Building a Movement

This chapter includes the preface to Virtual Equality (1995), in which Urvashi Vaid sketches formative influences in her personal and professional history, starting with her arrival in the US in 1966, at the age of 8, and ending with her years at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which she led from the late 1980s to early 1990s. It covers the emergence of her political consciousness during a time of civil rights struggles in the US, her participation in anti-war rallies, in the anti-apartheid movement, in the feminist and lesbian movement, her involvement in grassroots community organizing in Boston, her work at the ACLU, and her leadership at NGLTF. The chapter concludes with excerpts from letters Urvashi wrote to her family between 1979 to 1994, covering her time as an activist and law student in Boston, her work in the ACLU, and as public information director and executive director at the NGLTF and then moving to Provincetown, MA, to work on Virtual Equality. The letters home convey her evolution as an activist, lawyer, political organizer, and writer.