Indian-American lawyer, writer and activist Urvashi Vaid was BOTD in 1958. Born in New Delhi to middle-class parents, she was raised by her grandparents while her parents studied in the United States. In 1966, she and her family moved to Potsdam, New York, where her father took a teaching position. Politically active at a young age, she wrote letters to President Richard Nixon in support of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and took part in anti-Vietnam War marches. She studied at Vassar College before attending law school at Northeastern University in Boston, where she was involved in feminist, queer and anti-nuclear movements. After graduation, she worked for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, where she initiated an HIV/AIDS prevention campaign for prisoners. In her 1995 book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, she discussed the racist and classist assumptions within white-led queer politics, arguing for more inclusiveness of racial, gender and economic difference. The book won Vaid a Stonewall Book Award, and became a seminal text in 1990s queer discourse, convincing even the famously combative activist Larry Kramer of the need to embrace intersectional politics. In 1989, she was appointed executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, leading campaigns for HIV/AIDS funding. Her later worked for the Arcus, Ford and Gill Foundations. In 2011, she joined the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School, considering how tradition was used to enable and prevent progressive political movements, later discussed in her 2012 book Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics. While a vocal supporter of the gay marriage campaign, she cautioned LGBTG communities against political complacency, arguing that a “win” for gay marriage would not remove systemic inequalities affecting women, people of colour and trans people. She also co-founded the Lesbian Political Action Committee (LPAC) and her own social action consultancy. Vaid was in a long-term relationship with comedian Kate Clinton, whom she married in 2013. She died of breast cancer in 2022, aged 63. Later that year, she was posthumously inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Memorial in New York City.