Du Bois Workshop Series with Professor Bianki Torres

Professor Bianki Torres, Lecturer in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies

Gladys Bentley was a blues artist from the Harlem Renaissance and a drag king of national attention. Bentley's personal narrative has been a site of celebration and criticism, in honoring her gender transgression and examining her renunciation of her career as a "male impersonator." However, her music from 1940 and onward remains unexamined as a testament to the fortitude of Black queer performance in African American cultural production. In other words, how does Black music offer a platform for marginalized sexualities? How does queer politics inform Black music before the term

'queer' enters the lexicon? This chapter examines Bentley's most explicit work from the 1940s to demonstrate how Black queer performance is a necessary component to the versatility and persistence of the blues.