ABSTRACT
Leslie Lee’s 1975 play The First Breeze of Summer is the first Black family drama produced on Broadway to tackle the issue of gender nonconformity. It presents the character Lou Edwards who is going through the ritual of realizing his gender noncomformity as a three-step coming-of-age process: (1) his admission of his inability to reconcile what society’s gender norms want him to be with who he is; (2) his venting shame about this inability to reconcile these two; and (3) his regret about hastening his grandmother’s demise.
