Queer History 110: Erase This Shit , Assholes - Lorraine Hansberry

The Brilliant, Radical, Closeted Life of a Revolutionary They Tried to Erase How Broadway's first Black female playwright fought for justice on all fronts while hiding her true self

You think you know Lorraine Hansberry? That brilliant mind behind "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play by a Black woman to hit Broadway, the voice that captured working-class Black life with such unflinching honesty that it changed American theater forever? That's the sanitized version they teach in schools—Hansberry as a one-hit wonder, a civil rights footnote, a brilliant flame extinguished too soon at just 34 years old. What they don't tell you is that she was a goddamn revolutionary living a dangerous double life: a Black lesbian radical in the suffocating 1950s America, fighting for liberation on multiple fronts while carrying the crushing weight of secrets that would have destroyed her career.

Let me be clear about something—when Lorraine Hansberry was writing, being openly gay wasn't just socially unacceptable; it was fucking criminal. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness. People were arrested in bar raids, fired from jobs, subjected to electroshock therapy, and publicly humiliated for the "crime" of loving someone of the same gender. For a Black woman already challenging America's racial hierarchy, coming out would have been professional suicide. So she lived a compartmentalized life, fighting publicly for racial justice while privately exploring her sexuality through anonymous letters to lesbian publications and in the pages of her personal journals.

Hansberry wasn't just in the closet—she was trapped in a goddamn vault of secrecy. And that's what makes her courage, her work, and her relentless fight for justice all the more remarkable.

Beyond "A Raisin in the Sun": The Radical They Don't Teach You About

If all you know about Hansberry is "A Raisin in the Sun," you've been fed a deliberately incomplete story. Yes, her play about the Younger family's struggle against housing discrimination was groundbreaking. Yes, it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1959, beating out heavyweights like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. But that success has been used to whitewash who Hansberry really was—a fierce, uncompromising radical whose politics were far more revolutionary than mainstream America was comfortable acknowledging.

"She wasn't trying to integrate into middle-class America," explains literary scholar Imani Perry. "She was trying to transform society completely."

Hansberry wasn't just writing about a family wanting to move to a white neighborhood. She was dissecting the entire fucking system of capitalism and racism in America. She was a self-described "heterodoxical socialist" who wrote for Freedom, Paul Robeson's radical left-wing Black newspaper. The FBI had a 1,000-page file on her because they considered her dangerous. When most Americans were cowering under McCarthyism, Hansberry was publicly challenging imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.

"American capitalism has always been a dirty business," she wrote, refusing to mince words even when such statements could ruin her career during the Red Scare. At a time when most successful writers were carefully moderating their politics, Hansberry was getting more radical. Her unproduced play "Les Blancs" tackled African liberation struggles head-on. Her second Broadway play, "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," dealt with political activism and included a gay character at a time when depicting homosexuality on stage was still taboo.

"I AM A HOMOSEXUAL": The Secret Letters to The Ladder

While publicly fighting for racial justice, Hansberry was privately reaching out to the nascent lesbian rights movement. Using only her initials—"L.H."—she wrote a series of letters to The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in America, published by the Daughters of Bilitis.

In one of these anonymous letters in May 1957, she wrote defiantly:

"I'm tired of reading and hearing such shallow thinking by heterosexual people on the question of homosexuality, male or female. And I am fundamentally heterosexual, I think. But I have had homosexual experiences, like many, and quite unlike the 'bisexual' pattern...I am a lesbian. And I welcome the opportunity to say so."

The contradiction in claiming to be "fundamentally heterosexual" while simultaneously declaring "I am a lesbian" speaks to Hansberry's complicated relationship with her sexuality. Remember, she was writing in an era when there was no language for sexual fluidity, when even private homosexual acts were criminalized in every state, when being exposed would have destroyed not just her career but her ability to effect change on any front.

In another letter, she challenged the conservative approach of the homophile movement:

"As one raised in a culture where 'homosexuals' were simply something nasty to be loathed, I found myself gradually, with my husband's patient help, understanding a thing or two. It seems to me that you are saying that you would like to be recognized as a whole person, as one who has grown, developed as an entity, as a being with a contribution to make. I think it is time that 'half the human race' had the same to say about themselves as women."

This letter reveals not only her growing identity as a lesbian but her frustration with movements that didn't connect all struggles for human liberation.

The Marriage That Couldn't Contain Her

At 24, Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish songwriter and political activist. The marriage lasted eight years before they separated, though they remained collaborators and friends until her death. While some historians have suggested this was a marriage of convenience—a "lavender marriage" to shield both from scrutiny about their sexuality—others point to Hansberry's complexity. She wrote lovingly about Nemiroff in her journals while also documenting her desires for women.

"The real cruelty is the fact that I cannot tell him that I am afraid that I am not so much afraid of being homosexual as I am of never having been truly heterosexual," she confessed in her journal.

Her private writings reveal a woman struggling with society's limitations, not just on her sexuality but on her very existence:

"Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; feminists continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as the primary obstacle to equal status regardless of class or race; men of color continue to misinterpret their own domination of their women...as proof of manhood. The results are still the same—one half of the human race continues to be oppressed by the other."

Long before concepts like intersectionality entered academia, Hansberry was living and articulating the complex intersections of oppression based on race, gender, class, and sexuality.

"I Think It Is About Time That Equipped Women Began To Take On Some Of The Ethical Questions"

Hansberry's private writings reveal a woman decades ahead of her time. In her journals, later published posthumously as "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," she explored themes of feminism and lesbian identity with an honesty she couldn't afford publicly:

"I have always been disgusted by the whole business of 'men are this way and women are that way.' I have always said that women who accept this idea are just male flunkies. I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion."

She wrote candidly about her attractions:

"My homosexuality. By the time of my death I will have loved deeply and truly at least two men and one woman."

She documented the toll of living in the closet:

"It is much easier to be gay in Greenwich Village than on the South Side of Chicago. But it would be a sad existence indeed if one had to live in those few places."

And expressed her frustration with the apolitical nature of gay social circles:

"I have suspected for a good time that the homosexual in American life is going to find his social vision through the Negro struggle...The guts and muscle of the thing are missing and so is the integrity...They will also have to fight for their humanity and get a little bloody doing it."

For Hansberry, no single-issue politics could ever be sufficient. She saw all struggles for human dignity as interconnected, a revolutionary perspective that was too radical even for many in the movements she supported.

The Brilliant Flame Extinguished Too Soon

Hansberry's career was brutally cut short when she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, just 34 goddamn years old. Her ex-husband Nemiroff became her literary executor, and while he worked tirelessly to keep her work in the public eye, the full truth of her sexuality remained largely hidden for decades.

James Baldwin, her close friend and fellow writer who was himself gay, eulogized her: "It is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a human being."

What killed Hansberry was cancer. But what strained her, what forced her to compartmentalize her life, what denied her the freedom to live authentically, was a society that couldn't handle a Black lesbian radical intellectual who refused to stay in any of the boxes prescribed for her.

After her death, Nemiroff compiled and edited her unpublished writings into "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," but the explicit references to her sexuality were largely muted. In the climate of the 1960s, even her progressive literary executor felt the need to protect her legacy by obscuring parts of her identity.

The Legacy They Tried to Sanitize

For decades after her death, Hansberry's queerness was erased from her public legacy. Her contributions to lesbian publications remained uncredited. Her private journals describing her sexuality were left unexamined. She was canonized as a racial justice pioneer while her sexuality was treated as an irrelevant footnote at best, or as salacious gossip at worst.

This wasn't accidental. It was part of a broader pattern of straightwashing historical figures, particularly Black historical figures. The same erasure happened to Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and countless others. It's as if mainstream culture couldn't handle the idea that the struggles for racial justice and LGBTQ+ liberation might be interconnected, that the same brilliant minds might be fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.

"The erasure of Hansberry's queerness is not just homophobia—it's also racism," argues scholar Tracy Bealer. "It's the assumption that Black intellectuals couldn't possibly have been thinking about sexuality in sophisticated ways, that they must have been focused solely on race."

This sanitization serves a political purpose: it allows us to celebrate Hansberry's work on racial justice while ignoring her more radical critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. It turns a revolutionary into a respectable historical figure, defanging her most challenging ideas.

Reclaiming the Whole Hansberry

It wasn't until 2013—nearly 50 years after her death—that Hansberry's lesbianism received serious scholarly attention in the biography "A Raisin in the Sun: The Life of Lorraine Hansberry" by Lynn Nottage. The 2018 documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" further explored her sexuality, including interviews with women who had known her in queer circles in Greenwich Village.

In her journal, Hansberry once wrote: "One day, when it is safer, perhaps the truth will be told." That day has been long coming, but it's finally arriving.

Understanding Hansberry as a lesbian radical doesn't diminish her work on racial justice—it deepens it. It helps us see "A Raisin in the Sun" not just as a play about housing discrimination, but as a work that challenges multiple intersecting systems of oppression. It helps us understand why she wrote characters like Beneatha Younger, who rejects traditional gender roles and embraces African identity. It helps us appreciate why her writing shows such empathy for characters struggling against societal expectations from all directions.

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love," Hansberry wrote. For a Black lesbian in the 1950s and early 1960s, that statement wasn't just optimistic—it was fucking revolutionary.

The Radical Who Saw it All Connected

What makes Hansberry so remarkable isn't just that she was closeted while creating groundbreaking art. It's that she understood, decades before mainstream movements did, that all systems of oppression are interconnected.

In a 1964 speech, she declared:

"The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical. And we've got to find some way to encourage the Negro to become a revolutionary. That's got to be our problem."

She wasn't just calling for integration or equal rights. She was demanding a complete transformation of American society—a revolution in consciousness that would upend not just racism but capitalism, imperialism, sexism, and homophobia.

In her unfinished novel "Toussaint," she wrote about the radical potential of love itself:

"Love and respect the difference in each other. None of us can afford to feel all right about hating another living soul...People, particularly oppressed people, need each other, especially in their differences."

Why Hansberry Still Matters Today

In an era when politicians are banning books, when they're passing "Don't Say Gay" laws, when they're trying to erase Black history from school curricula, Hansberry's life and work feel urgently relevant. She knew what it was to fight on multiple fronts, to see how different forms of oppression reinforce each other, to understand that true liberation can't come from single-issue movements.

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely," she wrote. In her exceptional mind, Hansberry saw connections that others missed, challenged orthodoxies that others accepted, and imagined a more radical form of liberation than many of her contemporaries could envision.

Today, as movements for Black Lives, transgender rights, economic justice, and environmental justice struggle to work in coalition, Hansberry's intersectional vision offers a roadmap. She understood that the master's house cannot be dismantled with the master's tools, that reform was insufficient when the entire system was rotten.

In her final interview, given just before her death, Hansberry was asked about her hopes for the future. Her response was both optimistic and challenging:

"I think that we have to say that the ultimate confrontation is going to be between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I don't think there can be a cast aside section. We have got to find some way of working together, of making history together."

That's the Hansberry we need today—not the sanitized high school curriculum version, but the full revolutionary who understood that all our struggles for humanity are connected. The lesbian who wrote anonymously to The Ladder. The socialist who challenged capitalism. The feminist who questioned gender roles. The playwright who brought uncompromising Black stories to Broadway.

It's time we honor the whole damn brilliant, complex, radical Lorraine Hansberry—not just the parts that make us comfortable.

References

1. Gregory, D. (2018). Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart [Documentary].

2. Perry, I. (2018). Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.

3. Hansberry, L. (1984). To Be Young, Gifted and Black (R. Nemiroff, Ed.).

4. Carbado, D. W., & Gulati, M. (2013). Acting White?: Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America.

5. Gaines, K. K. (2012). Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century.

6. Holmes, R. (2021). The Radical Vision of Lorraine Hansberry. The New Yorker.

7. Ransby, B. (2013). Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson.

8. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.

9. The FBI Files on Lorraine Hansberry, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

10. Letters to The Ladder by "L.H." (1957-1959), Lesbian Herstory Archives.