“She was ahead of her time in … leading our movement for equality into a broader movement for freedom and justice and dignity for everyone.” - The Dream of A Common Movement, a collection of Vaid’s writings published following her death in 2022.
My interest in this topic stemmed from my discovery of Urvashi Vaid. Urvashi Vaid (1958-2022) was an Indian-American lesbian activist, author, and civil rights attorney who helped build spaces for radical queer organizing throughout the United States. Vaid’s literary career focused on essays calling for a truly intersectional feminist movement, emphasizing values demonstrated throughout this exhibit. Her posthumous collection, The Dream of a Common Movement, demanded intersectional change over assimilation, calling for politics rooted in coalition, confrontation, and collective imagination.
Prior to her involvement with SALGA and the National India Day Parade, Vaid was best known for being the head of the National LGBTQ Task Force, being the first woman of color to hold this position. In the 1990s, she advocated for HIV health policy reform and healthcare justice. Collaborating with the Fenway Institute of Health Policy research, Vaid helped launch the Racial and Economic Justice Initiative and the Aging Initiative, creating the largest-ever Black Pride Survey and Asian Pacific Islander LGBT Survey. In 2012, Vaid established the LPAC, the first Lesbian PAC.
Vaid’s involvement in SALGA’s fight against the FIA was key. Her framework of intersectionality and solidarity spoke to the issue of queer exclusion from the India Day Parade as an open debate on who gets to define “Indianness” in the diaspora, calling instead for diasporic accountability and democracy.