[Longtime activist Urvashi Vaid, a leader of many LGBTQ+ and other
social justice organizations, died on May 14 at age 63. The article
below, an interview Vaid gave last year, is posted in tribute to her
life and legacy.] [[link removed]]

URVASHI VAID: OUR VERY OWN WONDER WOMAN  
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Merryn Johns
April 1, 2022
Queer Forty
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_ Longtime activist Urvashi Vaid, a leader of many LGBTQ+ and other
social justice organizations, died on May 14 at age 63. The article
below, an interview Vaid gave last year, is posted in tribute to her
life and legacy. _

, Photo credit: Jurek-Wajdowicz

 

BEFORE SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS, BEFORE INTERSECTIONALITY, AND BEFORE
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION BECAME THE BUZZWORDS THEY ARE TODAY, ONE WOMAN
WAS DOING IT ALL.

Urvashi Vaid astonishes me. Even a brief perusal of her career makes
it clear to me that she is a super queer of the highest order. The
LGBTQ activist, author, lawyer, and consultant has achieved a
formidable amount in her six decades on this planet — and more
importantly, she has helped others achieve racial, reproductive,
gender, sexual and economic justice goals. Urvashi is that celebrated
lesbian: she who gets shit done. CEO of The Vaid Group
[[link removed]], a consultancy firm that dismantles
structural inequity based on sexual orientation, gender, race, and
economic status. Founder of LPAC [[link removed]], the
first lesbian Super PAC supporting queer and progressive women
running for office. Long-term service at the National LGBTQ Task
Force, including becoming its Executive Director in 1989. Countless
articles, speeches, column inches and two books advocating for radical
systemic change. Several positions in community service and on
advisory boards. Numerous well-deserved awards, accolades and honorary
degrees. And more is to come, including creating an American museum of
LGBTQ culture and history. But first, this year she will launch the
National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey, the largest-ever data
collection from the lives of queer women.

Ms. Magazine cover

5.3.81 march to the Pentagon

Forged in the fires of India’s inequities and America’s
instabilities — she went to anti-Vietnam protests as a child and was
an early proponent of co-gendered activism during the AIDS crisis —
Urvashi Vaid is a once-in-a-lifetime firebrand. I couldn’t think of
a better cover woman for our Women’s History Month issue. I recently
caught up with her over Zoom, and here are excerpts of our
conversation:

You have been an activist since the 1980s, and before many of the
current terms we use were even coined.

You know, I even started in the ’70s when I was in school, and
college, and I discovered I was drawn to political action and
organizing change. As a 10-year-old in 1968 I paid attention to the
news. You couldn’t avoid the movements that were on television. And
I felt like those were my people early on. I identified with the
anti-war movement and the Civil Rights movement. And then when I got
to college I found the Women’s Liberation movement, LGBT activism,
and that was just transformational. Being an immigrant, you see
culture from multiple vantage points and that also gave me an impetus
to say, I don’t agree with this, or This isn’t the way it has to
be — just a critical perspective.

Where does your unshakeable sense of justice come from?

I’m not a particularly religious person, but I do believe in justice
as an article of faith. Early in my life I got involved in movements
like the anti-apartheid movement, and that was just a vivid example of
injustice, you know, the apartheid regime in South Africa. Because
that injustice was so stark and, similarly, looking at racism and the
impact and legacies of slavery in this country, once you start to pay
attention and understand it, you can’t ignore it. It’s in every
institution, it’s in every situation that you find yourself in.
Coming from India, where I grew up until I was eight, you see so much
poverty and that exposure gave me a real sense of where this is wrong,
that amidst so much wealth, so many people have nothing. 

Urvashi Vaid cannot ignore injustice | Photo: Jurek Wadjowicz

Did your priorities, intentions or goals shift or magnify during the
Trump administration?

I’ve been focused the last six years on poverty and the LGBTQ
community, and addressing economic disparity. I’ve been focused
always on racial justice, and it’s been really extraordinary to see
how the Black Lives Matter leadership has transformed conversation in
this country. The other thing is, we have to win governing power to
ensure that we elect people who carry the values we believe in. I
think what Trump and the takeover of the Republican Party by the right
wing has shown is that we’re in a battle of ideology in this
country, and I reject that fascist and authoritarian ideology. I
reject it. Top to bottom, there’s nothing good about it, it’s a
destructive, oppressive tradition-based value system that is shared by
millions of people who believe that women’s equality is a threat,
that LGBTQ people’s emergence and that transgender people are a
danger to them. Millions of people actually believe that they’re not
racist, but they do not understand the privileging of whiteness in
this country. Trump is a genius at exploiting these cultural threads
to build political power and I think there’s a very good chance over
the next four years that he will be the nominee again and we have to
do everything in our power to defeat those forces on the right. …
The impact of the pandemic has been devastating. I was thinking about
how, you know, in ’92, we were marching around, protesting the
Republican National Convention, and I was part of the different
protest that ACT UP and others organized. I was at the task force at
the time and we were organizing the protest and we would chant
“40,000 dead from AIDS.” Where was George? Five hundred thousand
dead from Covid. And no accountability for that loss from Trump and
others.

You have consistently said that mainstreaming the LGBTQ community does
not necessarily translate into full equal rights.

Equality is like a precondition to actual justice. You have to have
what we call equality, but I’ve long argued that it’s not the end
goal; it’s a step along the way towards a restructuring of the
economic and social systems in this country so that they’re oriented
towards caring for people and supporting families and allowing people
to fulfill their individual potential. … And that’s the goal of
any movement: to create maximum freedom for the maximum number of
people, to be able to live their lives and form their families and
create their community and create themselves in the way that they want
to, without prejudice, discrimination or burden, and with real
opportunity. It sounds idealistic, the goal, but I’m a very
pragmatic person and there’s no doubt in my mind that we could turn
this society and the world in a more caring direction. But we’re up
against a very traditional old mindset, that some people are better
than others, that white people are better than Black people, that men
are better than women, gay people are sinful. We still face all that.
So I think we actually represent a fundamentally different way of
thinking about people, about structures of power, about how to
distribute resources equitably.

What has marriage equality done for our community?

We represent a lot of different things about how to create equal
relationships across genders, about how to blast open gender. It’s
quite amazing, you know, when you think about who LGBTQ people are, we
are ultimate outsiders. My partner and beloved spouse, Kate Clinton,
said that the amazing thing about marriage equality was how it turned
sexual outlaws into in-laws and made us much more comprehensible to
everybody. Marriage made us more legible for people because they
recognized our relationships as something that they have. We want that
equality. We want that respect and recognition and access to those
institutions. But I think my relationship with Kate is built on a
different kind of egalitarian gender footing than many straight
relationships. I think we represent a different way of doing
relationships, a different way of forming families that I think can
inform other people’s ways of doing things.

Urvashi Vaid (L) with her partner of 33 years, Kate Clinton

You two make an incredible couple. Advice, please. How do you make it
work? How do you sustain a long-term lesbian relationship? 

I’ve blessed my stars every day that I met her 33 years ago. You
know, I think it’s really communication. We talk a lot to each
other. She’s still the person I want to tell all my stories to,
about the day or what happened, and I think we’re also really strong
in ourselves and we really support each other. We are each other’s
strength. I see some relationships in which people get freaked out by
the other person’s strength or success. And it’s never been the
case. Kate has just been amazing. She’s taught me so much. We
always joke and you probably heard us say this, that we’re in a
marriage of comedy and tragedy — and you get to decide who is which,
depending on the day. Like many funny people, she’s terribly serious
and studious and quiet in many ways and just absolutely brilliant. But
she’s also truly, deeply funny and has this kindness and lightness
to her that I just love. Kate is one of the most kind and gentle
people I’ve ever met. 

Thirty-three years together is a long time. How do you view getting
older as a queer woman?

I love getting older. I like the confidence that you have in yourself.
I think when I was in my 20s I was so uncertain of who I was, trying
out identities and trying out jobs. And here I am at 62. I just feel
so much calmer inside and centered. I attribute that confidence to
age. We’ve just been through a lot of experience and you’ve seen
yourself get through it, you’ve seen yourself get through sickness,
you’ve seen yourself get through your parents getting sick and
dying, you’ve seen yourself live through so many things and that
makes you enriched. Friendships that have been around for a long, long
time, like suddenly I’ve had friends for 45 years, how did that
happen? It’s really fun. I love the kind of irreverence that comes
with age. Kate said when she turned 60 her motto was, “I could care
less.” And then she’d go, “Wait a minute, I’m caring. Less.”

Those nuances, the uniqueness of our identities and relationships and
lives, this is something you want to capture in your National LGBTQ+
Women’s Community Survey. When did you decide this was an essential
project? 

A little over three years ago I was thinking about how lesbians are so
diverse. You have women who were lesbians until graduation. You have
women who were married to a man for 60 years and then came out. You
have women who were with women for 50 years and then went back to
being with a man. Bisexual, trans, pan women. There’s so many
identities, so much range in gender and sexual diversity but most
people don’t see that. The other thing was that when I looked at
the agenda of queer organizations, it didn’t reflect anything
specific to the lives of female-gender people. Reproductive issues are
barely on the agenda. Pay inequality is not on the agenda of gay
organizations. Why not? 50 percent of our community is affected by
that. Violence against trans women and queer women is barely on the
agenda. Anti-violence movements deal with it in our communities, but
it’s not really championed. So I thought, well, how do you address
that? You make a survey to go out into the community and ask people
about our lives as LGBTQ+ women: How do you define yourself? How do
you make family? What’s your experience in health and discrimination
with housing? How has your experience been with the criminal legal
system? Where do you find support? So a range of questions opened up
and I realized how little I knew about our community. … So we
created this inclusive platform called The National LGBTQ+ Women*s
Community Survey [[link removed]]. We want to get
responses from anybody who identifies or has identified ever with the
category LGBTQ+ womxn in their life. It’s an open invitation to
share your experience that will show us snapshots of our community and
those will be very valuable in putting LGBTQ+ women more centrally on
the agenda of our movement and the women’s movement. 

Now, are you going to take the survey?

Oh, Hell yes. I think every single LGBTQ+ woman who has ever partnered
with another woman should consider taking the survey, to just put her
experience into the mix. We want thousands of responses. Hopefully
the survey will lead other activists and scholars to say, OK, we want
to go deeper in this area. This is just the beginning.

THE NATIONAL LGBTQ+ WOMEN*S COMMUNITY SURVEY’S ‘TAKE THE PLEDGE’
CAMPAIGN WAS LAUNCHED MARCH 8. FIND OUT MORE HERE
[[link removed]].

_Merryn Johns is the Editor in Chief of Queer Forty. She is an
award-winning journalist and public speaker. Originally from Sydney,
Australia she has been based in New York City for 15 years, editing
and writing for a variety of publications._

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