A special invitation for Yale GALA members / friends and friends of Jim Brudner ...

The Jim Brudner ('83) Memorial Prize and Lecture
by Justice Edwin Cameron (human right lawyer, author, Justice of South Africa's Constitutional Court and Rhodes Scholar)
entitled: "Africa, AIDS and Homophobia: The Other Epidemic"

WHEN:   Thursday, October 29, 2009.  
                6 pm reception.  7 pm lecture

WHERE:  The Yale Club of New York City, 50 Vanderbilt Avenue. http://www.yaleclubnyc.org/

COST:     $20 in advance.  $30 at the door. 
                A reception (with open bar) will precede the presentation
Please buy tickets, here: http://brudnerlecture.eventbrite.com/

Event website: http://www.yale.edu/lgbts/brudner.html


LGBT Studies at Yale invites you to an event honoring our 2009-10 Brudner Prize winner, Justice Edwin Cameron.

Cameron is a Justice on South Africa's Highest Court, a human rights lawyer, an activist and a Rhodes Scholar. More than anyone else, he is responsible for sexual orientation appearing in South Africa's Constitution.

Cameron's lecture is: Africa, AIDS and Homophobia: The Other Epidemic

The James Robert Brudner '83 Memorial 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.

Cameron will lecture on Wednesday, Oct 28 at 5 pm at the Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, Room 127.  That lecture will be "LGBTI Rights Around the World: Toward A Framework for Global Action". Free and no RSVP is required.

Many thanks to LGBT Studies at Yale for inviting Yale GALA to this event.

For more on the Brudner Prize Lecture, please visit: http://www.yale.edu/lgbts/brudner.html

To learn more about LGBT Studies at Yale, please visit: http://www.yale.edu/lgbts/index.html

Edwin Cameron is a Justice of the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court, as well as a human rights lawyer, an author, and a Rhodes Scholar.  Before serving as a judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal from 2000 to 2008, his legal practice included labor and employment law; defense of ANC fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality.  He drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium (a national affiliation of non-governmental organizations working in AIDS), which he chaired for its first three years, and founded and was the first director of the AIDS Law Project.  He oversaw the gay and lesbian movement’s submissions to the committee drafting a new South African constitution, in the course of whose deliberations he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, entitled "Sexual Orientation and the Constitution: A Test Case for Human Rights," which, with other work, was influential in securing the express inclusion of sexual orientation in the South African Constitution.  He is co-author of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (1994) and of scholarly articles on AIDS, HIV, and the legal rights of gays and lesbians, among other issues. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Excellence in Leadership Award for 2003, and South Africa's most distinguished literary award for non-fiction for his memoir, Witness to AIDS (2005). In October 2003 he was elected an honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

James Robert Brudner '83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer. He was also a Yale GALA member. 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 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.

Recipients of the Brudner Prize:
2000   George Chauncey
2001   Lillian Faderman
2002   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2003   Jonathan Ned Katz
2004   Judith Butler
2005   John D'Emilio
2006   Matt Coles
2007   B. Ruby Rich
2008   Didier Eribon

2008-2009 Cathy Cohen

2009-2010 Edwin Cameron

More event info at: www.yalegala.org/BrudnerPrizeOct2009.html  

View Brudner Brochure here: http://www.yalegala.org/Events/BrudnerBrochureFall09FINAL.pdf