Pre-Stonewall

Gladys Bentley


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PS: Pre-Stonewall returns with the story of Gladys Bentley. She was an irreverent icon of the Harlem Renaissance, who performed her act and went around in public dressed in men's clothing and even claimed to have married a woman. Later in the more puritanical atmosphere of the United States in the 1950s, though, she published an article claiming her homosexuality had been cured. But how sincere was she?


Sources:


Bentley, Gladys. "I am a Woman Again." Ebony Magazine 2.10 (1952): 92-95.


Jones, Regina V. "How Does A Bulldagger Get Out of the Footnote? Or Gladys Bentley's Blues." Ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women and Gender Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 31-48.


Turner, Joyce Moore and Turner, W. Burghardt. Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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Pre-StonewallBy Chad Denton