Coming Out of Cancer by Victoria A. Brownworth

Johnson called Vaid, “one of the most influential progressive activists of our time.”

“She was also a beloved colleague, friend, partner and someone we all looked up to - a brilliant, outspoken and deeply committed activist who wanted full justice and equality for all people.” “Urvashi Vaid was a leader, a warrior and a force to be reckoned with,” National LGBTQ Task Force’s Executive Director, Kierra Johnson, said in a press release. Toward that activism and other goals, Vaid co-founded the annual Creating Change conference and symposium with Sue Hyde, which Hyde still directs for the Task Force.

“And that made the difference between the protests getting page five in the Arizona paper, or The Dallas Morning News, and being on the front page, because there was a local person there,” Michelangelo Signorile told the ACT UP Oral History Project. At the action, protesters were given signs with the cities they came from and ACT UP announced them to reporters. Bush when she held up a sign that said: “Talk Is Cheap, AIDS Funding Is Not.”ĭuring ACT UP’s first national action, Seize Control of the FDA, Vaid devised a plan to pair local reporters with protesters from each media market. In 1990 Vaid was thrown out of an address being given on the AIDS crisis by President George H. Vaid’s was a constant presence on the national political stage at a time when overt LGBTQ activism had yet to become mainstreamed. In a tribute to Vaid in The New Yorker magazine, Masha Gessen wrote that Vaid “was, almost certainly, the most prolific LGBTQ organizer in history.”Ī fair and fitting assertion about the lesbian activist who for a decade led the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force) through one of the most tumultuous periods in LGBTQ history, the AIDS crisis, first as media director and then as executive director. The gay rights movement is an integral part of the American promise of freedom.” It is not a fad or a fringe or a sickness. At the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in April 1993, she said, “The gay rights movement is not a party.

She insisted decades ago that the fight for LGBTQ rights must not be dismissed nor demeaned by the language of straight politicians or the religious right. Vaid’s activist voice was unique and unequivocal. Jim Schwartz and Urvashi Vaid at the 1988 Speakout! Lesbian and Gay Rights forum at WCAU in Philadelphia.

Coming Out of Cancer by Victoria A. Brownworth