Carmen Vázquez, a longtime LGBTQ and social justice activist, died Wednesday as a result of Covid-19-connected complications, constant with the Nationwide LGBTQ Activity Force.
She used to be 72.
“The shortcoming of Carmen tears birth a hole in the coronary heart of the LGBTQ+, social justice, immigration, reproductive justice, and sexual freedom movements,” Rea Carey, the job power’s govt director, acknowledged in a assertion. “I’m deeply unhappy that one amongst our motion’s most excellent activists is rarely any longer with us. Rest in energy, Carmen. We are able to continue your work for liberation.”
Born in Puerto Rico in 1949 to a World Struggle II aged and a seamstress, Vázquez migrated to Original York Metropolis in the early 1950s. After graduating from the Metropolis University of Original York in the early ‘70s with a grasp’s level in training, she moved to San Francisco, the set she was a leading Bay Condominium activist.
Vázquez used to be the founding director of The Ladies’s Building, a girls folk-led neighborhood apartment that opened in San Francisco in 1971 with the function of advocating for gender equality and social justice. She then was the director of the Nationwide Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and the coordinator of LGBTQ products and services for the San Francisco Division of Public Health.
When Vázquez moved aid to Original York in the ’90s, she persevered her activism by serving as director of policy for the metropolis’s LGBT Neighborhood Heart and helped realized the Original York Utter LGBT Health & Human Services and products Network, a coalition that now contains further than 70 nonprofit organizations that recommend for abnormal Original Yorkers.
Her accomplishments had been known final year by SAGE, a nationwide advocacy community for LGBTQ elders, when it presented her with the SAGE Advocacy Award for Excellence on Aging Disorders. Michael Adams, CEO of SAGE, reminisced about the moment in a assertion this week.
“One among my proudest moments as an activist used to be presenting Carmen with the annual SAGE Award at Rising Swap 2020, in recognition of her lifetime of braveness, fierceness and war,” he acknowledged. “It’s unbelievable that Carmen has passed, however the spirit of someone as fierce as Carmen lives with out a sign of ending and continues to inspire us.”
SAGE plans to rename the award after Vázquez in honor of her an extended time of labor for the LGBTQ neighborhood.
In her acceptance speech for the award, Vázquez had shared her hopes for future activists.
“Whereas in an instant or this moment is set me, replace is by no device about one individual alone,” she acknowledged. “There had been numerous others who cleared the route for my activism and diverse others who will follow me and affect the bridge to the future. Equality is no longer satisfactory, justice and liberation are the set our hearts and minds might perhaps aloof lead us.”
