LORRAINE HANSBERRY.

That case in court did not defer the dream
I am still a raisin in the sun
raging against the machine

-- Lupe Fiasco

In high school, I fell in love with Lorraine Hansberry.

I had just finished appearing in Raisin in the Sun. I played Bobo, who is Walter Lee Younger's business partner, tasked with informing Walter that Willy has run off with the money that the three were supposed to invest in a liquor store. Naturally, I had wanted to play Walter Lee but my light skindedness made me unsuited to play the role of a black everyman. This is an oversimplified plot summary, but Raisin depicts a family from Chicago that is attempting to move into a white neighborhood, only to be told by a white representative from that neighborhood that they'd rather not have any black folks there. Hansberry practically lived this story, the above rhyme refers to the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee, which outlawed racial covenants in neighborhoods.

After the play was over, I read everything Lorraine Hansberry wrote (or so I thought). Although she's been lionized for Raisin -- staged in 1959, it was the first play on Broadway ever written by a black person, or a woman -- her other works have been basically ignored. The fact that her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, never got the attention it deserved, was a tragedy. It wasn't as good as Raisin, by any means, but it was still an amazing play. The play was ahead of its time: it depicted a bohemian set of close friends who were gay, black, and Jewish, and dealt honestly with the identity crisis of whites whose ethnic identities were erased in the American melting pot. One of the characters, Alton Scales, who is the son of a black train-car porter but who is light enough to pass as white, basically gave me my manifesto for life: "As long as the world has a problem with my being a Negro, I am going to make a point out of being one."

My high school crush on Lorraine Hansberry probably also had something to do with her marriage to Robert Nemiroff, since I assumed Hansberry had a thing for Jewish fellas. But today at The Root Kai Wright explores something I didn't know: Hansberry dated women and joined the country's first lesbian women's organization. (It probably wouldn't have changed anything, I did after all, fall for her after she had died of cancer at 34. Love is funny like that.) Wright writes, "It’s unclear whether Hansberry would have called herself a 'lesbian,' primarily because she and others were still in the process of developing the concept of such a clearly defined sexual identity." He cites one of her letters to a gay journal making a feminist case against homophobia:

“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,” Hansberry wrote in one letter, explaining, “There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”

One of the reasons I put the Lupe Fiasco quote at the top of this post is because it's almost impossible to describe the iconic status that Raisin in the Sun has for black folks. Every black child is assigned to read this play at some point in his or her school career. It is THE play. So it's stunning to find out how Hansberry's past has basically been ignored or obscured even as Raisin lives on, mostly because 50 years later, we're still struggling to come to terms with homosexuality in the black community. Hansberry wasn't alone -- as Wright notes, "many of the artists who peopled the Harlem Renaissance have had their queer lives entirely straight-washed." That would include one of Hansberry's muses. The fact that James Baldwin was gay is too often remembered in whispers, and even then only because it's pretty hard to avoid Giovanni's Room.