Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyAugust 12th, 2016
(d. 1960) The Harlem Renaissance blues singer was known as the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.” Her “sophisticated songs” were obscene parodies of famous blues standards and popular songs. She sang them in the speakeasies of Harlem, often while brazenly flirting with the women in the audience. She was famous for her powerful voice, her girlfriends, and her manner of dress, especially her signature tuxedo and top hat. In the 1930s, she headlined the Harlem’s Ubangi Club, an “exotic” (read: gay) club where she performed with a chorus line of drag queens as backup. She was successful enough to acquire a Park Avenue apartment, a fancy car, servants, and, as she claimed at one time, a white wife in New Jersey.
But by 1937, the popularity of Harlem began to wane, so she moved to Los Angeles to be with her mother. She continued to carve out a place for herself there in the underground gay scene, performing at such popular lesbian bars as Joquins’ El Rancho in Los Angeles and Mona’s in San Francisco.
But when the straight-laced fifties came around, Bentley abandoned her trademark tuxedo. She began wearing dresses, and, in a 1950 article for Ebony, claimed to have cured her lesbianism through hormone treatments. She also said that she married J. T. Gibson, a newspaper columnist who later denied that they had ever met. She did marry a man who was sixteen years her junior, although they eventually divorced. In 1960, she was on the verge of being ordained a minister for the Temple of Love in Christ when she died of pneumonia at age 52.
Sometime in the 1950s, she appeared on Grocho Marx’s You Bet Your Life.
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