Since being elected to Congress in 1978, Robert T. Matsui has gained a national and international reputation as a leader on far-reaching and complex public policy issues such as trade, tax policy, social security, health care and welfare reform. The Sacramento Congressman is a 16-year member of the powerful House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee. In 1996, he became ranking minority member of the Trade Subcommittee where he has been a member for 10 years and had served as acting Chair in 1994. Congressman Matsui is widely recognized as a leader on free trade issues and also is actively involved in issues affecting the well-being of the nation's children. Congressman Matsui's legislative accomplishments have been recognized by both local and national organizations, including the Child Welfare League of America, the Children's Defense Fund, and the Anti-Defamation League. Congressman Matsui is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and the Hastings College of Law. He is married to the former Doris Okada. Congressman and Mrs. Matsui have one son, Brian, a law student at Stanford University.

Urvashi Vaid is an attorney and community organizer whose involvement in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement spans nearly 20 years. She is currently the Director of the Policy Institute of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), a community-based think tank dedicated to research, policy analysis, and strategic projects to advance understanding of and equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people. She also serves on the founding Board of Directors of the White House Project, a new initiative to change the cultural climate in America over the next ten years in order to elect a woman President. Vaid was formerly a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, where she conducted prison conditions litigation and initiated the Project's work on HIV/AIDS in prison. She has also acted as NGLTF’s Media Director and Executive Director. In 1994, Urvashi Vaid was chosen as one of Time magazine’s “Fifty for the Future,” a list of America's fifty most promising leaders age 40 and under. She is most recently the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation.

SLANT is the ensemble of Richard Ebihara, Wayland Quintero and Perry Yung, who have redefined pop notions of Asian masculinity and created an innovative brand of performance art that mocks sexual questions and derogatory caricatures while holding Asian men up to the curious mirror of American pop culture. Since SLANT's debut in 1995, their shows have been reprised at La Mama, E.T.C., presented by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater and The Public Theater, and at colleges and universities.