Interview with Urvashi Vaid

Individual Responsibility
By Meg Dukes, editor “Meg in the City”

Not many people in the younger generation have heard of Urvashi Vaid, which is unfortunate. Vaid is a brilliant woman with degrees from Vassar and Northeastern Law and over 20 years of experience in the LGBT movement, working with organizations such as the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the Arcus Foundation, various other grassroots organizations, and was a featured speaker at the 2009 National Equality March. She is currently working as the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Columbia University School of Law’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

Having immigrated to the United States with her family from India at age eight, Vaid brings a global, multi issue perspective to the LGBT equality movement, which, is as intriguing as it is obvious. Through out the interview she subtly stressed the diversity of the LGBT community yet continually came back to one over arching theme, individual responsibility. An individual’s responsibility to be openly gay yet at the same time an individual’s responsibility “ to be sensible and make a realistic assessment of the risk ” of being out when beginning a career or attending a college or university and the individual responsibility of the previous generation to be a mentor for the new generation, a philosophy that Vaid seems to live by.

Upon mentioning LGBT young people a sense of deep passion for young people and all they have brought, currently and will continue to bring to the LGBT movement seeped into her voice, like many other seasoned members of the community she is continually astounded by the increasing numbers of out LGBT young people. Yet reminding them it’s not always solely about internships or paid positions, “ social movements are built by volunteers.” You don’t have to be a Point Scholar or the president of your high school’s GSA or your college or university’s LGBT student group or be associated with any major organization to help create change. If LGBT activism is where your heart is set and it is something you love to do, don’t ever give up on it never compromise where your heart is focused. If that requires getting jobs outside of the movement continue to volunteer or donate money, just what ever you do, “do not get discouraged.”

This interview was recorded in the Spring of 2010.

MP: I wanted to chat with you today about what it has been like to be an openly lesbian professional in the work force and how you can help give some insight to LGBT young people.

Urvashi Vaid: Okay. Great.

MP: So my first question is, what impact do you feel your openness about your sexual orientation has had on your journey as a professional?

UV: Well, I’ve been out for many years now, pretty much since 1980, and I’m 52 years old. So, that’s a long time. And it was a decision I made when I was just about to enter law school … I made a decision to be out in law school and then as a lawyer and in all the different jobs I’ve had since, which were both in non-LGBT organizations as well as Gay and Lesbian organizations, I’ve worked in both. On a personal level the decision to be out is absolutely essential for each of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. I think having to hide something that is as fundamental as our sexual orientation or our gender identity is so stifling and so demoralizing that it actually makes you less productive, less creative and certainly less happy. That’s not to say that everybody who comes out has a glorious and wonderful, titillating experience. There’s a lot of negative energy that gets directed at us for being gay. There are limitations that many of us experience in promotions. There is discrimination in work places and that’s a fact. For my own life hav[ing] worked in the legal contexts in which I’ve worked, it would have been hard for those folks to discriminate. At the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), they couldn’t exactly discriminate against me, and I have a funny story to tell. It was funny, I just ran into my first boss when I graduated from law school in 1983. I worked for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The National Prison Project actually still exists and it brings federal class action lawsuits against prisons and jails all over the country to improve the conditions under which prisoners are kept, it’s all conditions of confinement law suits. I had worked there as a law student and they offered me a job and my old boss, who is this guy Al Bronstein, who founded the National Prison Project back in the 70’s. I saw him in D.C. a week ago and he said, “ Do you remember that first interview you did with me?” and I said, “No, Al, I do not remember.” He said, “Well you came in as a law student and we talked about what you were doing at Northeastern Law School, what the Prison Project did, and at the end of the interview you were just getting up to go and you stood up and you said, ‘Oh, by the way, I should tell you I’m gay?’” Then he said, “Do you remember what I said?” I said, “I don’t remember what you said.” He said, “I said ‘Oh, by the way, I’m Jewish.” [Laughs] It was a really cute story. He was like, OK, you’re gay, I’m Jewish, and that’s the way he handled it. This was probably 1982 and the conversation about being gay was not as common as it is today. It just wasn’t as much in the public eye and many people were very, very deeply closeted, especially in Washington, D.C., where the Prison Project is based, and even many lawyers weren’t out. I remember in law school when we started the lesbian and gay law students association — what was it called? Northeastern, I don’t know, Gay and Lesbian Law Students Group — and it wasn’t until 1980 that Northeastern University had that. And we didn’t have a non-discrimination policy banning discrimination at the law school on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. So one of our first campaigns was to do that. And we went around to the law professors and did one-on-one conversations with them to say “Hey, we want to change the policy at the law school, and we want you to know this is the issue as we see it.” And a number of those professors actually said to the members of our group that we were the first openly gay people they had ever met.

MP: Wow.

UV: They weren’t being nasty; they were being completely honest. And of course we changed the policy, and it’s a progressive law school and has been one of the places where LGBT people can really go and get a great public interest legal education. It’s graduated just tons of amazing LGBT and straight progressive lawyers. So I’m really proud of Northeastern, I love that law school in Boston. Just the same, in 1980, ‘81, ’82, people had never met an openly gay person. So I’m sorry to be so long in answering your question, but, to me, coming out to all sorts of people in all sorts of institutions is essential. Even today it continues to be important, it continues to be very necessary to be openly gay.

MP: So then, what thoughts would you offer a young person who might be hesitant, as they begin their career, to be out in the workplace, particularly without the protection of the Federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act?

UV: Well, you have to be sensible and make a realistic assessment of the risk. The truth is, so many Fortune 500 companies have non-discrimination policies even if the federal government does not. So you need to look at, is the university that you’re going to, do they have a non-discrimination policy? Obviously, if you’re going to a religious school or a military school, you’re going to be confronting a different kind of environment then if you’re going to something like Northeastern University in Boston. So you have to make a realistic assessment of your environment. But in many, many, many workplace situations, whether they’re government jobs or private companies, businesses, corporations especially, they do have good policies and non-discrimination policies. You can look up, through HRC’s (Human Rights Campaign) corporate program or other websites or just ask about the non-discrimination policy of the organization that you’re about to interview with or research it a little bit to see. Now the fact that a company has a policy doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not going to encounter prejudice. The law is one thing; behavior is another.  My advice to anybody is, you’ve got to have some support for yourself. If you can have mentors or colleagues that you can talk to about your job search … I think that’s a good thing, many schools have counselors. Although I’ve got to tell you, my guidance counselors were useless in high school. I hope they’ve gotten better but they were always counseling me to avoid conflict and avoid disclosure, and it’s not me. At the university or college level my professors were better, I did get some good advice from them. I could turn to a couple of them for solid advice, and in law school I had very good advisors. I think the higher up the graduate school ladder you get, the more, maybe more tolerant people [there are]. I do think peers can be fantastic resources, and for me, in my own professional and personal development, the strongest allies I have ever had are my colleagues in LGBT organizations and the grassroots groups that I worked in, those are my best friends and they’re friends for life. So I turn to them a lot for advice — how would you handle this? And what do you think? But you do need support when you’re starting out in any profession, and you can find it by seeking it out. A lot of people call me and I don’t really know them but I try to talk to everybody and say, hey, this is what I did or this is how it could work, I’m happy to problem-solve and brainstorm. So many of us in LGBT activism are really willing to help each other because that’s what its all about.

MP: You have been a consistent voice in the equality movement in the last 15 years since your book Virtual Equality was published. What differences in the social, economic and political facets of the movement do you feel have been the most significant?

UV: That’s a great question. In the last 15 years you’d say?

MP: Yeah.

UV: Well, we’ve really broken the barrier on cultural visibility. It’s very hard to go anywhere in America today, and indeed its hard to go anywhere in the world today, without seeing the issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people discussed in the papers one way or another. Sometimes it’s not a good discussion because we have a very vigorous opposition and … the more dialogue there is, the more public discussion, the better it is for us in the long run. A second change that I’ve noticed is the change in political leadership. President Obama is a dramatic difference from President Bush on LGBT issues and he’s even a dramatic improvement over President Clinton on LGBT issues. The way Barack Obama embraces gay and lesbian people, not as fully as we would like, he’s still got points where I want to push him further — but you’ve got to give credit where credit is due. And that’s a big change from 15 years ago, a big change from when I was living in Washington under the Reagan and Bush [Sr.] years. Boy, it was like night and day to today! So that’s a big change. But it’s not just at the federal level; you can see it also around the country in … state legislatures we have allies, at mayor’s levels we have allies, the openly gay mayor of Houston, it’s the fifth largest city in America, that’s fabulous. There is political visibility and political leadership, both LGBT and straight, that supports full human rights for LGBT people. That’s a big change. A third change is that you’re seeing two interesting developments in the gay communities around the country, I’m saying gay but I mean everybody. One is that you’re seeing, on the one hand, a graying of the community — there’s more old LGBT people who are out than ever before. It had to happen. Stonewall was 40 years ago, those people are aging. They’re out radicals, nothing like a cranky out radical man [laughs]. So you have that phenomenon, the graying of certain parts of our community, and you also have the phenomenon of more younger people being out than ever before. Isn’t that fascinating to think about, that you have both? There’s like this vast movement of gay-straight alliances of activism. I’m constantly meeting the most fabulous organizers at the Creating Change Conference that the [National Gay & Lesbian] Task Force does. You get to meet a couple of thousand people who come to that, so you just sort of see all these people from all over the country and a lot of really experienced young organizers who’ve been working on a bullying bill or whatever local issue or some local campaign. And they’re 17 and they’ve been doing it for four years. I think that’s phenomenal, that’s new and I think that’s great.  I don’t know what to make of it, but I do notice it as a trend, a demographic trend that’s happening in terms of economic issues. I’m glad you brought the word up because we tend to have this myth about the LGBT community as being all one class or all one race or all one type — and its not. We’ve got a rural LGBT movement, there’s gay people living in very rural parts of the country and states, and then you’ve got an urban reality. You’ve got an upper middle class, middle class, working class and poor LGBT communities; all of them exist. They have different priorities and different needs. There’s a lot of gay people without jobs right now and so one of the biggest issues for them economically is simply getting a job, and of course job discrimination is a problem in that and a barrier. But it’s also simply that the economic picture in this country has to get better for young people. And another issue for young LGBT people, I think, is debt, people carrying huge amounts of debt, from college and loans and this kind of personal debt that young people are burdened with because that’s how they’ve been financing their education, because this country is so backwards it doesn’t believe in free public higher education. I feel like those kinds of issues are the next generation of LGBT issues. In other words, I think we have to look at it as, you’ve got this current generation [that gets to determine] what are the named issues in our community. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, we want the President to do something about ENDA (Employee Non-Discrimination Act), we want done this and that, and I’m not putting them down they are important issues, but they’re kind of like one wave, once those are fulfilled there is another generation, another wave of issues that has to emerge. My fear is that many people will think “Oh, our battle is won, we have the right to serve in the military.” Well, there is still a tremendous amount of violence … you know this [from] working with the Matthew Shepard Foundation. And that violence isn’t going to go away with the ending of the ban. We have to change consciousness, we have to change people’s fear of gender non-conformity — we have so many things we have to work on. We have to tackle religion and religious based anti-gay sentiments and we are doing that, our movement is doing that, and that’s what I mean by the next wave of issues, they’re cultural transformational issues, not just legal reform issues.

MP: What responsibility do you feel seasoned members of the community have in supporting and mentoring young LGBT people, and what do you feel is the most significant way they can offer this support?

UV: I think that we each have an individual responsibility to never turn somebody away in a conversation or in giving help — and especially those of us lucky enough to work full time in the movement. We have an extra responsibility in that regard. I think we need to create, and I have been pleased to see the creation of a number of different kinds of internship and fellowship programs at organizations. I think the LGBT movement could use many more of those because every year. When I was at the Task Force think-tank we created different fellowships that actually helped pay for undergrads or graduate students to come in to work on the research side of the think-tank for a semester. That’s what I mean, you need paid opportunities for people who are students to be able to get some practical experience and I think that would be very, very meaningful. I guess there are also other kinds of programs like the Point Foundation or other kinds of projects that try to bring together cohorts of young leaders and those are, as far as I’m concerned they’re all valuable but the truth is, we pretty much need those in every single state to make the opportunity available to a larger number of people. And that requires funding, because I don’t think they should just be free unpaid work forces of young people, although I do think that social movements are built by volunteers. When I started out it was completely impossible to think about having a job in the gay movement because there were maybe 3 people in the whole country who did so! That’s kind of why I went to law school, I thought, okay I’ve got to get a J-O-B to make a living so I can do all this work in my spare time. And then I was crazily lucky enough to be able to combine what I did full time, I mean I did that, that’s what I did for a long time — I did whatever I needed to do to pay the rent and pay my loans and I worked happily on this or that project in the evenings and on weekends. I value volunteer energy. I really think. whether it’s the dyke marches or the direct action groups or the volunteers who work in our AIDS service and health care organizations. there are tons and tons and tons of volunteer energy that goes into a movement. At the same time. I think there is a need for a workforce … and you have to be serious about that and you have to be serious about making it a diverse workforce, making it accessible to people of all different economic backgrounds. So that’s why you have to pay. Otherwise you just have rich people who can work in the movement.

MP: Do you have any thoughts for LGBT young people who are considering pursuing a career in activism?

UV: Just keep doing it. Do not get discouraged. When I was in college, law school actually, Ralph Nader came to speak. He was even active back then; now he’s ancient. He was a younger guy then and he’d started all this consumer activism, agitation against General Motors and all this stuff. He said something that really stuck with me, I was like the baby law student and he said, “You know I go around to a lot of law schools and people tell me, ‘Well, Ralph, I’ve got to pay my college and law school loans and I have a kid and I have to take care of my family, so I’m gonna go work in a corporate law firm and then when I’ve paid my loans, I’ll come back and work for a public interest law firm.’” He said, “The truth is none of those people will make that leap from making a lot of money to making no money.” He said, “if you really want to do this work you are going to have to be willing to do whatever it takes to do the work.” Then he told us stories about people that he knew who had taken the two jobs to make a living and meet their family obligations and do the work that they wanted to do. It sounds kind of naïve but it made a big impression on me. And it persuaded me that I needed to do whatever I needed to do to support myself. Because I don’t have a trust fund and I never will, and I’m gonna do what I need to do to support myself … I didn’t have to compromise my heart’s desire in order to make a living. It was very important for somebody to say that to me, somebody I respected. I would say that to young activists — we have to find a way to allow us to keep doing the work, and sometimes that might be that your doing a job you don’t particularly care about for a while so you can continue to get the experience as a volunteer. Other times it might be taking a job that feels like “Oh, I can’t believe I’m taking an entry level secretarial job.” But take it to get in the door, to get the experience, to get to do the work that you really want to do. So I just say do it, do it, do it, and eventually after you stuff enough envelopes and sit through enough boring meetings you end up somehow magically being in the place where you’re setting the agenda for the meeting. It’s hard work, it’s not glamorous — organizing is door knocking, organizing is sitting through a lot of bullshit and talking to lots and lots of people and pushing your own limits and sitting and working with people you don’t necessarily like. Movements aren’t about fun and games and working with your best friends. There about hard lessons and being pushed and people calling you on your stuff. Ooof, I’ve had so many uncomfortable moments. And they’ve made me grow and learn. But I’ve also had unbelievable joy and the best friendships, and the best relationships, and the best of times through political activism. I’m calling it political because it wasn’t just about electoral politics it was all about, whether it was producing a Creating Change Conference or organizing a demonstration at the Food and Drug Administration about AIDS drugs in 1988 or preparing testimony to give before a congressional committee. I’ve had the gift and opportunity to be in so many different kinds of settings because of the movement, and I would not trade it. It’s been a great, great learning experience. The thing I love about being an activist is how endlessly creative it can be. You get to make it up, Meg, I get to make it up. You pick a target; you say, “Oh, I want to change the Wyoming public school system.” You get to think about how you are going to do that, you get to organize the people to work with you on it. It’s so creative; there isn’t one way to do it, the way you come up with is just as valid as the way I can come up with, it’s really neat.

MP: Do you have any plans to write another book?

UV: I Do! Funny you should ask, since I left the Arcus Foundation I’ve begun work on another book, I’m gonna write about the relationship between social justice movements and the idea of tradition. Because I’m really feeling a lot about how we get slammed with “not being for tradition,” and the book that I want to write is called “Against Tradition” because I think we are and we should be. So I hope I can do it. It’s terrifying to write a book. But I did it once so I figured I know that I just have to lock myself in a room and sweat for two years and then maybe something will come out, and be terrified by the blank page — eh, do I have anything meaningful to say? Does this make any sense to anybody but me? Will anyone be interested in this? All of those doubts and fears that I had last time I wrote a book and I’m one of those people who’s very practice-based. I like to do and not just talk, so I really feel like I had to. When I finished “Virtual Equality” I went back out and for the last 15 years have been doing many of the things that I outlined and said that needed to be done. I’ve been working on building a state-based LGBT movement, I worked to build think tanks for our community, I worked on intersections of race and sexuality and pushing that into another level in the movement and worked on organizing money. And now I really want to think about the social justice world, gay and non-gay, and look at the ways tradition holds us back, and yet the way we end up creating new tradition. So it’s a nerd thing to do but I’m interested in it.

MP: Well I have to say that Virtual Equality is on my night table and it hangs out there every night.

UV: That’s so cool. Well, I hope that you write your own version of what you see.

MP: I hope to.

UV: I really mean it. Go for it. If I can do it, you can do it. It’s about believing in yourself and making the commitment to write a little bit every day. Put it down. You’ve got the ideas, you’ve got the experience, you’ve got the authority. Don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t.

MP: Thank you so much for your time and for your advocacy.

UV: Thanks so much.