Breaking Down Barriers: Famous and Prominent Queer Black Women
Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry, the famous A Raisin in the Sun playwright, decided to keep her sexuality hidden, but she wrote for a lesbian publication The Ladder using only her initials. Although her sexual orientation wasn’t revealed until after her death, she was an advocate for equal rights. Within the publication she wrote in 1957, “One is oppressed or discriminated against because one is different, not ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ somehow.”