URVASHI VAID
Urvashi Vaid has been a social justice warrior for more than 30 years. Highlights of her career include being a staff attorney for ACLU´s National Prison Project, Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force´s Policy Institute and Senior Fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. In between, she´s somehow managed to find the time to write two books (Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics); co-edit another one (Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights); start LPAC, a political action committee for lesbians; and fall in love with one of our favorite comedians, Kate Clinton. (And they´ve been going strong for over a quarter of a century!) Currently, Vaid is the CEO of The Vaid Group, a company that helps social justice leaders, movements and organizations. “To reconstitute the world [and] to end violence of all kinds-physical, economic, racial, gender-based, anti-queer, police, military, cultural, nationalist, environmental and more-we need a new, energetic, progressive movement that is feminist, queer and anti-racist, and that is about taking power once and for all to defeat the boring, decaying, decadent, destructive patriarchy,” she says. “It won´t be easy. But it can be done.” -GH
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