Gladys Bentley

Queer as Fact

History

4.8 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2020

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's episode is on American blues singer Gladys Bentley. Join us for our first venture into the Harlem Renaissance, where you'll find eight hour piano marathons, explicitly queer lyrics, and legally recognised weddings between women. Check out our website, where you can find out everything there is to know about Queer as Fact, including source posts for each episode of our current season. If you enjoy this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon, checking out our merch, and following us on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.
0:04.8	I'm Alice. I'm Eli. I'm Jason. And today we're talking about the American blues singer Gladys Bentley.
0:13.6	We have some content warnings before we begin this episode. This episode is going to include
0:21.4	discussions of periodical racism and will include outdated language for African-American people
0:26.0	in quotes. It will also include discussions of periodical queer phobia, including anti-queer
0:30.7	legislation, the medicalisation of queerness and internalised queerophobia. We'll also be using some
0:35.8	language for lesbians that has at times being used as slurs.
0:39.3	If any of that sounds like something you don't want to listen to,
0:41.2	feel free to skip this episode and check out any of our other content.
0:44.2	So before we get started, as we normally do at the start of a person's life,
0:48.5	I'm going to jump in when Gladys was 45 years old in the year 1952.
0:53.6	Revolutionary.
0:55.2	Okay, then.
0:56.3	Is there time travel in this episode?
0:58.4	Yes, no.
1:00.5	No, there's no time travel in this episode.
1:02.2	The reason we're dumping in here is because 1952 is the year that one of our main sources was written,
1:07.7	and I want to talk about that source as part of our Lid Review before we actually
1:11.1	talk about that as his life. So in the 1940s and 1950s in the USA, politicians like
1:17.6	Senator Joe McCarthy were spearheading, moral and political panic about queer people in the
1:22.9	understanding that queer people were not only immoral but also susceptible to blackmail and therefore
1:27.1	more likely to become communist spies. Gladys Bentley had built her career on being an openly
	...

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