April 22, 2002 Civil and gay rights activist Urvashi Vaid speaks April 29 By Jennifer McNulty Civil rights activist and attorney Urvashi Vaid will give a free public lecture on Monday, April 29, at 7 p.m. in the newly restored Del Mar Theater at 1124 Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz. Attorney Urvashi Vaid wrote Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. Her talk, "Sexuality and Its Discontents: What's Race, Class, and War Got to Do with It?," marks the third annual Anne Neufeld Levin Spring Lecture presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community (CJTC). Involved with civil and gay rights since the early 1980s, Vaid is a former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. Born in India and raised in New York, Vaid was included in Time magazine's 1994 "Fifty for the Future" list of America's most promising leaders under the age of 40. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including the national evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour and National Public Radio. "The gay rights movement is an integral part of the American promise of freedom," Vaid said during the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights and Liberation. Manuel Pastor, director of the CJTC and a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at UCSC, called Vaid a bridge among activists working on a wide range of civil rights issues. Vaid's visit is presented by the CJTC in collaboration with UCSC's Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center; the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; and the Women's Center. Other UCSC cosponsors include the Chicano/Latino Research Center, the Institute for Humanities Research, College Eight, and the Departments of Anthropology, Community Studies, History of Consciousness, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and Women's Studies. For more information, e-mail or call CJTC at (831) 459-5743. Return to Front Page