Urvashi Vaid

Urvashi Vaid (8 October 1958 – 14 May 2022) was an Indian-born American LGBT rights activist, lawyer, and writer.

An expert in gender and sexuality law, she was a consultant in attaining specific goals of social justice.

Urvashi Vaid was born on 8 October 1958, in New Delhi, India and moved to Potsdam, New York, at age eight with her family, after her father, writer Krishna Baldev Vaid, took up a university teaching position.

At age 11, she participated in the anti-Vietnam war movement.

At Vassar College, she was active in a variety of political and social causes, including co-founding the Feminist Union on campus (in the context of Vassar's recent transition to coed) and participating in activism against apartheid.

She received a Juris Doctor degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston in 1983, where she founded the Boston Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance, a non-partisan political organization that interviews and endorses candidates for political office and advocates for Boston's gay community.

From 1983 to 1986, Vaid was staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organisation's work on HIV/AIDS in prisons.

She held a series of roles at the National LGBTQ Task Force, serving as executive director from 1989-1992 — the first woman of color to lead a national gay-and-lesbian organization.

For more than ten years, Vaid worked in various capacities at the National LGBTQ Task Force (NGLTF), the oldest national LGBT civil rights organisation; first as its media director, then as executive director (1989–1992), and as director of its Policy Institute think-tank.

While executive director, Vaid disrupted a presidential press conference being made by George H. W. Bush with a sign "Talk Is Cheap, AIDS Funding Is Not"; she also co-founded the Task Force's Creating Change conference.

Vaid became executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) in 1989.

A co-worker at the National LGBTQ Task Force remembers in article in the New Yorker, "In 1990, Urvashi gave us a fisting demonstration at our Task Force staff meeting, raising her hand in the air and creating the proper form."

Vaid left NGLTF in December 1992 and wrote Virtual Equality (published in 1995).

In a conversation between Vaid and Larry Kramer in 1994, Vaid made an argument for intersectional solidarity within HIV and reproductive issues: "What if we tried to identify how [H.I.V.] treatment issues connect with racism…It’s going to express itself differently in your life than in mine . . . . That’s the issue of reproductive choice. It was never about men should march with women because they support women. It was more that men should march for reproductive freedom because we’re marching against the power of the state to tell you and me what to do sexually . . . If the state can say you can’t have an abortion, the state can say you can’t have sodomy."

She is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012).

Her book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) won a Stonewall Book Award in 1996.

She returned to NGLTF from 1997 to 2001 as the director of its think tank, the NGLTF Policy Institute.

Vaid worked for five years at the Ford Foundation, and served as executive director of the Arcus Foundation.

She served on the board of the Gill Foundation from 2004 to 2014.

Vaid spent ten years working in global philanthropic organisations, serving as executive director of the Arcus Foundation (2005–2010) and deputy director of Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation (2001–2005) as well as serving on the board of the Gill Foundation (2004–2014).

In April 2009 Out magazine named her one of the 50 most influential LGBT people in the United States.

She was the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School from 2011 to 2015.

The project focused on the way tradition is used in movements for gender and sexuality to inform, enable or limit the movement.

Vaid was the founder of LPAC, the first lesbian Super PAC, which was launched in July 2012 and has invested millions of dollars in candidates who are committed to legislation promoting social justice.

She was founder of The Vaid Group, a social innovation consultancy that advises individuals and organisations working to advance equity, justice and inclusion globally and domestically.

At the time of her death, Vaid was president of the Vaid Group LLC, which worked with social justice innovators, movements, and organizations to address structural inequalities based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race, gender, and economic status.

Vaid believed that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality will occur only when the larger institutions of society and the family are transformed to be more inclusive of racial, gender, and economic difference.

Vaid's book Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012) critiques the racial and gender bias of the mainstream LGBT movement and continues her argument that engagement with social justice is what will enable all parts of the LGBT community to realise equality and justice.

Vaid told Curve magazine that her biggest fear was that LGBT communities would get preoccupied by the wins in the fight for marriage equality and slow down their movement.

She argued for a more inclusive movement, one that would encompass everyone regardless of race, class, ethnicity, age, or ability.

Vaid hoped that the future of LGBT communities will accomplish two things.

"One is to take care of the parts of our community that are less powerful. That means low-income LGBT people, transgender people and our community's women, whose rights are getting the crap kicked out of them, parts of our community across the board—kids, old gay people" and "The second thing I would love to see happen is for the LGBT community to use its political power and access to create a more just society for all."

In an article written in 2014 for the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vaid called for a greater activist response for and by people with breast cancer.

"There’s a clear need for an ACT UP type direct action movement organized around diagnosis, treatment, and care for breast cancer," she wrote.

"But they are not organized to mobilize the anger and energy of breast cancer survivors and our families to pressure and demand an improvement in diagnosis technologies, in drug development, in standards of care and treatment, in health insurance coverage, for example."

Vaid shared homes in Manhattan and Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner, comedian Kate Clinton.

Upon the death of former president George H.W. Bush in 2018, Vaid, who had been executive director of NGLTF during his presidency, commented on the Bush's legacy regarding AIDS, saying: "If one was being charitable one could say it was a mixed legacy, but in truth it was a bad legacy of leadership ... He did not lead on AIDS."

Vaid was a staunch sexual liberationist.

As Richard Burns, who had been the managing editor of the Gay Community News prior to becoming Vaid's classmate at Northeastern recalled, "If I told her about a sex club, she wanted to go, too," Burns said.

"And then we did, and then we were thrown out when they discovered she was not a guy. More than once."