Judith Light’s Activist Journey: ‘I Never Realized That I Had Power Outside of My Lane Until I Started Speaking Up’
The TV icon shared inspiring words at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit
Judith Light has long been beloved for her roles on shows like One Life to Life, Who’s the Boss?, Ugly Betty and Transparent, and the veteran actress is just as impressive offscreen as she is on it, as she’s been a passionate activist for AIDS awareness for over 40 years.
On September 10, Woman’s World attended Forbes’ 13th Annual Power Women’s Summit and saw the star speak about the causes closest to her heart as part of an inspiring panel featuring actress and disability advocate Selma Blair, civil rights trailblazer Dolores Huerta and fashion designer and activist Aurora James, and moderated by CNN anchor Abby Phillip.
Read on to see the powerful words Judith Light shared about using her platform to help others.
How Judith Light started speaking up
Dressed in a glittering gray power suit while sitting with a group of accomplished women at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, Light spoke emphatically about her early days of activism in the ’80s. “I never realized that I had power outside of my lane until I started speaking up,” she said.
“I watched people like Elizabeth Taylor talk about human rights and the LGBTQIA+ community in the early days of AIDS,” she noted. “It was really personal. I needed to say something, because I saw that there was a tremendous injustice happening toward the community and this hotbed of homophobia that was living under the surface of our country. This community was being treated so divisively.”
Dealing with backlash
In the early days of the AIDS crisis, there was much stigma around the disease, and those who spoke openly about it weren’t always treated kindly. “I got letters from people who said they’d never watch me again, because of how I spoke out,” Light said, but she knew in her gut that she was doing the right thing, and that instinct kept her strong during hard times. “It was like there was this intuitive sense that something must be said,” the former soap star explained.
Asking the big questions
Light, who has served on the boards of the Matthew Shepard Foundation and the Point Foundation, then went on to outline the guiding questions she asked herself on her activist journey: “Am I listening to someone else? Am I watching them? Am I hearing them? Am I seeing them? Am I not making this all about myself?”
These questions apply to any number of causes. As she elaborated, “We all have different content in our advocacy, but it seems to me that there’s a larger context of ‘Who do you want to be as a community?’ We know what’s happening in our world now, and how do we know that we get to transform that? That comes from a larger picture. The content is different for all of us, but we can all mesh in this larger container and I think that’s really important.”
Evolving as an advocate
Light ended her portion of the panel by speaking about how she’s evolved. “I began to feel more empowered as time went on, because people were beginning to listen,” she said. “I think about women in the early days and what we were fighting for, and at that time we didn’t know that we were the powerful one.” She concluded, “We were the power, and I think it’s different now. We’re starting to know that women have the kind of power that they do.”
During a time of chaos, Light’s words give us hope, and we deeply appreciate her reminder of women’s innate power.
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