Mary Bonauto , 2010-11 recipient of the Brudner Prize:

    Perry, Gill and the Right Wing Challenges to Defeat Us

Thursday, December 2, reception at 6 pm and lecture at 7 pm, at the Yale Club of New York, 50 Vanderbilt Avenue on the corner of 44th Street, across the street from Grand Central Station. 

Registration for the reception at the Yale Club is $20.00 in advance, $30.00 at the door.

Introduction by George Chauncey, Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University.
 

The Brudner prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people. The Brudner prize winner gives a Prize Lecture at Yale.

Mary Bonauto has been the Civil Rights Project Director for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990.  As a brilliant legal strategist and tireless advocate, she has played a key role in making New England’s laws, regulations, and policies the most gay-friendly in the nation.  Her litigation has secured the right of ●lesbian mothers to keep their children, ● lesbian and gay couples to adopt children together and secure visitation rights if their relationship ends, ● gay couples to kiss in bars, ● gay teachers to keep their jobs, ● high school students to organize Gay Straight Alliances and to be protected from antigay harassment and ● transpeople to keep their jobs and to wear the clothes they prefer to school.  She was co-counsel in Baker v. Vermont, the case that led Vermont to establish civil unions in 2000, the plaintiffs’ attorney in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the epoch-making 2003 case that secured the right of same-sex couples in Massachusetts to marry, and co-counsel in Kerrigan v. Department of Public Health, the 2008 case in which the Connecticut Supreme Court inaugurated marriage over civil unions to fulfill the constitutional equality mandate. She is currently co-lead counsel in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, pending in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston

James Robert Brudner '83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer. A man of wit and compassion, outsized knowledge and curiosity, Jim valued both academic inquiry and direct action. He spent 12 years as a policy analyst for the City of New York. He also earned an MA in journalism from New York University and wrote for various publications on gay- and AIDS-related topics. Jim became a member of ACT UP, the Treatment Action Group, and other organizations after the death of his twin brother, Eric, of AIDS in 1987. He worked on treatment and prevention issues with the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical corporations, and federal agencies. In his final years he devoted much of his time to traveling the back roads of rural America with a camera. La Mama Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of his photographs in 1997. Jim died of AIDS-related illness on September 18, 1998 at the age of 37. Through his will, he established the Brudner Prize at Yale as "a perpetual annual prize" for scholarship and activism on gay and lesbian issues.