (that I won’t post here), but writing a thesis in Africana Studies has pushed me to trust my intuition. When you get to a certain level, they don’t tell you “you’re a good writer” anymore. You have to trust yourself and believe it.

Introduction

In October 2024, the New York Times published an interactive map with the title “When Harlem Was “as Gay as It Was Black.”1 This interactive map features famous musicians and writers like Ma Rainey, Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Alain Locke, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes saying that they had an association with queerness in their public or private lives. This phrase “as gay as it was Black” comes from historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. It serves as a way to reframe the Harlem Renaissance to not only talk about Black art but Black queer art. By framing Harlem “as gay as it was Black”, scholars can complicate the history of the Harlem Renaissance by looking at how sexuality impacted the development of the movement and the culture. Having an article on gay Harlem in a mainstream media outlet like the New York Times shows the prevailing idea that being gay was an accepted or understood part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Gladys Bentley, the focus of this essay, is described in the article as “Harlem royalty and the neighborhood’s most famous lesbian. She performed wearing white tuxedos, singing racy lyrics over popular music. A New York Times obituary of Bentley said she was the first performer of the era to embrace a transgender identity.”2 The brevity of Bentley’s biography in the New York Times piece presents an idea that she was accepted within Harlem and was a proud transgender lesbian. In this essay, I want to complicate this description of Bentley by comparing how Bentley described her experience as a lesbian blues performer in the August 1952 edition of Ebony Magazine. In most descriptions of Gladys Bentley, she is described as wearing a white tuxedo, but in my research I found no pictures of her in a tuxedo. Bentley wears white tails that differ from a tuxedo as it is a more elegant and formal version of men’s evening wear. This seemingly small mistake is emblematic of the way history has failed to understand Gladys Bentley and the intentionality in her sartorial expression.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this essay, I frequently use the word “queer” to refer to Bentley and other people in the Harlem Renaissance. By using the word “queer,” it resists discourse about differences bisexual and lesbian identity labels and includes genders other than “woman” when speaking about the queer experience. Cathy J. Cohen explains that “In queer politics sexual expression is something that always entails the possibility of change, movement, and redefinition, and subversive performance–from year to year, from partner to partner, from day to day, even from act to act.”3 It’s helpful to think about Bentley within this context because she no longer identifies as a lesbian when her essay is published and supposedly returns to lesbianism. However it is helpful to think of her as lesbian because her experience closely aligns with that of lesbians especially as she details her feelings of not being like other women, experiencing isolation, and popular literature regarding lesbians as a third sex and a threat to one’s reputation. Gladys Bentley, for the purposes of this essay, is both queer and lesbian.

This essay begins with a discussion of “Queerness in the Harlem Renaissance.” This section seeks to provide background information on the Harlem Renaissance and the politics of the time. Despite Harlem being seen as “tolerant” further research shows that there were many behavioral expectations.In “The Sartorial Science of Lesbian Masculinity,” I look towards Bentley’s masculine dress during the Harlem Renaissance. Bentley’s decision to visibly display queerness serves as an opportunity to inquire into what it means for a Black lesbian to wear a suit. To further discuss this, I interpret the visual symbols worn by Bentley such as a top hat, a cane, a house smock, hair curlers among other symbols to interpret them based on their meaning within the time period.

Next I provide a literary and visual analysis of her essay “I Am a Woman Again” and the photos that accompany the essay in the section “Returning ‘Home’ to Womanhood.” This section also compares Bentley’s images to images in popular women’s magazines, Vogue and Ladies’ Home Journal to highlight the gender presentation that she embraced. Bentley’s essay shows that the Harlem Renaissance was not as liberal as it is often portrayed. Because of the isolation Bentley experienced as a lesbian, she renounced lesbianism as a “strange affliction” and presented to the public as a woman. Her attire in the Ebony Magazine coverage is drastically different from what she wore in the Harlem Renaissance. I argue that the accompanying photoshoot is proof of the restrictive standard during the Harlem Renaissance and emblematic of the reality that people could not be openly queer.

Finally, in “Domestic Gender Presentation in the Details,” I continue discussing Bentley’s presentation in Ebony Magazine. Scholars suggest that this was a publicity stunt to remake her image in the new, more conservative postwar era, especially during the backdrop of McCarthyism. The late Harlem Renaissance period (1925-1935) and the McCarthy era had visually different standards of femininity and masculinity and by looking at both periods, the social pressure to perform a certain gender or sexuality becomes apparent.

3

Cathy J. Cohen, Politics?” GLQ, Vol. 3, pp. 437-465 “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ, Vol. 3, pp. 437-465

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