Today, Kai Wright has a great piece in The Root about Lorraine Hansberry -- and how "she engaged both a personal and a political search for sexual freedom and articulated a still-urgent understanding of its relationship to gender equality." Kai 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. But she dated women and, more strikingly, joined the country's first-ever lesbian political organization, the now-defunct Daughters of Bilitis, at a time when doing so made you a target of federal law enforcement.After joining the group, Hansberry wrote a series of provocative letters to two gay journals. Daughters of Bilitis began publishing its journal, the Ladder, in 1956. Hansberry chimed in to it in May and August of 1957, while she was writing A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry is known for her drama, but she was a prolific political writer and speaker, dating back to her early 1950s activism and editorial work for Robeson. And in her essay-length 1957 letters to the editor, she challenged members to consider the 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."
As Adam writes over on TAPPED, A Raisin in the Sun is a play that most of us read in school. It's undeniably a classic. But that's not all Hansberry wrote. We remember her for her anti-segregation activism and anti-racist writing, but not so much her bold statements (oh, and you better believe they were bold!) on gender inequality and homophobia. As Adam puts it,
When Hansberry was taking on the evils of segregation and "we just want to be left alone" white racism, we applauded, but when she started talking about "homosexual persecution" we stopped listening.
Props to Kai for getting us to listen.
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I was always taught straight forwardly (no pun intended) she was a lesbian and married her beard. I never got the hype over that play by the way, as a PoC the notion that moving close to whites was equivalent to the promised land is dubious at best to me. Granted it was well before my time but still...Gentrification tells you ya never know what you had till it's gone.
I saw some of the play's themes as problematic, but, as you know, minority communities are not monolithic simply because they are all minority. Each community and its own sub-communities have their own historical contexts, struggles, needs, and goals that won't match those of another community.
e.g. If you compare the Black civil rights paradigm (of which Hansberry was a part) to, say, the Native rights movement, the former *was* looking towards achievement in a Euro-dominated system, whereas the latter rejected membership in the system altogether. To suggest that these two historically different communities should have a unified purpose does not, to me, make sense, and actually flirts with the Euro-majority party line that "all those non-white people" together form a lump of Other.
Thanks for posting this. I get over to the Root occasionally but hadn't seen this.
One of the comments attracted my attention. It was posted by soemone whom I believe (from past comments) is a man, and it said:
wow...here we go again with
wow...here we go again with that i'm gay and had to sit in the back of the bus nonsense. sorry, but i neither feel nor share your pain, and few would be interested had that community need to roll it out with such, ah, passion.
This type of attitude cuts me to the core. I am not a participant in the non-immigrant African-American tradition, so I have no personal investment in the issue, but I am from an immigrant background in which queer identity is verboten. I have frequently been told "we don't have people like that in our country; it's a Westerner thing, and if we did, hells yeah, they should have their houses burned." And this from members of minority ethnic/tribal groups that have been raked over the coals by majority ones.
This Root commentator's attitude, which doesn't seem far off from that of my cousins abroad, cuts me to the core. Pardon my privilege-noting, but there are definite unearned advantages to being a hetero, cisgendered (I don't know if this particular commentator is) man. Outrageous burdens for being a Black Man, yes indeed, but, in certain contexts, some privileges, too. All of us have privilege and burdens alike to some degree. And the hope we'd have that one so outrageously burdened (such as my cousins abroad or, in this country, this Black Man despised and feared by the Euro majority) would reach out a hand to another sufferer is, regrettably, a short-lived one.
His outright statement that, sorry, he just doesn't get the struggles gay folk endure, is tantamount to admitting that, sorry, he's not planning on trying to learn how gay folks struggle. He's not planning on practicing empathy or on extending grace to humanity. He didn't live it, so he doesn't have to try to understand it.
Sad.
Ann, or anyone else, do you happen to know what articles she wrote in The Ladder in 1957. I'm looking through my school database for it and I cant find it. Any help would be great.