Urvashi Vaid, Pioneering L.G.B.T.Q. Activist, Is Dead at 63
Urvashi Vaid, a lawyer and activist who was a leading figure in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. equality for more than four decades, died on Saturday in Manhattan.
She was 63. Her sisters, Rachna Vaid and Jyotsna Vaid, said the cause was breast cancer. From her days as a law student in Boston, Ms.
Vaid was at the center of a wide array of progressive issues, centered on but not limited to the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement.
Long before the word “intersectionality” entered common parlance, she was practicing it, insisting that freedom for gay men and lesbians required fighting for gender, racial and economic equality as well. “A purely single-issue organizing approach prevents us from making the connections that would advance our goals and would advance the project of building a progressive movement,” she told the magazine The Progressive in 1996.
