This week I presented my thesis to around thirty people and I am so grateful for everyone who attended. It means the world to feel celebrated, heard, and recognized. Fun fact: MY SLIDESHOW DID NOT EVEN WORK! But, I passed the slides around on my iPad. I knew I was right to have Canva downloaded on my phone (that’s why its on my iPad). Anyways, please enjoy the next section and this photo of me from presentation day.

Queerness in the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an intense period of Black creativity and intellectual thought taking place from the late 1910s until the beginning of World War II. During this period, Harlem became a mecca for Black writers, artists, and people generally down on their luck. Gladys Bentley left her home in Philadelphia in 1923 and began performing in the Harlem blues circuit shortly thereafter. The period known as the late Harlem Renaissance begins in 1925 the same year that Alain Locke publishes The New Negro: Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, an anthology naming the Harlem Renaissance and explicitly stating its goal to attain respect for Black people through showcasing skills in arts and letters.1 The Harlem Renaissance attracted many white tourists looking for a chance to see how the other side lives and view Negro art. The influx of people emigrating to New York City, new rights for (white) women, and the popularity of new jazz styles of music and dance crafted a Harlem Renaissance that was seen as accepting and morally loose.

However, popular ideas of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1920s have prevented contemporary audiences from understanding what the prevailing politics of the time were. Relevant to this conversation and the Harlem Renaissance as a whole is the presence of new forms of music. The blues genre emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and jazz arrived soon after.The Harlem Renaissance is sometimes referred to as the Jazz Age because the new form of music present in Harlem drew people in. Jazz and blues both exist as racialized forms of music. Because they were considered to be low class or folk music, it was sometimes considered to be of the devil, and a moral panic soon arose because popular white society didn’t approve of the new dance moves that came with jazz. Jazz could be sexual, but it did not have to be, but its association with sex and the backdrop of prohibition helped create the idea of a hypersexual Harlem with loose morals.

The Harlem Renaissance primarily included middle-to upper-middle class people. Alain Locke made that clear in his “The New Negro” essay published in1925 near the beginning of the late Harlem Renaissance. He writes, “No sane observer, however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet, but they stir, they move, they are more than just physically restless.”2 W.E.B. Du Bois’ principle of the “talented tenth,” or the idea that a minority of educated Black people could lead a less-educated majority,echoes here. DuBois and Locke were friends at the time and his influence is apparent as Locke points out a division between the articulate and inarticulate.Middle and upper class Black people were a minority, so the “great masses” he refers to are the poorer Black people. Despite Locke’s effort to uplift the Black race, he adheres to the idea that there is a certain kind of man who is a Harlem Renaissance man. Black women were certainly part of the Harlem Renaissance but often special interest had to be paid to the contributions of Black women because they weren’t openly addressed in racial uplift. Although Locke constantly makes references to self-expression, that expression was actually meant to be a community expression to encourage “the reevaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective.”3 Culture like its contributions is fluid. Meaning at any point, white or Black society can decide something is or is not a (positive) contribution. His essay being a quasi-manifesto of the movement speaks to the idea that“accurate”, “articulate”, “appropriate” Black representation was favored over representations of people like Gladys Bentley who were rarely operating from the mindset of being understood by white people and representing a respectable, Black race.

When Bentley reflects on this time period, she acknowledges her success, but speaks of general disapproval of her personal life. In this way, Bentley is viewed as both representative and deviant. She was famous for being a blues-singing masculine lesbian performing at the hottest spots in Harlem. Her image from the Harlem Renaissance presents a confident depiction of Black female masculinity. She proudly flaunted her sexuality and was almost never seen without a woman on her arms. She was known by some of the most famous participants in the Harlem Renaissance like Carl Van Vetchen and Langston Hughes. However famous she was, she still remained lonely and her position as a fat, working-class, Black lesbian drastically changed her experience of the Harlem Renaissance. When Bentley is introduced in popular recounts of the period, they usually focus on her white “tuxedo” and masculine appearance and lyrics.

Although Bentley was often referred to as a male impersonator, James F.Wilson theatre and performance scholar writes that the term is imprecise as Bentley, “Differ[ed] from the traditional male impersonator, or drag king, in the popular theater, Gladys Bentley did not try to “pass” as a man, nor did she playfully try to deceive her audience into believing she was biologically male.”4 Arguably the most important part of Bentley’s dress is that she never denied being a woman. Her position as a Black lesbian meant that she didn’t fit into the societal image of a woman both white and heterosexual. Facing this exclusion is why Bentley decided to take a firmer stance on womanhood in Ebony Magazine.As the Harlem Renaissance came to an end, opportunities for Bentley’s act began to wane even as she moved west to California. Wearing men’s clothes was no longer in style and Bentley’s career suffered as a result. Prior to publication of her essay, her performance was shut down due to its indecency and she was denied compensation. Continued battles with discrimination and isolation led Bentley to renounce lesbianism as a “strange affliction” in the 1950s and she presented a new, feminine and homely sense of self in Ebony Magazine.

The Harlem Renaissance may have been “as gay as it was Black”, but this perceived and experienced freedom didn’t always extend to Black lesbians,especially if they were fat and dark skin. Uncovering and acknowledging the queer history of the Harlem Renaissance is important to understanding why it was called a “renaissance” in the first place. It is important not to obscure the lived reality of queer people even as they become icons within history. Queer, Black people still remain marginalized from both Black and queer communities.

If we decide to view the Harlem Renaissance as a “queer” movement,then we obscure the “personal hell” women like Gladys Bentley experienced and we would fail to see all the ways that queerness was repressed throughout the renaissance. Despite public appreciation of their artistry, many Harlem Renaissance artists were not public about their same-sex affairs because it would have endangered their standing in the community. Their queerness has been revealed through tabloids and gossip columns of the time and analysis of personal correspondence with other artists. It’s no coincidence that many people during the Harlem Renaissance chose to remain closeted about their sexual preferences, but Bentley who was not shy about her preferences had to work to reconcile her identity with her career and used her clothing as a way to explore that.

When it comes to understanding queer people in a cis-heterosexual environment, looking at “dress” provides another way to conceptualize how people created public presentations of usually private behaviors. In order for this to be effective, mutual understanding must be at the center of analyzing dress as a method of visual communication. “Dress” as defined by theorists Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher is “an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body.”5 This definition of dress encompasses hairstyles, tattoos, piercings, clothing, and accessories. In this essay, Roach-Higgins and Eicher discuss how dress serves as a primary mode of communication writing that,

On the basis of their experience through time with other people, individuals develop, in advance of the interaction, notions of how other people are likely to react to their dress. If a person’s predictions of reactions by others are accurate, the identity or identities this person intends to present via dress will coincide with what others perceive.

At her level of celebrity, Gladys Bentley could afford to be intentional with her dress and her continued masculine style would have been recognized as a sign of lesbianism. When she no longer wanted to be recognized as a lesbian, she took on a feminine style of dress.

For someone to be perceived as Black, lesbian, or any other identity, there must be shared definitions (or assumptions) of all identities in order to deduce who is or is not part of a social group. For Bentley, a major problem was that she was misunderstood both by others and as a result, she had difficulty understanding herself. In her personal essay “I Am a Woman Again” in Ebony Magazine’s August 1952 issue, she opens her writing by saying, “For Many years I lived in a personal hell.” She goes on to say “Society shuns us. The unscrupulous exploit us. Very few people can understand us.”6 Bentley’s personal hell was caused by the social isolation and rejection of homosexuality that occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. Aware that she wasn’t the only person affected by this “affliction” she speaks of a collective “we” that is being pushed out of society because of their sexuality.

Had Bentley decided to remain closeted, she may have been accepted as a woman and possibly had more longevity, but because Bentley made her lesbianism public and reinforced it through her visual communication she was made to live in a “personal hell.” Publication rejection of homosexuality makes it difficult to have a harmonious identity in public and personal life, so Bentley either had to reconcile publicly or privately with her sexuality. Through her apologia in Ebony Magazine , she publicly takes accountability for showing off her sexuality.

There’s no way to know what was written in her autobiography as the status of the manuscript remains unclear after the Ebony Magazine article. It could have revealed more about how she navigated the world during her years of lesbianism or an even more critical stance on homosexuality and religion. Since we know that Bentley’s position in the world changed according to her public expression of lesbianism, it is necessary for scholars to seriously discuss Bentley’s own reflections of her dress and identity. Bentley writes that she was misunderstood, and she remains elusive to much of history, but it is through analyzing the trends she did or did not participate in that help us to place or replace her within Black homosexual or heterosexual histories.

6

Gladys Bentley, “I Am a Woman Again",” Ebony Magazine 1952.

UP NEXT… “The Sartorial Science of Lesbian Masculinity in the Late Harlem Renaissance”

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