The James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize and Lecture celebrates lifetime accomplishment and scholarly contributions in the field of LGBT Studies.
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".
He 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.