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 pub…