Urvashi Vaid

Has a new book out, Irresistible Revolution.  It's top of my to get list.  I've been listening to interviews on podcasts like OUT FM in NYC and watching speeches and interviews on the web and remembering how cogent and incisive Virtual Equality, her earlier book, was.  And remembering what an inspiring activist "Urv" and others like Sue Hyde, Jerry Greenberg, Linda (I'm blanking on her name, but she was fierce), young folks working for NGLTF and moonlighting in OUT! like Scott and Mary, and old hands like Frank Kameny were when I was a teenager in 80s DC with homohatred and denial strong in the local and national culture and AIDS raging.  I was constantly impressed with her and their fearlessness and willingness to speak out despite all the shaming and silencing that was still the hallmark of the time, so many years post-Stonewall.

Besides having a hot, funny GF (Kate Clinton, yes, *that* Kate Clinton), Urvashi's wicked smaht.  And lived the movement history she's writing about.

Her site has a link to a study of lesbian participation in the first two "marches on Washington of the LG flavor-  labels changed for each one and 1993...   Some interesting observations. 

It brings me back... Queer DC at the time, like Boston and other cities was split between men and women, each divided by racial groupings, with a radical lesbian underground hosting women's music, collectives, a feminist bookstore, magazines like off our backs, and the like.  And some of us straddled that scene and hung with the radical guys in scenes like Gay Community News, ACT UP!, and OUT!  It was a bit of a mind- bender, ideologically and socially speaking.  Sexism, hostile defensive disinterest, and invisibility from one side and some whack ideological social policing and infighting/trashing like only women can do on the other...  For a teenage wannabe activist, there was a lot to learn and digest, all at once from all directions.  Urvashi had a way of cutting through the b.s. effectively, from understanding where everybody was coming from but calling them out too.  The way I remember it, anyway...