People of the year.

Using much the same criteria it uses today, The Advocate started a long-standing tradition 15 years ago when it picked its first woman and man of the year: activist Urvashi Vaid and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In 1990, Vaid, as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, had confronted President George Bush during his first major address on AIDS. Before Secret Service agents removed her, she bravely asserted that money, not platitudes, was needed to fight AIDS. "Urvashi has the facility to reason through issues and tactics, then make clear conclusions and inspire us to fight for them," wrote author Jewelle Gomez.

Mapplethorpe, who had died the year prior, produced explicitly homoerotic photography that so upset officials that its showing at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center culminated in the gallery's director being tried for obscenity. "Highly refined, his radiant pictures proudly claimed for otherwise marginalized classes of human beings the prerogatives held by the inviolable god that is straight white male America," wrote art critic Christopher Knight.--D.R.