Strategic Self-Censorship: The Responsive Visibilities of Pauli Murray and Gladys Bentley
In March 1940, civil rights theorist, author, and lawyer Pauli Murray mounted a bus leaving New York City with his friend Adelene McBean.[1] The pair planned to spend Easter in Durham, North Carolina, with Pauli’s family. The bus eventually entered Virginia, where Jim Crow segregation laws were still in operation. After a stop in Richmond, Murray and McBean chose a seat above the bus’s rear wheel; McBean later said that her side hurt from being pushed against the wheel’s housing. Murray tried to resolve the issue by asking the bus driver if some white children could move forward into empty seats, enabling McBean and Murray to move up a row. Contrary to popular belief, bus segregation laws did not necessarily consign Black riders to back rows but instead indicated that Black passengers could only occupy the rows behind white riders. “In other words,” explains historian Glenda Gilmore in retelling Murray’s story, “the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ of the bus were relative concepts.”[2] In response, the bus driver “pushed [Murray] backward,” yelling, “Get out of my face and go back to your seat.”[3]
After being assaulted by the driver, Murray and McBean took the opportunity of a pit stop in Petersburg, Virginia, to take new seats that were closer to the front of the bus. The driver responded by commanding them to move back. McBean ignored the driver at first and then matched his aggression. McBean, who was, in Murray’s words, “peppery,” had previously expressed defiance about racial segregation laws, so Murray had been anxious that a confrontation might ensue on the trip.[4] She said, “I can’t understand this. I’ve never been treated this way before…. I have my rights. I’ve paid my money… I told him the seat is broken… I’m an ill woman and I can not sit in that seat.” When McBean refused to yield, the driver summoned two police officers. Upon boarding the bus, one officer sternly said to the pair, “All right now. What’s up?” At this point, Murray tried to intervene. He responded to the policeman, “Nothing’s wrong, officer. Nothing at all is wrong. We are simply sitting in these seats we paid to ride in. My friend here is ill. She can’t ride over the wheel and besides the seat back there is broken.”[5] Murray was ignored.
Eventually the driver fixed the seat and the police left. McBean was not satisfied with this resolution. She demanded an apology for the way she had been treated. Then the driver distributed “witness cards” to white passengers to describe their experience of the event. Murray and McBean protested that the Black passengers were not being given the same chance to provide their accounts.[6] For the driver, this was the last straw. The police returned and arrested Murray and McBean for “creating a disturbance.”[7]
Murray went on to document the five days he spent in a dirty and crowded jail cell. He recorded his interactions with inmates and used his legal connections to solicit support for his cause. He wished to use his arrest to challenge segregation law with the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With this goal in mind, Murray “noticed with satisfaction” that a charge for violating segregation laws was added after their arrest. The judge assigned to their case, however, later dismissed the segregation charge, undermining Murray’s ability to challenge bus segregation in this case.[8]
Also aboard the bus that day was a white graduate student, Harold Garfinkel, who went on to publish an article about the incident in Opportunity, a popular Black cultural magazine during the Harlem Renaissance. Garfinkel’s account described an altercation involving a Black man, a Black woman, and a White bus driver. When Murray spoke to the officers on McBean’s behalf, Garfinkel wrote, “His voice was just a bit too loud and too clear, an arrogant adolescent repeating by rote…. The whites were not attracted to him because he was neither white nor black, spoke like neither, and threatened to upset a good fight.”[9] Garfinkel would go on to have a 35-year-long career in academia and become a highly influential sociologist. Historian Glenda Gilmore asserts, “Garfinkel was surprised to learn in 2004 that the person about whom he had written was a woman.”[10]
Murray’s arrest predates Rosa Parks's famous bus segregation protest in Montgomery, Alabama, by fifteen years, but the incident has been largely overlooked in civil rights history, which might be due to Murray’s transmasculinity. Historian Cookie Woolner explains that there was a moral backlash about gender and sexuality nonconformity in Black culture in the years prior to Murray’s arrest. In New York, where Murray lived and worked, the transgressive environment of the Harlem Renaissance began to be seen as excessive during the financial hardships of the 1930s.[11] Furthermore, W.E.B. DuBois and other Black public figures felt that transmasculine performers and other transgressive entertainers were hurting the project of racial uplift. This shift undoubtedly influenced Murray’s experiences of discrimination.
By the time Murray was arrested, Brittney Cooper argues, his “masculine gender performance had already caused problems for her in both her activism and education.” When Murray wanted to challenge racial segregation in a University of North Carolina graduate program in 1938, the NAACP declined to represent him. Cooper, in agreement with Gilmore, explains that the NAACP’s refusal to represent Murray had more to do with his “less-than-secret lesbian associations,” his masculinity, and his mental health issues than the legal technicalities that the organization cited in its refusal.[12]
In trans histories, Murray’s historic arrest is likely under-discussed because Murray himself chose not to record that he was presenting as a man at the time. Murray’s gender presentation, however, cannot be reduced to an effort to maximize safety while traveling. Just weeks prior, according to Cooper, “Murray had written…that her desire to embrace maleness was so strong, that she simply could not reconcile herself to any notion of womanhood.” Murray bequeathed his personal writing and correspondence about the event to Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and provided a chapter-long account of his arrest in his 1987 mémoire, Song In A Weary Throat.[13] Murray’s choice not to mention his gender nonconformity in accounts of the incident reveals how transmasculine subjects sometimes employ self-censorship as a survival technique. It is common for historians today to refer to Murray as a trans historical figure, even if he would not have used that word to describe himself.
Murray was not the only Black transmasculine person during this period to employ strategic self-censorship. In 1952, jazz performer Gladys Bentley published a sensational article entitled, “I Am a Woman Again,” in Ebony magazine. Bentley wrote that she had received estrogen treatment to be restored to womanhood and heterosexuality, resulting in her marriage to a man. Bentley described previously living in a “half-shadow no-man’s land… between the boundaries of the two sexes” as a “personal hell,” explicitly referencing her years as a “male impersonator” as well as more subtly mentioning her romantic relationships with women. Bentley was relatively open about being a lesbian early in her career and dressed “as a man” in her performances. She even had a “highly publicized” wedding ceremony with a white woman in Atlantic City in 1931.[14] While not formalizing a legal marriage, Bentley was brazenly challenging race, gender, and sexual norms in a highly visible way.[15] Queer historians often refer to a moral backlash concerning homosexuality after World War Two’s more permissive atmosphere.[16] An important example of this shift is the state-sponsored punishment of homosexuals during the Lavender Scare, the height of which was approaching when Bentley published her article.
While Bentley’s piece might appear to indicate that she had once and for all forsaken her queer lifestyle and gender nonconformity, historian Lillian Gieseke explains, “Almost every scholar who has examined Bentley’s life agrees that she published the Ebony article to escape persecution during the McCarthy Era and the Lavender Scare. Red-baiting officials often conflated communism and homosexuality, and actors and actresses were being accused and then blacklisted.”[17] The article in Ebony included photographs of Bentley in housewife attire tending to domestic duties, yet her musical performances remained queer and masculine after its publication.[18] Cookie Woolner documents that Bentley had experienced relative tolerance for her vulgar and queer performances in Harlem up until the 1930s, when “the Great Depression helped precipitate a revolt against gay life.”[19] Part of this backlash toward queerness, and perhaps transmasculinity in particular, related to how the Depression caused the perceived emasculation of men through joblessness. This led to efforts to reinforce traditional gender norms and campaigns to police gender and sexual nonconformity. Indeed, despite the article in Ebony, Bentley was eventually investigated by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee.
In the end, Bentley’s Ebony article is an example of both strategic performances of conformity and transmasculine visibility. Bentley expressed her motivation to write the article: “I am still haunted by the sex underworld in which I once lived. I want to help others who are trapped in its dark recesses by telling my story.” Gieseke further clarifies Bentley’s intention, explaining that the “article was sympathetic to the queer community in a way that no other sources were.” She continues, “Although we now recognize that the idea of a cure to queerness is very harmful, the Ebony essay gave queer people hope that their lives would improve.” In this sense, Bentley tells a story of erasing queerness while making queerness incredibly visible. The form of that visibility—her rejection of queerness—may have been required in the context of the violent repression she was experiencing.
In these examples, both Murray and Bentley utilized the erasure of their transmasculinity, as well as their queer sexuality, to escape political persecution, professional discrimination, and social judgement. Yet both also chose, at other times, to assert their visibility as gender nonconforming people. Bentley did so before and after the Ebony article: in 1957, as the force of the Lavender Scare waned, Bentley showed a reporter pictures of both her husband and her wife.[20] While Murray chose not to be public about his gender nonconformity while he was alive, he left meticulous evidence of his failed attempts to access testosterone treatment in the personal papers he bequeathed to Harvard University. Murray and Bentley demonstrated a pragmatic politics of visibility, alternatively deploying both self-censorship and conspicuous gender nonconformity in response to rapidly shifting social attitudes toward homosexuality and transgenderism.
[1] I use he/him pronouns for Murray because of his identification as a man in some of his personal papers. As Brittney Cooper demonstrates, however, Murray’s relationship with gender and womanhood was complicated and unfixed throughout his life. For this reason, I do not “correct” authors when they use other pronouns for Murray. See Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
[2] Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 318.
[3] “Petersburg Bus Incident—March 1940–May 16, 1940,” 1940, Boxes 4 and 5, Papers 85–88, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
[4] Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 317; Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
[5] Harold Garfinkel, “Color Trouble,” in The Best Short Stories of 1941, ed. E.J. O’Brien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 145.
[6] Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 319.
[7] “Petersburg Bus Incident,” Schlesinger Library.
[8] Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 88.
[9] Garfinkel, “Color Trouble,” 145-146.
[10] Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 536, n120.
[11] Cookie Woolner, The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 97-100.
[12] Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 95.
[13] Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 146-65.
[14] Eric Garber, “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues,” Outlook, Spring 1988, 58-59; Steven Niven, “Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke Ground With Marriage to a Woman in 1931,” The Root, February 11, 2015, https://www.theroot.com/blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-ground-with-marriage-1790858771; Lillian Gieseke, “Gladys Bentley’s Confessions,” Center on Religion and Culture, Fordham University, August 4, 2022, https://crc.blog.fordham.edu/arts-culture/gladys-bentleys-confessions/; Woolner, The Famous Lady Lovers, 8, 53, 95, 138.
[15] Niven, “Blues Singer Gladys Bentley.”
[16] See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[17] Gieseke, “Gladys Bentley’s Confessions.”
[18] Gieseke, “Gladys Bentley’s Confessions.”
[19] Woolner, The Famous Lady Lovers, 98.
[20] Some aspects of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which banned homosexuals from working for the federal government, stayed in effect until 1995, but the height of the Lavender Scare ended in 1956 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956).