Urvashi Vaid: Friend, Mentor, and Champion of Global LGBTQI+ Advocacy
By Julie Dorf, Co-Chair, Council for Global Equality, May 19, 2022 — Last Saturday, after rallying for reproductive choice and before the news of the Buffalo shooting reached me, I found out that Urvashi Vaid had died. She was fighting for so long — against racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, poverty; waging her campaigns from the intersections of all those injustices. These past weeks and years in the United States have taken their toll on many of us — as I battled my own demoralization, I wondered if the weight of this moment finally got the best of someone as full of life and fight as Urv.
Urvashi always had clarity of vision. She fought the ideologies and hatred espoused by the right-wing her whole life — and she understood those connections well before I did.
I first met Urvashi in 1991 as I was starting OutRight Action International (then IGLHRC) and trying to get Amnesty International to be inclusive of sexual orientation in their mandate. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force joined forces with our little “global” campaign, sharing their conference line technology (cutting edge at the time!) and scheming together on how to pressure Amnesty USA and the global Amnesty movement to be more inclusive in how they defined human rights. We threatened a membership boycott if Amnesty didn’t vote to include lesbians and gay men as part of their human rights mandate. [See our joint press release from 1991.]
As she did with so many young leaders in our movement, Urvashi encouraged me with both hard, probing questions about strategy and with her personal validation of our purpose and passion. We put our heads together on a number of activist issues and campaigns – adding global issues to the Creating Change conference program; making the most of 1994’s Stonewall 25 celebrations; taking advantage of the global ILGA conference in New York City (we co-authored “Think Globally, Act Globally” for Newsday at her suggestion); and lifting up the lesbian rights work at the World Conference on Women in Beijing a year later by co-writing another opinion piece for a U.S. audience, “What Lesbians Gained in Beijing.”
Later in the philanthropic space, we schemed with Urvashi to bring more individual donors into funding global LGBTQI rights work. Urvashi was an early and enthusiastic champion of our work at the Council for Global Equality. She always offered support to my latest schemes. She was the definition of a movement friend.
A few months ago, when she was being honored by the Williams Institute, Urvashi talked about the importance of her movement friends and community — not only as a factor in what kept her going, but one of the key ingredients of a strong queer movement. She was renowned for her “warm anger” —calling people “in” instead of calling people “out” — to help us all think harder and better about how we pursue justice, but not in a naming and shaming (or ever in a canceling) way. She supported leadership instinctively and built community, connecting people with differing opinions rather than adding to divisions. As I’ve been reading reflections and tributes across the internet these past few days since her death, it’s impossible not to be in awe of how many activists she impacted and befriended. Her importance as a role model for South Asian queers is particularly touching to see.
Urvashi was absolutely a brilliant thought leader for our movement – particularly holding an intersectional lens before the term intersectional was even known in a very white, middle-class dominated LGBTQ movement. That principled, deeply political vision — in combination with her warmth as a human and her ability to support young leaders and build community among advocates — is what made her exceptional.
We don’t post many personal blogs. But with this reflection, I want to ensure that Urvashi’s contributions a global movement are known and appreciated as we collectively chronicle her legacy. Her globalism wasn’t just because she was from India, and it wasn’t with a superior white-savior-style American-exceptionalism flavor. Her globalism was rooted in a deep understanding of the intersections of queer issues, power, and the interconnectedness of our worlds.
From her 1993 speech at our movement’s March on Washington, Urvashi presciently preached: “Perhaps the right is right about something,” she reflected. “We call for the end of the world as we know it. We call for the end of racism and sexism and bigotry as we know it. For the end of violence and discrimination and homophobia as we know it. For the end of sexism as we know it. We stand for freedom as we have yet to know it, and we will not be denied.”
Today more than ever, the U.S. domestic and the global LGBTQI movements have more in common and at stake than ever. Our enemies are united in their hateful ideology and tactics. The transnational right-wing hate movement has coalesced from Russia to Florida, from Budapest to Buffalo.
May Urvashi’s deep understanding inspire and fuel us. May her clarity of vision, passion, and chutzpah to pursue true justice, as well as her ability to turn trusted colleagues into friends and community, be Urvashi Vaid’s legacy to us. To quote Rebecca Fox of the Astraea Foundation, may her memory be for a revolution.