Amber L. Hollibaugh

Amber L. Hollibaugh (June 20, 1946 – October 20, 2023) was an American writer, filmmaker, activist and organizer concerned with working class, lesbian and feminist politics, especially around sexuality. She was a former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice and was Senior Activist Fellow Emerita at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Hollibaugh proudly identified as a "lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke."

Early life
Hollibaugh was the daughter of a dark-skinned Romany father and a white Irish-American mother. Her father grew up traveling in caravans, and both he and her grandmother were harassed and branded by the Ku Klux Klan. Hollibaugh's working poor upbringing would become central to her organizing work, helping her connect with people in rural and small towns and bringing a necessary intersectional approach to her writings on gay rights and sexuality. Before full time involvement in movement work, Hollibaugh hitchhiked across the country, did sex work, and organized with SNCC and United Farm Workers.

Organizing Work
After moving to Canada in the late sixties, Hollibaugh was a leader in the Canadian movement for abortion rights. In 1978, Hollibaugh joined the team organizing against the Briggs Initiative in California, helping to overturn one of the first significant legislative attacks on LGBTQ civil rights. That same year, she was a co-founder with Allan Bérubé and others of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.

As discourse on sexuality in the feminist and lesbian feminist movements picked up in the late seventies, Hollibaugh was a significant voice in support of sexual liberation and sex work. Hollibaugh, alongside writer and organizer Cherríe Moraga, co-authored the piece "What We're Rollin' around in Bed With" a much-cited and discussed piece in the controversial "Sex Issue" of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Hollibaugh was a speaker at the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, a key event in what would become known as the Feminist Sex Wars. Hollibaugh has written on the marginalization she experienced afterwards as a result of being a former sex worker and her involvement in the sadomasochism community.

Filmmaking and later professional work
Hollibaugh was the director and co-producer with Gini Reticker of The Heart of the Matter, a 60-minute documentary film about the confusing messages women students receive about sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. The film won the 1994 Sundance Film Festival Freedom of Expression Award and premiered to a national audience on PBS.

In the 1990s, Hollibaugh argued that American liberalism was in disarray, but was looking to the Left for guidance in how to reshape itself. Stafford has analyzed her memoir My Dangerous Desires (2000) in terms of femme lesbian narratives.

In 2002, Jenrose Fitzgerald discussed Hollibaugh and Singh's 1999 essay Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism in Social Text. Fitzgerald says that their presentation of the relationship between sexual politics and the labor movement proposed a labor movement "that will take on immigration issues, racism, health care, and the nuances of economic inequality alongside more mainstream labor and 'gay rights' concerns."

In Hollibaugh's writings on sexuality, she has declared that "there is no human hope without the promise of ecstasy."

Meryl Altman says that Hollibaugh was "a powerful organizing speaker, a very fine incisive writer and a brilliant theorist."

In 2012, Hollibaugh received the Vicki Sexual Freedom Award from the Woodhull Freedom Foundation.

Hollibaugh was the Chief Officer of Elder & LBTI Women's Services at Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago. She was a director of education, advocacy and community building at Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), a New York program dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender senior education, advocacy, and community organizing.

Death
Amber L. Hollibaugh died from complications of diabetes in Brooklyn, New York, on October 20, 2023, at the age of 77.

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