Playwright Lorraine Hansberry
by David Bianco
"I was born black and female," playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote, summing
up the influences on her life and work. If she had lived longer, she might
have added "and lesbian" to her description of herself.
Both of Hansberry's parents were civil rights activists in Chicago. In 1938,
when Lorraine was 8, the family moved from a black ghetto to a mostly white,
middle-class neighborhood in order to challenge the city's Jim Crow housing
laws. The Hansberrys fought all the way to the Supreme Court for a black
family's right to live where it pleased - a struggle that served as
inspiration for Hansberry's landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun.
After a few years of study at the University of Wisconsin, Hansberry moved to
New York City, joined the editorial staff of Paul Robeson's radical journal,
Freedom, and became a civil rights activist. At one demonstration, against
the exclusion of blacks from university sports, she met Robert Nemiroff, a
white Jewish intellectual and music producer, and the two married in 1953.
But the marriage lasted only a few years, because Hansberry soon began coming
to terms with her lesbianism. Around 1957, Hansberry joined the Daughters of
Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization based in San Francisco, and
began receiving their journal, The Ladder.
In May 1957, Hansberry wrote the first of two thoughtful letters to the
magazine. Since the editorial policy was to identify letter writers with
initials, the printed letter was signed only, "L.H.N., New York, N.Y." - the
writer's identity was disclosed only after her death. In her letter,
Hansberry mused about everything from butch-femme culture to the gaps between
lesbians and gay men, displaying a feminist awareness that would grow stronger
over the next few years.
In August of that same year, "L.H.N." once again wrote the The Ladder with
more feminist commentary. The connections she drew between sexism and
homophobia were ahead of her time: "Homosexual persecution has at its roots
not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma," she wrote.
By 1957, Hansberry was already well into writing A Raisin in the Sun.
When the play opened on Broadway in 1959, she became an instant celebrity, making
theater history for both African-Americans and women. Never before had a
black woman writer's work appeared on a Broadway stage. Hansberry became
the first African-American and the fifth woman to win the New York Drama Critics'
Award. Softened of some of its defiance, the play became a hit movie two years later.
Hansberry's second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964),
received only lukewarm reviews, however. She was criticized for writing
about white people and straying from "black" topics. She also presented radical
ideas about gay activism. "If you don't like the sex laws," Sidney, the
protagonist, tells David, a gay male character, "attack 'em.... Please get
over the notion that your particular 'thing' is something that only the
deepest, saddest, and most nobly tortured can know about. It ain't."
Sadly, Hansberry's contributions to theater, to African-American culture, and
to gay liberation were all cut short. After a bout with ulcers, she learned
in July 1964 that there were serious problems with her intestinal system.
Six months later she died of cancer at the age of 34. Nemiroff, her literary
executor, spent the next 25 years keeping her work alive. But Hansberry's
sexual identity remained hidden until lesbian scholars brought it to light in the 1980s.
|
|
| PlanetOut Direct |
News to You
Get PlanetOut News headlines mailed directly to you now!
|
|
Search
