Blues singer Gladys Bentley was a dazzling star of the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the 1920s and ’30s when African American culture flourished in New York City. Bentley’s risqué performances intrigued audiences. So did the entertainer’s relationships with women.
“There are many ways to read Bentley’s life,” fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst explains in Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion, “but mine is, of course, through clothing.”
