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Opposition into Opportunity: NGLTF at Sixteen
UP CLOSE:
Urvashi Vaid
by Jim Marks
According to pioneering D.C. gay rights
activist Frank Kameny, the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) was bom out of
frustration, crisis and a sense of opportunity.
In the fall of 1973, the long fought battle to
force the American Psychological Association to
remove homosexuality from its list of mental
disorders was nearing a successful conclusion.
But New York's Gay Activists Alliance, which
had spearheaded the effort, was tearing itself
apart, its energy consumed in endless wrangling
over procedure.
In early November, Kameny recalls, "I got a
phone call on short notice from GAA president
Bruce Voeller, asking me to come to New York."
November 15, at a hastily arranged news
conference, Kameny and Philadelphia lesbian
activist Barbara Gittings joined \beller and four
other New Yorkers, including Dr. Howard Brown
(at that time the highest public official ever to
come out) and the historian Martin Duberman, in
announcing the formation of the National Gay
Task Force (changed to the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force in November 1985), the first
national gay political organization.
Exactly one month later, December 15, the
APA board of trustees voted to declassify
homosexuality-a decision NGLTF lists as its first
major victory.
It is a measure of the newness of the gay
community that its oldest political organization is
a mere adolescent, turning 16 this fall. From the
original seven people, the organization has grown
to 14,000 paid members, with a budget
approaching $1,000,000 a year.
Indications are that NGLTF, like much of the
gay movement, is entering a period of maturity
and stability. While there will no doubt be future
stresses, the continued survival and growth of
NGLTF is one sign that the revolution begun
with the Stonewall rebellion twenty years ago has
been institutionalized. For better or worse, a
band of radicals, outlaws and street activists have
created a gay civil society which, ;while less
dramatic, has a good chance of lasting.
Certainly, NGLTFs youth didn't lack drama.
One of the most significant moments came in
1982, when the organization was shaken by a
power struggle between co-chairs Lucia Valeska
and Charlie Brydon. First, Valeska succeeded in
forcing Brydon from the organization's
leadership. Then, at what Kameny recalls as a
"stormy" board meeting, Valeska was asked to
resign because of what Kameny delicately
describes as "the poor quality" of her work.
In Valeska's successor, Virginia M. "Ginny"
Apuzzo, NGLTF found perhaps the only truly
Patsy Lynch
Virginia M. "Ginny" Apuzzo
charismatic leader the modem gay movement
has so far produced. Apuzzo crisscrossed the
country speaking to gay groups. She debated
Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell on national
TV. And she placed NGLTF squarely in the
forefront of the fight against AIDS, becoming
the first gay representative to meet with U.S.
Public Health head Edward Brandt in the
summer of 1983.
Apuzzo's leadership gifts, however, were not
matched by institution building talents. When
she left NGLTF to join New York Governor
Mario Cuomo's administration in 1985, NGLTF
soon found itself in its worst crisis ever.
Since 1983, Jeff Levi had been NGLTFs
Washington point man in D.C., primarily dealing
with AIDS. After Apuzzo's departure, Levi
shared responsibility for the organization with
Rosemary Kuropat, who took over the New York
headquarters as director of administration. The
resulting two headed, schizoid organism nearly
committed suicide in March of 1986, when
Kuropat noisily resigned, charging NGLTFs
board lacked "sound business practices" and
attacking Levi as a poor manager.
Fortunately for the organization, Ms.
Kuropat prove to be wrong about Levi's
managerial skills. NGLTF not only survived the
move to Washington, it thrived, paying off the
"hopeless" debt in little more than a year. This
was mostly due to Levi's role in the creation of
an AIDS policy and lobbying structure.
Even if Randy Shilts' And the Band Played
On had covered the role gay organizations
played in mobilizing to fight the AIDS epidemic,
Levi might still not have received the notice he
deserved. At a Capitol Hill congressional
hearing on AIDS, Levi would be seen at the back
of the room chatting with, say, CDC director Dr.
Jim Marks
Jeff Levi with Dr. James Mason
James Mason, and not at the table under the
lights testifying. But during the behind-the-
scenes arranging that goes on before Washington
stages its political shows, Levi had been
consulted many times, finding witnesses,
suggesting testimony, talking to reporters and
generally making sure, as he puts it "the right
things got said."
Levi and NGLTF started the AIDS Action
Council to provide, in Vaid's words, "a non-gay
identified organization" to take the lead in AIDS
lobbying. Meeting together the second Monday
of every month, Levi and four others stitched
together NORA (National Organizations
Responding to AIDS),the coalition of around 140
organizations that now lobbies on AIDS policy.
In Washington, if you don't have the
numbers-and NGLTF's 10,000 plus and growing
members were nothing next to Jesse Helms'
millions-you've got to have allies.
And Apuzzo taught Levi, as he puts it, "to
give good copy." In one memorable exchange,
he informed Senator Strom Thurmond that gays
aren’t interested in being "converted": "we think
we are like other people," Levi replied. The
New York Times found the exchange worth
reprinting. During the March on Washington in
1987, he was a National Press Club luncheon
speaker, where he informed the capitol's
assembled journalists that in the future gays
would be looking for ways not only to get
government to "protect our rights, but affirm our
relationships."
And NGLTF survived because, despite the
turmoil, it established programs that have a real
connection to where gay people actually live.
Take the anti-violence project, run by Kevin
Berrill. The project began in 1982 as a crisis
hotline in the New York office. Lucia Valeska
by Jim Marks
On the evening of October 6, after the NGLTF
National Town Meeting on AIDS in Washington,
D.C., Urvashi Vaid and a dozen ravenous gay
activists commandeered a table outside an Italian
restaurant. "Someone went in and saw Judge
Bork," Ronald Reagan's rejected Supreme Court
nominee, Vaid recalls.
"Everyone agreed we should do something,
but we couldn't agree on a tactic. While the
discussion on confronting the right wing jurist
continued, Bork walked out of the restaurant
"There being no consensus, I seized control,”
Vaid says. "I stood up, stuck my hand out and
said 'my name is Urvashi Vaid, I’m the executive
director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force. I wanted to see if you had a few minutes
because we're so rarely in the same place."’
For ten minutes, Vaid engaged the nervous
Bork in a discussion of his Appeals Court
decision upholding the military's right to expel
gays, and his support for the Supreme Court
decision upholding Georgia's sodomy laws.
"Finally, I said, well, Judge Bork, what would
you suggest to our movement that we do, because
we're hying to correct widespread discrimination
that hurts ordinary people. He said, you're not
going to get it from the courts; go to the
legislatures."
"And I said we are doing that"
Vaid ended the conversation saying, "Judge
Bork, all we can do is ask that where ever you go
that you speak out against bigotry and prejudice.
And he smiled and walked away.”
The impromptu dialogue was vintage Vaid
(her last name rhymes with glad). A sparrow of a
woman, she possesses a strength of purpose that
quickly banishes all thought of her size. At thirty,
she combines a lawyer's intellect with an activist's
appreciation for street theater.
Bom in New Delhi, India, she grew up in a
"traditional Indian household” in Potsdam, New
York, a farming town where her father, a writer, is
a professor of English. Her background gave her
a sense of being different, but not discriminated
against. "I think Indians in this country are
viewed by Americans as exotic. We're not treated
like black people, we're not treated like Hispanic
people. We're like a special category."
Lesbian and gay rights began to move into the
center of her personal agenda, she says, when she
fell in love with another woman her junior year of
college at Vassar. "I'm not one of those people
who knew since I was eleven. But when I came
out and looked back, I realized, Gee, I've always
had strong friendships with women, and so it
Continued on page 14
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