Out Spotlight LXIV

Today's Out Spotlight is Urvashi Vaid.

Urvashi Vaid has been an activist for broad issues of peace and social justice, and especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. Born on October 8, 1958, in New Delhi, India. Her family came to the United States in 1966, when she was she was eight years old. In 1966, she attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting George McGovern, when she was twelve.

A quick and diligent student, Vaid graduated from high school in three years and attended Vassar College in New York. There she continued to develop her progressive politics, becoming involved in the women's liberation movement and coming out as a lesbian. "I feel like I've always known that I was a lesbian," Vaid told The Progressive's Anne-Marie Cusac. "But ... I really didn't have a name for what I felt until I met a bunch of out lesbians in college."

In 1983, she received her law degree from Boston's Northeastern University. Even while in school, she had begun to organize around feminist, gay, and justice issues, working with the Women's Prison Project and co-founding the Allston-Brighton Greenlight Safehouse Network and the Boston Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance.

After receiving her law degree, community organizer who has worked in the LGBT movement for more than two decades. She joined the ACLU's prisons project then began her long association with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. In the book Vaid stated her most basic desire for the movement, "Gay people do not fight for freedom to live in a lavender bubble, but in a more just society."

She was a featured speaker at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. In a speech to the Lesbian Rights Summit of the National Organization for Women she said, "I want a movement that is not just focused on identity but that is engaged in defining what kind of society we will have in the next century."

She is an attorney and From 2001-2005, Urvashi worked at the Ford Foundation where she served as the deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Peace and Social Justice Program.

Vaid is the executive director of the Arcus Foundation, a funder of the LGBT movement and a major international funder of the conservation of Great Apes and their natural habitat.

She was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Gill Foundation, the largest funder of GLBTQ organizations in the United States

In addition to her her book Virtual Equality, Urvashi is the co-editor of Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights, has penned numerous articles on gay and lesbian rights, and has been an columnist for The Advocate.

She and her partner comedian Kate Clinton live in Washington DC, and Provincetown MA.