GLR July-August 2022

the bathroom and the scene collapses. A third story, “Manywhere,” which first appeared in The Kenyon Review , begins and ends in Perdido, Florida, where nar rator Charlie Vickers, a trans man, has recently taken in his homeless, estranged father, John Leroy Vickers. John fantasizes he is a trekker, rambling through the eastern U.S. and ap proaching Quebec, atlas in hand—without actually leaving home. “My father walks circles around my kitchen,” Charlie explains. More troublingly, John rejects Charlie’s trans identity, pushing him instead to be the daughter he knew as Charlotte. Charlie narrates vivid backstories of his parents’ romance and divorce, of living with his mother as a child, of hiking with his father as a teen, and of his college and young adult years, up to when he had found a partner six months earlier. Now the part

ner has left, unable to put up with the elder Vickers’ delusions. Charlie feels his own chance for a real life might require walk ing out too, but he hesitates because his father needs care. Sud denly, he recalls meeting a woman recently who was a close fit in age and size for the daughter his father craves; amazingly, she had a backpack and talked about hiking the Appalachian Trail. The idea of replacing himself with this chanced-on “daughter” takes hold, and Charlie’s frenzied engineering of the feat brings him to a new place. The six remaining stories in Manywhere are similarly nes tled in the South. They display the challenges of a gender-con forming world—set off by an array of doggedly inventive queer and trans responses. Written with openness and generosity of spirit, the collection is an imaginative tour de force.

A Playwright’s First Act

L ORRAINE HANSBERRY (1930 1965) has experienced a revival of interest in recent years, with several biographies and collec tions of her interviews coming out. Charles J. Shields, author of a biography of Harper Lee, contributes to this trend with a carefully researched and highly readable life of the playwright, whose A Raisin in the Sun is still performed, read,

berry was disappointed by Nemiroff’s re action to a reading, feeling that he did not understand “a single thing—least of all the implications.” After divorcing Nemiroff, Hansberry became involved with women, many of whom were “preppy, cardigan-wearing” types, pretty to look at but not Hans berry’s intellectual equals. She may have had a relationship with Molly Malone

C HARLES G REEN

LORRAINE HANSBERRY The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun by Charles J. Shields Henry Holt & Co. 367 pages, $29.99

Cook, a Village Voice photographer who later became poet Mary Oliver’s partner, and she met authors Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh. Her last relationship was with Dorothy Secules, a tenant in the Greenwich Village apartment building that Hansberry purchased with her earnings from A Raisin in

and discussed more than sixty years after it opened on Broad way in 1959. The book examines aspects of Hansberry’s story not usually discussed at length, including her sexuality. Al though married to songwriter and fellow activist Bob Ne miroff, Hansberry considered him more a friend and critic than a husband. He encouraged her play writing, read her drafts, and offered suggestions.

After reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Sec ond Sex , Hansberry was inspired by its discussion of lesbianism to explore her own attraction to women. Accordingly, her lesbianism was as much an intellectual and activist stance as it was a sex ual orientation. She wrote letters, always under a pseudonym, to gay and lesbian publications, in cluding the first gay magazine, ONE (published by an offshoot of the Mattachine Society), and its sister magazine, the Daughters of Bilitis’ The Ladder . Responding to an article arguing that les bians needed to dress conservatively to avoid pro voking mainstream society, she defended the individual’s freedom of dress but acknowledged, as a Black person, that such compromises were sometimes necessary. She wrote two plays, The Apples of Autumn and Flowers for the General , that featured women with same-sex desires. Hav ing written them while she was married, Hans Charles Green, a writer based in Annapolis, MD, is a fre quent contributor to these pages.

The playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1959.Credit...David Attie/Getty Images

July–August 2022

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