Urvashi Vaid.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Gay-lesbian activist/author - Interview

Urvashi Vaid is one of the lesbian and gay movement's most visible political figures. Always provocative, she has distinguished herself by insisting that gay people share interests with African Americans, feminists, and blue-collar workers. "I have never been a single-issue person," she says. "I feel that I have always been a progressive person who happened to be working in the gay and lesbian movement.

Her call for a comprehensive liberation movement poses a challenge to a gay and lesbian agenda that, over the past fifteen years, has tended to restrict the energy of activists to a narrow band of so-called gay issues.

"Like the civil-rights movements that preceded us and on which we model our goals and strategies, we have reached the moment of partial fulfillment," Vaid writes in the opening pages of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. "The system has adapted to our existence, but it still has not changed in fundamental ways. We are freer than we were in the 1940s and 1960s, but we have failed to realize true equality or win full acceptance as moral human beings.... The liberty we have won is incomplete, conditional, and ultimately revocable."

The straight community has rewarded the lesbian and gay civil-rights movement with "virtual equality," a state of seeming nondiscrimination marked by the coexistence of "two Americas," she argues. In the first, gay people appear to have access to government, and some semblance of power and prestige. The second gay America, in Vaid's words, "is much larger; it is the one in which most of our people live, dominated by fear, permeated by discrimination, violence, and shame." For Vaid, actual equality requires a return to the goal of liberation, of transforming institutions, economic structures, and cultures.

Vaid was born in India in 1958. She emigrated to the United States in 1966. She attended Vassar College, where she came out to herself as a lesbian and a feminist, and she is a graduate of Northeastern University Law School. Her social-service work has included a stint at Gay Community News in Boston, and several years with the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1986 through 1989, Vaid served as public-information director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and from 1989 to 1992 as executive director. She and her writings have been featured in Out/Look, Ms., The Nation, and The Advocate. In 1994, magazine named Vaid one of its "Fifty for the Future," a catalog of promising young American leaders. She was the only out lesbian listed.

I met Urvashi Vaid on a foggy January morning in Province-town, Massachusetts. She picked me up at the inn where I was staying and drove me through the resort town. Most of the shops on Commercial Street were closed, but we stopped to peer through the window of her favorite, the Marine Supply Store. "They have everything in there," she said as I squinted at a hodgepodge of umbrellas, lanterns, stuffed lobsters, kites, and ceramic plates. "Kids love it." Back in her truck, she waved, rolled down the window, and called out to several passers-by. I asked her if she knew the whole town. She said she did, and pointed out the homes of several close friends before turning toward the house she shares with her lover of nearly eight years, Kate Clinton, the comedian and Progressive columnist.

During our talk, I was struck by Vaid's ability to create community out of the small interactions of life. With her direct gaze and her warm, candid conversational style, she continually strengthens her liaisons with neighbors, new acquaintances, and longtime friends. These local communications, and their capacity to change strangers into allies, are the underpinnings of Vaid's grassroots politics.

Q: You talk about the gay and lesbian movement as transformative and redemptive. What do you mean by that?

Vaid: The redemptive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality is that it broadens and opens up gender rigidity. And therefore I think it can redeem heterosexual misery. I think a lot of heterosexual people are miserable. The more rigid the heterosexual scheme that they are living out, the more miserable I find them to be. Unless they totally accept it, and then they're not miserable.

I think heterosexual men are made miserable by their cultural conditioning to not express their love of other men, and to not express their softness or their weakness or their fear. Men are just not supposed to be afraid.

And women are made miserable by being conditioned to accept what you get, and not go after what you really want. Most straight women just can't understand lesbians because they don't even understand their own sexual pleasure. They just can't see it. They have no idea how hot lesbian sex is because the world is so set up around male sexual desire as being the only hot thing. They don't see how female sexual desire is seething and hot.

But in gay and lesbian relationships there is such a premium placed on pleasure, and such a premium placed on, "Are you fulfilled and are you happy?" We're always asking ourselves that in our relationships. And if you're not happy, you leave. Outsiders might look at that and say, "Well, there's such instability," and so on. Well, yes, and there's also a lot more honesty.

Also there's always this whole gender-bending that happens in gay and lesbian relationships. Men are free to be butch, and then put on a dress for a weekend if they want, and that doesn't even mean they're transgendered. They're just playing. We play with gender roles, we play with gender rigidity, and we talk a lot about sex, and therefore we understand our pleasure more.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One of the things I was thinking of when I wrote that gay culture is transformative was this notion that maybe we can help redeem the tired old categories of heterosexual relating, and freshen them up and give them new ways of dealing with each other and new possibilities. And I think we do, actually.

Q: Is that what's disruptive?

Vaid: It's very threatening. But it's also very helpful, because it's not about displacing it. I don't think everybody should be straight or gay. I don't think everybody should be gay at all, or will be. I don't think that will ever happen, because I think some people are heterosexual. I think some people are bisexual. And if...