The Association of Queer Anthropology (AQA) celebrates its 2020/2021 Distinguished Achievement Award Winners, in recognition of their considerable career accomplishments and lasting impact on the field of queer anthropology. Evelyn Blackwood's notable works have contributed significantly to the study of gender, kinship and sexuality in Indonesia as well as the cultural history of lesbian and gay communities in the United States. Her early ethnographic research focused on how Sumatran matrilineal communities adapted to socioeconomic and political change and offered important critiques on the persistence of patriarchy within matrilineal systems. Through well-received edited volumes, Blackwood also challenged the invisibility of female desires and sexuality in queer anthropology and theorization more broadly. Her work on Tombois and their girlfriends in Indonesia marked an early foray into transgender studies in Asia. Over her career, Gayle Rubin has merged activism with keen anthropological scholarship. Her landmark essays "The Traffic in Women" and "Thinking Sex” are still read as foundational texts in anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and social theory. Through these works, Rubin pioneered much of the analytic vocabulary around gender and sexuality that has sustained feminist and queer anthropology. Rubin has been the key ethnographer, archivist, and public historian of the San Francisco leather community, and has founded or served on the boards of several important U.S. LGBT cultural institutions. Her historical and contemporary study of erotophobia within American rightwing cultures continues to provide critical insights as to how sexual control operates in society.