Ending Patriarchy: Political Legacies of the 1970s Lesbian Movement
Urvashi Vaid
For me the 1970's were not about gay liberation. They were about believing that I could bring down capitalist patriarchy and build a radically egalitarian society. They were about discovering the brilliance of 1970s feminist theorists (like Shulamith Firestone, Sheila Rowbotham, de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig and Susan Brownmiller, among others), and they were about discovering the vapidity of left politics. They were about identifying with the Situationist International and the manifesto The Poverty of Student Life. They were about organizing against apartheid, organizing against violence against women, organizing for prisoners' rights (post-Attica), organizing against the military, discovering women's bookstores and feminist newsprint manifestos, and listening to punk rock and Patti Smith while producing women's music.
Those years were so infused with radical ideas that when I came out to my parents in the '80s, my father joked that he was a little relieved because he knew something was up, but he worried that I was in the Weather Underground – which surprised me to no end, since I myself critiqued my own work as reformist, at best.
I started the decade in junior high school, a very nerdy Indian girl with long hair to my waist and coke bottle glasses, and I ended the decade still a nerdy girl, moving to Boston at the age of 20 in September of 1979 into a macrobiotic group lesbian house with eight other women, a chore chart, and cooking nights.
Along the way I organized. Feminist coffeehouses on campus, poetry readings, conferences with titles like "Feminist Union Socialist Symposium" or "Anger and the Rebirth of Woman Power." Holly Near concerts, the Varied Voices of Black Women Tour at my campus.
And I learned new things—how to strip wallpaper and paint houses, how to spackle and build things, how to play a bass (badly), how to write a leaflet, how to use a French press to make coffee, how to create a budget for an event, how to put together a publication, how to fundraise and make things happen with no money, how to use sage and crystals, how to run a food coop, how to be a secretary, how to live on food stamps, how to line up busses for demonstrations in DC, how to put brewers yeast in my popcorn to get B12 vitamins.
Sarah Schulman asked us to talk about what we think "took" from the lesbian ideas and movements we were part of in the '70s. This is a great question because I think we got a LOT of things from the lesbian-feminist movement of the '70s.
First, while lesbians did not invent feminism, the lesbian contribution to feminism certainly toughened it up and strengthened it by making it more inclusive. Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Firestone and Gloria Steinem are to be credited with the early analysis, but it was Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Smith, Charlotte Bunch, Rita Mae Brown and other lesbian feminists who proposed and embedded the ideas of the multiplicity and interconnectedness of race, class, sexuality and gender oppression. From the publication of Motive (the United Methodist publication) on Lesbian Feminism in 1971, to the Combahee River Collective statement of 1977 to the speech Audre Lorde gave at the October 1979 March on Washington, we created a new and inclusive consciousness. We all were, as Lorde said in her speech, "committed to struggle for a day when all our children can grow free from the diseases of racism, of sexism, of classism, and of homophobia. For those oppressions are inseparable."
I have a picture of a big banner from the 1995 International Conference on Women held in Beijing that says "Lesbians Free Everyone." I think that theory of intersecting identities and interconnected struggle has been part of the progressive wings of all social justice movements since the '70s but the progressives who held those politics have not – until very, very recently – been in the power position in each of these movements. This has changed today. Today, people who hold a commitment to intersectional practice ARE in leadership positions in the labor movement, Planned Parenthood, NAACP, MALDEF, CAP, NGLTF and a range of other left-of-center groups. This is a political achievement I celebrate because where these organizations all started out was pretty conservative.
Related to our demand for inclusion was the idea of accessibility – due to economic status, race, ability, child care, and every other factor. This was an insistent demand of lesbian feminist activism. It meant that concerts were signed for the hearing- impaired. I had never seen or heard of such a thing – like most of us I suspect – until I went to my earliest women's music shows. Seeing Susan Freundlich or Shirley Childress Saxton dancing out the songs and signing in ASL are among my most vivid, life-shifting memories. Today, what distinguishes feminist spaces is their consciousness about and commitment to accessibility.
Our commitment to inclusion was double-edged, however. It led us to expect absolutely perfect inclusion at all times in all ways, and that was simply not possible. We beat ourselves, and each other, up a lot over our failure to achieve our ideal of perfect inclusion and safe space.
And we willfully ignored the ways in which our own language and rhetoric was exclusionary of some women because we saw gender in such a narrow and biological manner. I am thinking of the whole idea of woman-born-woman. I cannot begin to tell you how many hours I spent talking and trying to define and understand that term. (In the same way, we spent hundreds of hours talking about what "woman-identified woman" meant). What I see now is that these were boundary- setting words, that we felt a need to claim our space and protect the culture we had fought so hard to carve out, that we felt under siege and vulnerable. I remember the change in my own politics from unquestioned acceptance of the idea that women-only space meant literally that—limited to biologically born women—to seeing gender and woman as a socially constructed notion, and being fully comfortable allowing all sorts of people to identify into "my" space. Michigan still operates on this biological determinism and it is to me an example of how the radical inclusivity we professed broke down on the shoals of our acceptance of gender as primarily biological.
A second political idea that we brought forward that has "taken hold" in progressive movements is our insistence on the importance of process to the outcome. Now I suspect this was a Maoist hangover from the ultra leftists of the anti-war movement, but I was too young to experience them, so I will tell you how I experienced it. Process meant that you did every meeting, planned every event and ran every gathering with an eye toward how power imbalances were implicated in whatever we were doing. Process meant we made no decision without full consensus, and we would discuss and discuss until every one in the room agreed. Any one person could block consensus and we could not move forward. (Sounds like a Republican filibuster). Process meant that we rotated chairs, allowed everyone to speak, sought to question every hierarchy from alphabetical order, to right- handed domination. Process meant that my feminist union meetings on campus were three-and-a- half hours long each week. It meant that we made an effort to ensure that everyone spoke and that we urged the loudest to speak less; that we turned leadership over to whoever volunteered with no regard to skills or competencies; that we had criticism and self-criticism as core values throughout every darn step of the way, so there was always someone raising a concern and feeling unsafe or wanting something to change to widen the circle.
Kate and I often say that our most vivid sound memory from lesbian feminist meetings in that decade is the sound of folding chairs moving backwards as we perpetually widened the circle to include people who came in late for the meeting. What a radical departure from Roberts' Rules of Order!
Related to the idea of process was the importance we placed on the link between culture and politics – our third important contribution. Michelle Parkerson made a great point at the opening plenary about how culture was critical because so much of our effort in our early years as out lesbians was to create visibility.
Lesbian communities were built through cultural organizing; coffeehouses, poetry readings, dances, potlucks, women's music and comedy concerts, documentaries, photography, lesbian and feminist theater companies, performances, just flourished in this decade. I mean you could be living in Poughkeepsie New York and hear that Holly was coming to perform in town and a crowd of 600 lesbians would gather – pre-internet, with no mainstream advertising, just face-to-face outreach through bookstores, bars, flyers, ads, mailing lists and phone calls. Culture helped us get together and build a shared set of values. Because of cultural workers like Bernice Johnson Reagon, Holly Near, Cris Williamson, and Meg Christian, because of Robin Tyler, and Linda Tillery, and Maxine Feldman and Alix Dobkin, we had a shared set of jokes (Ode to a Gym Teacher), a shared consciousness about Central America (pro-Sandinista and anti-junta in Chile and Salvador), a shared Amazon Alphabet, and amazing songs to challenge Anita Bryant with when she came campaigning in late 1977-78.
The cultural consciousness extended to the idea that we needed to create women-owned businesses – record companies, bookstores, bars, theaters, newspapers, construction companies, lesbian presses like Tower Press, stores that sold groovy new age crystals and patchouli oil and lots of purple and lavender clothing. It was expressed in the many and varied kinds of collectives, women's communes, and women's land that women formed as a counter-vailing strategy to take back power over our lives. This culture continues to this day, but it is smaller and struggles financially.
Finally, I believe the fourth lasting contribution from lesbian feminist politics of the '70s came from radical feminism and its critique of heterosexism, of the patriarchy, and of the nuclear family. We all spent a great deal of energy (in CR groups and in our early political writing) naming and talking about how to dismantle the systems of male domination that held women down and that held racial and economic hierarchies intact. Gay men who were feminists were important contributors to a critique of patriarchy in the late '70s and '80s, as Bryant and the Moral Majority started crusading for the so-called Family Protection Act which would have codified a hetero-only- form for the family. Today, the idea that a majority of the gay male leadership of the LGBT movement would be feminist is so shocking because many of the current male leaders in that movement seem to not even be aware of women's existence separate from theirs, much less to be questioning their own privileges within patriarchal structures.
A note that was raised yesterday bears some further consideration. What happened to sexual liberation, which was such a large priority for the lesbian movement of the '70s? It is important to remind each other that sex still matters to us and our sexual desire for each other has not disappeared or magically mutated into spooning or desiring sex with men (as "The Kids Are All Right" would have you think) with the advent of age, longevity in our relationships or a few wrinkles. What we all loved about the '70s was how hot it was. It was a lot about the sex, at least at my age group and in the political world. We were heavily influenced by gay male culture in the '70s and longed for the zipless sex they had. While ours always had to have more process, it was less U-haul than today's satires suggest. Instead, our communities were literally an army of ex-lovers. We were consciously non-monogamous. We questioned the whole idea of coupling in nuclear family units – my friends and I used to plan the collectives we would live in when we got older.
What happens to sexual liberation movements when they are attacked as they were in 1950s, '60s and the '70s by Joe McCarthy, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell and many others? They hide. We lived under the radar, as gay male sexuality did pre-AIDS, a flourishing but relatively insiders' network known to us, but not the straight world. Lesbians were never taken seriously enough sexually to be seen as active, so we always were under the radar.
But what happens to a sexual liberation movement when it is outed – as we were in the 1980s – by the anti-AIDS right- wing response, and by the backlash to feminism? We put on straight drag – and became the very things that lesbian feminism critiqued in the '70s – coupled, married, with children, living in nuclear families, isolated from and no longer building our communities.
Sarah also asked us to think about our disappointments from the 1970s. The biggest disappointment to me is the decrease in the spaces for lesbian communities – oddly, there are now fewer publicly lesbian events, spaces, political statements, and writers writing about lesbian lives and ideas. There are many more lesbians who are out and visible and indeed powerful in many spheres (Ellen, Rosie, Melissa, Wanda, Billie Jean etc. etc. etc.). Lesbians are still leaders in every social justice movement – and now often as OUT dykes. Women are still doing great organizing work and writing amazing literature and creating music and art – often with no mainstream support. But, strangely, the space for lesbian life on the ground has shrunk – there are fewer bookstores, bards, newspapers, zines, and even not that many lesbian-aimed political web sites. Our sense of community with each other has decreased.
Where else did we fall short? In my view, we fell short with our:
Back in the '70s I really wanted to destroy the patriarchy and smash imperialism in all its forms and you know what, I still do. In many ways the patriarchal order today has fully discredited itself and is in complete disarray. Its dying convulsions may destroy us all, but its lack of solutions and lack of concern for the lives of millions of poor and ordinary people, the lion's share of whom are women and children, are obvious to anyone looking at the news. What can we do now to hasten its demise?
Those years were so infused with radical ideas that when I came out to my parents in the '80s, my father joked that he was a little relieved because he knew something was up, but he worried that I was in the Weather Underground – which surprised me to no end, since I myself critiqued my own work as reformist, at best.
I started the decade in junior high school, a very nerdy Indian girl with long hair to my waist and coke bottle glasses, and I ended the decade still a nerdy girl, moving to Boston at the age of 20 in September of 1979 into a macrobiotic group lesbian house with eight other women, a chore chart, and cooking nights.
Along the way I organized. Feminist coffeehouses on campus, poetry readings, conferences with titles like "Feminist Union Socialist Symposium" or "Anger and the Rebirth of Woman Power." Holly Near concerts, the Varied Voices of Black Women Tour at my campus.
And I learned new things—how to strip wallpaper and paint houses, how to spackle and build things, how to play a bass (badly), how to write a leaflet, how to use a French press to make coffee, how to create a budget for an event, how to put together a publication, how to fundraise and make things happen with no money, how to use sage and crystals, how to run a food coop, how to be a secretary, how to live on food stamps, how to line up busses for demonstrations in DC, how to put brewers yeast in my popcorn to get B12 vitamins.
Sarah Schulman asked us to talk about what we think "took" from the lesbian ideas and movements we were part of in the '70s. This is a great question because I think we got a LOT of things from the lesbian-feminist movement of the '70s.
- Lesbian visibility accompanied by inspired definitions of what a lesbian is – from the Furies, to Radical Lesbians, to poets and artists.
- Ideas about accountability and transparency in organizing ( another form of process-consciousness) – e.g. publishing the budgets and salaries of everyone in programs for events so there was no mystery.
- A self-help health movement – which became the prototype for the PWA and Treatment Action movements in the HIV epidemic the next decade.
- A lot of second-wave feminist institutions that were started and run by lesbians who did not necessarily do their work as out lesbians.
- A critique of the structures of all institutions, not just laws.
- Spirituality and new age culture – crystals, and woo-woo.
- Grunge clothing and style – flannel way before Nirvana in the '90s.
- Women's rock-and-roll bands and technical skills
- The first openly gay political leaders (Elaine Noble – 1974; Karen Clark; Ginny Apuzzo; Gwen Craig (SF))
- The idea that sexuality could be a choice and just not a biological imperative.
First, while lesbians did not invent feminism, the lesbian contribution to feminism certainly toughened it up and strengthened it by making it more inclusive. Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Firestone and Gloria Steinem are to be credited with the early analysis, but it was Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Smith, Charlotte Bunch, Rita Mae Brown and other lesbian feminists who proposed and embedded the ideas of the multiplicity and interconnectedness of race, class, sexuality and gender oppression. From the publication of Motive (the United Methodist publication) on Lesbian Feminism in 1971, to the Combahee River Collective statement of 1977 to the speech Audre Lorde gave at the October 1979 March on Washington, we created a new and inclusive consciousness. We all were, as Lorde said in her speech, "committed to struggle for a day when all our children can grow free from the diseases of racism, of sexism, of classism, and of homophobia. For those oppressions are inseparable."
I have a picture of a big banner from the 1995 International Conference on Women held in Beijing that says "Lesbians Free Everyone." I think that theory of intersecting identities and interconnected struggle has been part of the progressive wings of all social justice movements since the '70s but the progressives who held those politics have not – until very, very recently – been in the power position in each of these movements. This has changed today. Today, people who hold a commitment to intersectional practice ARE in leadership positions in the labor movement, Planned Parenthood, NAACP, MALDEF, CAP, NGLTF and a range of other left-of-center groups. This is a political achievement I celebrate because where these organizations all started out was pretty conservative.
Related to our demand for inclusion was the idea of accessibility – due to economic status, race, ability, child care, and every other factor. This was an insistent demand of lesbian feminist activism. It meant that concerts were signed for the hearing- impaired. I had never seen or heard of such a thing – like most of us I suspect – until I went to my earliest women's music shows. Seeing Susan Freundlich or Shirley Childress Saxton dancing out the songs and signing in ASL are among my most vivid, life-shifting memories. Today, what distinguishes feminist spaces is their consciousness about and commitment to accessibility.
Our commitment to inclusion was double-edged, however. It led us to expect absolutely perfect inclusion at all times in all ways, and that was simply not possible. We beat ourselves, and each other, up a lot over our failure to achieve our ideal of perfect inclusion and safe space.
And we willfully ignored the ways in which our own language and rhetoric was exclusionary of some women because we saw gender in such a narrow and biological manner. I am thinking of the whole idea of woman-born-woman. I cannot begin to tell you how many hours I spent talking and trying to define and understand that term. (In the same way, we spent hundreds of hours talking about what "woman-identified woman" meant). What I see now is that these were boundary- setting words, that we felt a need to claim our space and protect the culture we had fought so hard to carve out, that we felt under siege and vulnerable. I remember the change in my own politics from unquestioned acceptance of the idea that women-only space meant literally that—limited to biologically born women—to seeing gender and woman as a socially constructed notion, and being fully comfortable allowing all sorts of people to identify into "my" space. Michigan still operates on this biological determinism and it is to me an example of how the radical inclusivity we professed broke down on the shoals of our acceptance of gender as primarily biological.
A second political idea that we brought forward that has "taken hold" in progressive movements is our insistence on the importance of process to the outcome. Now I suspect this was a Maoist hangover from the ultra leftists of the anti-war movement, but I was too young to experience them, so I will tell you how I experienced it. Process meant that you did every meeting, planned every event and ran every gathering with an eye toward how power imbalances were implicated in whatever we were doing. Process meant we made no decision without full consensus, and we would discuss and discuss until every one in the room agreed. Any one person could block consensus and we could not move forward. (Sounds like a Republican filibuster). Process meant that we rotated chairs, allowed everyone to speak, sought to question every hierarchy from alphabetical order, to right- handed domination. Process meant that my feminist union meetings on campus were three-and-a- half hours long each week. It meant that we made an effort to ensure that everyone spoke and that we urged the loudest to speak less; that we turned leadership over to whoever volunteered with no regard to skills or competencies; that we had criticism and self-criticism as core values throughout every darn step of the way, so there was always someone raising a concern and feeling unsafe or wanting something to change to widen the circle.
Kate and I often say that our most vivid sound memory from lesbian feminist meetings in that decade is the sound of folding chairs moving backwards as we perpetually widened the circle to include people who came in late for the meeting. What a radical departure from Roberts' Rules of Order!
Related to the idea of process was the importance we placed on the link between culture and politics – our third important contribution. Michelle Parkerson made a great point at the opening plenary about how culture was critical because so much of our effort in our early years as out lesbians was to create visibility.
Lesbian communities were built through cultural organizing; coffeehouses, poetry readings, dances, potlucks, women's music and comedy concerts, documentaries, photography, lesbian and feminist theater companies, performances, just flourished in this decade. I mean you could be living in Poughkeepsie New York and hear that Holly was coming to perform in town and a crowd of 600 lesbians would gather – pre-internet, with no mainstream advertising, just face-to-face outreach through bookstores, bars, flyers, ads, mailing lists and phone calls. Culture helped us get together and build a shared set of values. Because of cultural workers like Bernice Johnson Reagon, Holly Near, Cris Williamson, and Meg Christian, because of Robin Tyler, and Linda Tillery, and Maxine Feldman and Alix Dobkin, we had a shared set of jokes (Ode to a Gym Teacher), a shared consciousness about Central America (pro-Sandinista and anti-junta in Chile and Salvador), a shared Amazon Alphabet, and amazing songs to challenge Anita Bryant with when she came campaigning in late 1977-78.
The cultural consciousness extended to the idea that we needed to create women-owned businesses – record companies, bookstores, bars, theaters, newspapers, construction companies, lesbian presses like Tower Press, stores that sold groovy new age crystals and patchouli oil and lots of purple and lavender clothing. It was expressed in the many and varied kinds of collectives, women's communes, and women's land that women formed as a counter-vailing strategy to take back power over our lives. This culture continues to this day, but it is smaller and struggles financially.
Finally, I believe the fourth lasting contribution from lesbian feminist politics of the '70s came from radical feminism and its critique of heterosexism, of the patriarchy, and of the nuclear family. We all spent a great deal of energy (in CR groups and in our early political writing) naming and talking about how to dismantle the systems of male domination that held women down and that held racial and economic hierarchies intact. Gay men who were feminists were important contributors to a critique of patriarchy in the late '70s and '80s, as Bryant and the Moral Majority started crusading for the so-called Family Protection Act which would have codified a hetero-only- form for the family. Today, the idea that a majority of the gay male leadership of the LGBT movement would be feminist is so shocking because many of the current male leaders in that movement seem to not even be aware of women's existence separate from theirs, much less to be questioning their own privileges within patriarchal structures.
A note that was raised yesterday bears some further consideration. What happened to sexual liberation, which was such a large priority for the lesbian movement of the '70s? It is important to remind each other that sex still matters to us and our sexual desire for each other has not disappeared or magically mutated into spooning or desiring sex with men (as "The Kids Are All Right" would have you think) with the advent of age, longevity in our relationships or a few wrinkles. What we all loved about the '70s was how hot it was. It was a lot about the sex, at least at my age group and in the political world. We were heavily influenced by gay male culture in the '70s and longed for the zipless sex they had. While ours always had to have more process, it was less U-haul than today's satires suggest. Instead, our communities were literally an army of ex-lovers. We were consciously non-monogamous. We questioned the whole idea of coupling in nuclear family units – my friends and I used to plan the collectives we would live in when we got older.
What happens to sexual liberation movements when they are attacked as they were in 1950s, '60s and the '70s by Joe McCarthy, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell and many others? They hide. We lived under the radar, as gay male sexuality did pre-AIDS, a flourishing but relatively insiders' network known to us, but not the straight world. Lesbians were never taken seriously enough sexually to be seen as active, so we always were under the radar.
But what happens to a sexual liberation movement when it is outed – as we were in the 1980s – by the anti-AIDS right- wing response, and by the backlash to feminism? We put on straight drag – and became the very things that lesbian feminism critiqued in the '70s – coupled, married, with children, living in nuclear families, isolated from and no longer building our communities.
Sarah also asked us to think about our disappointments from the 1970s. The biggest disappointment to me is the decrease in the spaces for lesbian communities – oddly, there are now fewer publicly lesbian events, spaces, political statements, and writers writing about lesbian lives and ideas. There are many more lesbians who are out and visible and indeed powerful in many spheres (Ellen, Rosie, Melissa, Wanda, Billie Jean etc. etc. etc.). Lesbians are still leaders in every social justice movement – and now often as OUT dykes. Women are still doing great organizing work and writing amazing literature and creating music and art – often with no mainstream support. But, strangely, the space for lesbian life on the ground has shrunk – there are fewer bookstores, bards, newspapers, zines, and even not that many lesbian-aimed political web sites. Our sense of community with each other has decreased.
Where else did we fall short? In my view, we fell short with our:
- Rather rigid notions of identity—the split between separatists and non-separatists, between gay women and dykes, between political in the mainstream and political in the back- to-the-land sense, between trans and born-woman separatists. For an inclusive people whose politics encompassed every oppression, we spent a lot of time excluding.
- Inability to build an economically viable basis for our culture, our businesses and our institutions.
- Weakness at cross-generational translation to embrace and engender successive versions of dykeness. We did not have THE definition of lesbian feminist politics in the '70s, just the one for our times. We have failed in connecting to those succeeding us.
- Our communities always struggled with the competing demands of motherhood and its necessary domesticity and time requirements. The fact that so many of us are and were even then mothers remains a very under-discussed aspect of lesbian lives.
- A rejection and dislike of femaleness itself, expressed in rejection of the affiliation with the term lesbian for many years until Lesbian Avengers brought it back into vogue among some younger women in the 1990's.
- A purity politics that promised an impossible and never realized (therefore always criticized) perfectly safe space.
- An avoidance of the mainstream which meant that the LGBT movement grew without feminist politics being embedded anywhere except the radical parts.
Back in the '70s I really wanted to destroy the patriarchy and smash imperialism in all its forms and you know what, I still do. In many ways the patriarchal order today has fully discredited itself and is in complete disarray. Its dying convulsions may destroy us all, but its lack of solutions and lack of concern for the lives of millions of poor and ordinary people, the lion's share of whom are women and children, are obvious to anyone looking at the news. What can we do now to hasten its demise?
About the author
Urvashi Vaid has worked in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and social justice movements for nearly three decades.
She is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the former executive director of the Arcus Foundation and was the deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation. Vaid worked for many years at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) in several positions including media director, executive director and director of its think tank. She is a former staff attorney for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organization's work on HIV/AIDS in prisons.
Vaid is author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996) and co-editor, with Dr. John D'Emilio and Dr. William Turner, of an anthology on public policy history titled Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin's Press, 2000). She is a former columnist for The Advocate, the U.S. national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, and has contributed chapters to a number of books.
Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College, and of Northeastern University School of Law. She lives in New York City with her partner of twenty-three years, Kate Clinton.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
She is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the former executive director of the Arcus Foundation and was the deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation. Vaid worked for many years at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) in several positions including media director, executive director and director of its think tank. She is a former staff attorney for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organization's work on HIV/AIDS in prisons.
Vaid is author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996) and co-editor, with Dr. John D'Emilio and Dr. William Turner, of an anthology on public policy history titled Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin's Press, 2000). She is a former columnist for The Advocate, the U.S. national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, and has contributed chapters to a number of books.
Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College, and of Northeastern University School of Law. She lives in New York City with her partner of twenty-three years, Kate Clinton.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.