An ode to an Indian luminary in the LGBTQ+ community
When activist Dipti Ghosh came out about her sexuality in Michigan in the early 1980s, she knew no other South Asian lesbian. Then, her mother said she had seen an “Indian lesbian” on television.
In 1990/91, Ghosh went to Michigan Pride and found to her astonishment that the “Indian lesbian” was the keynote speaker. Her name was Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the first woman and the first Indian American to head the organisation in a movement often seen as a White gay men’s club.
Vaid was born in New Delhi in 1958. She emigrated to the United States (US) in 1966 when her father, noted Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid, found a job teaching English literature in New York. In high school, she was giving anti-war speeches. By the time she graduated from Vassar College, she had come out as a lesbian.
Her obituaries list her long activist career. She instituted the Creating Change LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) conference, created a Donors of Colour network, and co-founded political action committees and projects dealing with LGBTQ poverty. “She believed the LGBTQ movement needed to be part of a larger social justice movement,” says Ghosh who became a long-time friend.
That’s why Vaid moved to mainstream progressive politics. But at heart, she was always an activist. In 1990, when AIDS was ravaging the gay community, she disrupted a speech by then President George HW Bush with a placard saying “Talk is cheap, AIDS funding is not.” In a Facebook post, activist J’aime Grant remembers wealthy Task Force donors revolting when she opposed the Gulf War, asking what gays had to do with the war, but she held her ground because she believed fiercely in intersectionality. Her book Virtual Equality made the case that the pursuit of mainstream acceptance had come in the way of the LGBTQ+ movement becoming a true civil rights movement.
At a time when South Asian queers were hardly visible, seeing her at the forefront of the US LGBTQ+ movement, unapologetically queer and South Asian, was electrifying. When the South Asian LGBTQ+ group Trikone honoured her with their first Pink Peacock award in 1995, writer Minal Hajratwala, at that time a board member, remembers Vaid telling the audience half-jokingly, “if you’re going to come out to the extended family, the cover of Time Magazine is the way to do it.” She had just been named one of
Time’s 50 leaders of the future.
Later in an interview with Samar Magazine, Vaid recalled meeting officials from the Federation of Indian Associations who were refusing to allow the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of New York to march in the India Day parade. After a long debate about homosexuality, the official asked if she knew the Indian woman who was “the head of all gays.” It took her a while to realise he was talking about her. Vaid said she thought it was “wonderful” that at least he knew an Indian woman was “the head of all gays”. For her, it was an opportunity to keep pushing the envelope.
Vaid died on May 14 at the age of 63. She is survived by comedian Kate Clinton, her partner of more than 30 years. She was aunt to gender non-conforming performance artist, Alok Vaid-menon, who remembered her on social media, saying, “She fought so vehemently because she loved us more than they could ever hate us.”