Mary Bonauto is this years winner of the Jim Brudner 83 Prize for LGBT Activism! 

Bonauto litigated VT Civil Unions, Massachusetts (2004) & Connecticut (2008) LGBT marriage and is now challenging DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act)

Come meet Mary Bonauto and hear her speak. Her lecture is entitled "

Perry, Gill and the Right Wing Challenges to Defeat Us"

In NYC: Thurs, Dec 2, 6 pm reception, 7 pm talk. Yale Club of NYC. $20 (advance, closes 12-1) $30 at the door
REGISTRATION REQUESTED (for NYC): www.brudnerprizenewyork.eventbrite.com

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.

This year we will also honor Mary Bonauto with a reception and lecture in New York.

 Mary Bonauto has been the civil rights project director of GLAD since 1990.  She has worked to make the laws, regulations
and policies of New England the most gay-friendly in the nation. Her litigation has secured the rights 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

- Transpeople to keep their jobs and to wear the clothes they prefer to school.

She was co-counsel in Baker v. Vermont attorneyin 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 inKerrigan 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.

James Robert Brudner 83 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 (TAG) 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 (NIH), pharmaceutical companies 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.  

Recipients of the Brudner Prize:
2000 George Chauncey
2001 Lillian Faderman
2002 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2003 Jonathan Ned Katz
2004 Judith Butler
2005 John DEmilio
2006 Matt Coles
2007 B. Ruby Rich
2008 Didier Eribon
2008-09 Cathy Cohen
2009-10 Edwin Cameron
2010-11 Mary Bonauto  Thanks to LGBT Studies at Yale for the invitation:  http://www.yale.edu/lgbts/brudner.html
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