Born October 8, 11: Urvashi Vaid, Eleanor Roosevelt
In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt was an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Please, please read her column from sixty years ago, October 1947, about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. The relevance of her writing career is that she used words precisely and carefully and she meant exactly what she said. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts of their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.
Hick darling,
All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it. _________________________________________
[Eleanor to Hickok]
I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.
_________________________________________
[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]
Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .
The website brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Four examples:
"You must do the things you think you cannot do."
"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."
"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!"
"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."
Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. From 2005 until earlier this year she was Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. This academic year (2010-11) she's a visiting scholar at CUNY's Graduate Center’s Department of Sociology and writing a new book. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and was recently one of OUT's 50 most influential lgbt people. For a long, funny time she's been partners with Kate Clinton, dividing their time between Manhattan and Provincetown. Read the texts of her speeches on her site. (Photo by Don Hamerman.)
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