DECEMBER 15 - LORRAINE HANSBERRYLorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin In The Sun and the first Blac

DECEMBER 15 - LORRAINE HANSBERRY

Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin In The Sun and the first Black playwright to win a “Best Play” award from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, spent the entirety of her short life (she died at the age of 34 from Pancreatic Cancer) in the closet — but that didn’t stop her from lending her voice to the movement.

She published several letters anonymously in lesbian magazine The Ladder, identifying herself as a “heterosexually married lesbian” and an essay, in 1961, called “On Homophobia, The Intellectual Impoverishment of Women and a Homosexual Bill of Rights.”

By that time she’d already “quietly separated” from her husband Robert Nemiroff and was living alone in Greenwich Village. They eventually divorced but stayed close and wrote together. So much of Hansberry’s writings have been found after her death, including incredible lists like the I AM BORED TO DEATH WITH list on which she included “lesbians,” “A RAISIN IN THE SUN!” and “silly white people.” Tellingly, she included “my homosexuality” on both “I Like” and “I Hate.”

Text for today’s post was taken from the Autostraddlepiece12 Women They Didn’t Tell You Were Queer In History Class.Please consider donating a few minutes to make a submission to Celebrate Women before the year is over.