GLR January-February 2023
IN MEMORIAM
Urvashi Vaid, Creator of Change R ICHARD B URNS
E DITOR ’ S N OTE : Memorial programs were held in both Boston and New York City this past fall to celebrate the life of activist Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022), who passed away last May. Her longtime friend and “co-conspirator” Richard Burns delivered the first of many eulogies at both programs. What follows is based on the Boston speech, which was delivered on Septem ber 28th at Northeastern University. A few items have been in cluded from Richard’s remarks in New York (November 3rd), which began with the following prefatory statement: You can see in your program that there’s a campaign to put Urvashi on a United States postage stamp. Stamps are planned three years in advance, and the time is long overdue for us to have an activist lesbian leader on our mail. You’ll be shocked to know that this will be a very political process, and the people in this room could make it happen. The New York program was streamed live by the American LGBTQ+ Museum and can still be viewed on their website (americanlgbtqmuseum.org). U RVASHI VAID and I met in Boston 42 years ago on our first day of law school at North eastern University in 1980. She was in the stu dent lounge reading a copy of Gay Community News , where I had been the managing editor until the day before. I approached her, and she said: “Haven’t I seen you around at some demonstrations?” We quickly became friends and co-conspirators at the Law School and at GCN , the national queer liberation newsweekly where so many of us figured ourselves out as young organiz ers. Urv believed in radical change and in breaking some dishes, but she also believed in the necessity of building social infra structure and in working in community and in institutions. She created, led, and participated in so many organizations and proj ects and boards, and I want to bear witness to the vastness of her work and passions with just a small sample of some of the places where she made a difference. During her years in Boston, she not only went to the Pride march, she immediately joined the Pride March Committee. While we were in law school, she joined the board of GLAD, the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a legal organi zation that John Ward founded to fight police harassment and entrapment of gay men in parks and restrooms, and that went on to win the fight for the right to marry in Massachusetts. In 1982, Eric Rofes, also part of the GCN crowd, led the Richard Burns is board chair of the LGBTQ + Museum and is interim ex ecutive director of the Johnson Family Foundation. He has held execu tive positions at many nonprofits, including Lambda Legal, the Drug Policy Alliance, Funders for LGBTQ Issues, and the Arcus Foundation.
founding of the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance, BL / GPA , or, as Charley Shively used to call it, Bilgepump. So Urv joined that board and became a firebrand at BL / GPA as well. In law school, some of our professors said to us that they had never actually talked to an openly gay person. So Urvashi and Kevin Cathcart and I made appointments with every member of the Law School faculty to fill them in our existence and to urge them to include lesbian and gay issues in our legal studies. After graduation in 1983, as a young lawyer Urvashi joined the National Prison Project at the ACLU in Washington, DC, and later joined the staff of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, first as the director of communications in 1986, right be fore Sue Hyde joined the staff. Later, Urv became the executive director of the Task Force. And that was a big change—for the Task Force. She positioned the group to reflect her vision of a larger movement, one that would push the rest of our movement to act with the integrity that her vision and principles required, a movement that would work at the intersections of race and gender and money and queerness. And it was not easy. You can imagine the constant pressure she placed on the Task Force’s sister organization, the Human Rights Campaign Fund. At the Task Force, she and Sue Hyde cofounded Creating Change, the annual conference that has trained literally tens of thousands of young activists. And there she also conceived of the National Religious Roundtable and the Equality Federation. And then she came to New York. Something not too many people realize is that she had a major impact on philanthropy and its approach to LGBT people and causes. She played key roles at three of the largest funders of LGBT equality in the world. First, at the Ford Foundation she rose quite quickly in
15 This photo and the following from Richard Burns’ private collection.
January–February 2023
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