The James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize and Lecture at Yale University celebrates lifetime accomplishment and scholarly contributions in the field of LGBT Studies. It is bestowed annually by the Committee for LGBT Studies at Yale University. Recipients receive a cash prize and give a public lecture on the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut as well as a second lecture in New York City.
The prize is named for city planner, musician, and photographer James Brudner (1961-1998), a member of the Yale College class of 1983 and Stuyvesant High School Class of 1979. Brudner died of AIDS-related illness on September 18, 1998. Through his will he established the prize and lecture as "a perpetual annual prize for scholarship in the history, culture, anthropology, biology, etiology, or literature of gay men and lesbians or related fields, or for advancing the understanding of homosexuality as a phenomenon, or the tolerance of gay men and lesbians in society."
James Robert Brudner '83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer. 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, 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, 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.