Born October 8: James Magruder, Urvashi Vaid

After earning his Ph.D. at the Yale School of Drama, translating the finest French plays, and writing the book for Broadway's misnamed musical The Triumph of Love, James Magruder jumped to fiction. His great debut novel about a horny gay teen growing up with religious parents in Florida in the 1970s, Sugarless [Kindle], was a finalist for a Lammy and for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and it earned him strings of adjectives from famous writers: "important, funny, heartbreaking, and beautiful" (Tony Kushner) and "compassionate, funny, wrenching, and real" (Amy Bloom). After several publishing delays, his story collection Let Me See It will come out next May. Follow him on Facebook for glimpses of the extraordinary year he and his longtime partner Steve Bolton are spending in East Africa.

 

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York in 1966 when she was eight; 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 book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program, and from 2005 to 2010 she was Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, srsly, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. Last year she released a collection of essays, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics, which ubiquitous blurbist Tony Kushner called," evivifying, incisive, provocative, scrupulously argued, and beautifully articulated." For a long, funny time she's been partners with Kate Clinton, dividing their time between Manhattan and Provincetown. (Photo by Jurek Wajdowicz.)