I first created this zine, "Gladys Bentley: A History in Three Acts," to accompany some of my digital zine-making workshops. It's all about queer blues icon, Gladys Bentley, and their history. I wanted the zine to serve as a model to students and participants that queer histories can be presented in zines without erasing their complexity.
The zine is based off of my Master's research that considers how Gladys Bentley's history has been presented across different forms of media.
"Gladys Bentley: A History in Three Acts" is a short introduction to the twists and turns of Gladys Bentley's history divided in three acts.
Wanna learn more about Gladys Bentley?
Gladys Bentley was an incredible performer with a complicated and rich history. You can read more about Bentley in a chapter of Saidiya Hartman's amazing book, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, and in James F. Wilson's Bulldagggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies.
To learn more about the blues and its deep connections to Black feminisms in the US, read Angela Y. Davis' Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.
Explore some archival resources about Gladys Bentley via Queer Music Heritage or the Digital Transgender Archive.
You can watch Gladys Bentley perform on Groucho Marx's popular TV show, "You Bet Your Life," in 1958 below, and a feature on Gladys Bentley by PBS' "Unladylike" in 2020: