Hansberry Offstage: The playwright's lesbian writings

Hansberry OffstageThe playwright's lesbian writings Alec Pollak (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution David Attie, contact sheets of Lorraine Hansberry portrait session, 1959. David Attie/Archive Photos via Getty Images. [End Page 60] With each passing year, Lorraine Hansberry rests more comfortably on her laurels. She is secure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literary greats, unequivocally a foremother of Black American drama. This has not always been the case: Hansberry died young, a one-hit wonder and widely misunderstood. A Raisin in the Sun, her 1959 play about a Black American family's struggle against housing segregation, made her the first Broadway-produced Black woman playwright and the youngest-ever winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Hansberry's politics may have been far-left, but audiences [End Page 61] understood Raisin as a liberal paean to assimilation. As Black art and politics took an increasingly militant turn in the years after Hansberry's death, her popularity waned. Thanks to the tireless work of her literary estate—headed in its early years by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff—Hansberry never slipped entirely out of print or public consciousness, but her afterlife has been full of false starts. Critics, eager to explain away a young Black woman who challenged the limits of their understanding, have been quick to write off Hansberry's oeuvre beyond Raisin as "the poor remnants of an unfinished life." As a result, Hansberry's life and influence have come in and out of focus since her death in 1965: she has been rediscovered each decade, celebrated, and then sidelined anew. Today, we are in the midst of a Hansberry renaissance that one hopes will be her last. Since 2014, three biographies, two documentaries, and a half-dozen exhibitions, commemorative works, and awards-nominated theater revivals have recovered what Soyica Diggs Colbert has called Hansberry's "radical vision" as an enduring source of wisdom for the present. For the first time, Hansberry's sexuality has emerged as a meaningful component of her identity, one that demands consideration in any account of her life and work. The timing isn't a coincidence: in 2014, the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust avowed publicly that Hansberry was a lesbian and greenlit an unprecedented number of projects. Since then, ten years of commemorative works have reinvented Hansberry as a prophet of feminism, postcolonialism, LGBTQ rights, and Black nationalism who lived an extraordinarily full life, despite her untimely death. With unprecedented access to Hansberry's archive and an engaged, obliging literary estate, the story of Hansberry's multidimensional life seems finally within reach. But the work of understanding her life is far from over. Recent biographers have acknowledged Hansberry's lesbianism, but they have not plumbed the depths of her queer archive or reckoned with her sexuality on Hansberry's own terms: as the "great personal contradiction" of her life. Hansberry explored this "great personal contradiction" across a series of lesbian-themed stories, four [End Page 62] of which she published in the early gay magazines The Ladder and ONE under the pen name Emily Jones. These four stories, along with snippets of diary entries and letters that have been quoted by her latest biographers, are the primary materials from which contemporary critics have gleaned insight into Hansberry's sexuality. But Hansberry wrote these stories during the self-professed "childhood" of her homosexuality, and they are but a small part of her queer corpus. The richer story of Hansberry's lesbianism can be found in a handful of unpublished stories and plays, housed among her papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in which she explores the evolution of her homosexuality, its role in her life, and its compatibility with the other dimensions of her identity. Unlike her key writings on feminism, anticolonialism, and Blackness, many of which have been published and pored over, these stories remain largely untouched. The Hansberry proffered by the past decade's reappraisals is fearless and fully formed—as clear-eyed and analytically astute about "the question of homosexuality" as she is about feminism, colonialism, and Black liberation. "She was a feminist before the feminist movement," explains Imani...