And more could have been done had the White House not been, frankly, bad on issues affecting LGBT people because they had bias.” “So I think what could have been done was done because of the activism. We were dealing with that while dealing with loss. People were being turned away from mortuaries. Bush when she held up a sign that said: “Talk Is Cheap, AIDS Funding Is Not.”Īfter Bush died in 2018, Vaid told NPR’s All Things Considered, “The fact is that we were doing our best and hardest work in our community to build social services, to fight discrimination. In 1990 she was thrown out of an address being given on the AIDS crisis by President George H. Vaid was a constant presence on the national political stage at a time when overt LGBTQ activism had yet to become mainstreamed. That is 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.
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.” “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. 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.Īt the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in April 1993, Vaid declared, “The gay rights movement is not a party.
Vaid’s activist voice was unique and unequivocal. Over a half-century of activism that began when she was only 11, Vaid worked on a wide range of issues - from LGBTQ civil rights to women’s rights to the rights of prisoners to immigration justice to health care justice. In May this year, when Urvashi Vaid died, at the age of 63, after a valiant fight with breast cancer, thousands of LGBTQ people who had been touched by her decades of activism mourned her passing. Urvashi Vaid (Photo by Rex Wockner) LGBTQ icon Urvashi Vaid spent her life advocating for justice
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