Bentley also studied to be a minister, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones. Roberts later denied that they ever married. Charles Roberts was a cook who she married (within five months of meeting) in a civil ceremony in Santa Barbara, California, in 1952. She claimed that she had married a white woman in Atlantic City.īentley was openly lesbian during her early career, but during the McCarthy Era, she started wearing dresses, and married a man at the age of 28 named Charles Roberts. She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing.
On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player", and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting outrageously with women in the audience. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She moved to New York at the age of 16, and her career as a performer skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House on 133rd Street, one of New York City's most notorious gay speakeasies, in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. Bentley and his wife, a Trinidadian, Mary Mote.
She was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of American George L. Gladys Bentley was a pianist, singer, and performer during the Harlem Renaissance.
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