Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an African American playwright and author of political speeches, letters, and essays. Best known for "A Raisin in the Sun", which in 1959 became the first play by an African American woman to open on Broadway. It also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year. This play was inspired by her family's legal battle against racially segregated housing laws in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago during her childhood.

At 29 years, she became the youngest American playwright and only the 5th woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.
While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime - essays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement, the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.

Although Lorraine Hansberry was known as a supporter of equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, it wasn't until after her death that her own sexual orientation was revealed. She was married to Robert Nemiroff in the 1950s, so no one questioned her sexual orientation. However, she did date women and was involved in the early gay rights movement.

Lorraine Hansberry was a feminist and gay rights proponent at a time when such things were considered suspect. She wrote into The Ladder in 1957 calling for a feminist analysis of 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. 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 root not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma."

Late she wrote to the gay magazine ONE. An unpublished letter in 1961 calls out the connection between racism, classism, homophobia and anti-semitism.

I have suspected for a good time that the homosexual in America would ultimately pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment of women. Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexual think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.

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