THE DREAM OF A COMMON MOVEMENT
Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid
Edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman
Duke Univ. Press. 288 pages, $26.95
URVASHI VAID was one of the most perceptive and effective queer activists in the U.S. before her untimely death from breast cancer in 2022 at the age of 63. Perhaps more than any other figure, she combined, at different stages of her life, the hard, grinding work of grass-roots organizing with working behind the scenes within “the Establishment.” As the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for much of the 1990s, she was the public face of the LGBT movement. Her books and articles addressed issues ranging from AIDS to the rise of the religious Right. Tireless, brilliant, and unafraid, she developed and espoused trenchant positions on almost every issue touching our lives.
A new collection of some of her most important writings has now been carefully curated and edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman under the title The Dream of a Common Movement. Included is some previously unpublished material, so the book is well worth reading even for those already familiar with her work. As Rachel Maddow remarks in her blurb for the book, Vaid ought to be a household name. She was in some ways the queer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never forgetting the full meaning of justice or the necessity of its pursuit.
Born in New Delhi, raised and educated in the U.S., Vaid’s status as an Asian-American lesbian gave her a unique standpoint from which to observe and analyze the political situation in which she found herself immersed. Much like W. E. B. Du Bois in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, her position outside of the ethnic mainstream helped her to understand and evaluate the political world with a keen eye and a sharp but never bitter tongue. Having earned a law degree at Northeastern University in Boston, she recognized early on that minority communities cannot rely entirely on the legal system to win equality. Rights granted can still be repealed, she noted—a prophecy of what we have witnessed with the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which may be a preview of what the current renegade Supreme Court may do to LGBT rights. Vaid was equally prescient in her analysis of the far Right, which she saw, long before Trumpism, as motivated not at all by morality, despite pious claims, but only by power, and a willingness to redefine the meaning of democracy in order to acquire it.
Vaid writes incisively and critically about identity-based movements and the need to form coalitions and find common purpose with other minorities that society has left and continues to leave behind. Without such coalition-building, she argues, identity-based politics “does not lead to liberatory outcomes.” She discusses the difference between formal equality and social respect, and stresses the need for shared prosperity in society. She sees connections between race and class, and had an intersectional outlook long before it became fashionable.
She also writes personally and shrewdly about both the devastating impact of AIDS on the community and the ways in which the response to the AIDS crisis in many quarters led to a “de-gaying” and desexualizing of the LGBT movement. She refuses to see gay marriage as a panacea. She writes about what she calls the “soap opera” of the nonprofit world, where she worked for a time, and writes with unusual honesty about how her jobs in various foundations changed her own class position. And she writes movingly about her battle with cancer. Also here are early, touching letters to her family, both personal and clear-eyed about how she had chosen to spend her life.
I met Urvashi only once, briefly. It was a stuffy academic conference and I was startled and touched by the unusual warmth of her greeting. As Tony Kushner says in his foreword to the collection, she was “lit from within.” It is a tragedy for all of us that Urvashi’s light has gone out.
H N Hirsch, an emeritus professor of politics at Oberlin College, is the author of the “Bob and Marcus” mystery series.
