Today In Black LGBTQ+ History: LORRAINE HANSBERRY

TODAY IN BLACK LGBTQ+ HISTORY, we celebrate Lorraine Hansberry, who was an activist and playwright best known for her groundbreaking play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a struggling Black family on Chicago’s South Side. After the play’s release, Hansberry became the first Black playwright and youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle Award. “A Raisin in the Sun,” named after a line in Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred,” opened at New York City’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre in March 1959, becoming the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The iconic work was then made into a 1961 film starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. 
 
Prior to “A Raisin in the Sun” fame, Hansberry joined lesbian rights group Daughters of Bilitis and contributed letters about feminism and homophobia to its magazine, “The Ladder,” according to LGBTQ historian Eric Marcus, host of the “Making Gay History” podcast. Marcus notes that Hansberry did not officially come out until nearly a half-century after her death — when in 2014 her estate unsealed diaries and other writings in which she revealed her sexuality. Hansberry died in 1965, at just 34 years old, of pancreatic cancer.