Amber L. Hollibaugh
Amber L. Hollibaugh was an American writer, filmmaker, activist and organizer concerned with working-class, lesbian and feminist politics. 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 identified as a "lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke."
Biography
Early life
Hollibaugh was born in Bakersfield, California. Her father was of Romani descent, while her mother was of Irish ancestry. Her father was dark-skinned and 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 became central to her organizing work, helping her connect with people in rural and small towns and bringing an 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 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and United Farm Workers.Organizing work
After moving to Canada in the late 1960s, Hollibaugh was a leader in the Canadian movement for abortion rights. In 1978, Hollibaugh joined the group organizing against the 1978 [California Proposition 6|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. While based in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, Hollibaugh was a contributor to the Socialist Review new-left movement journal. She also worked at Modern Times, a well-known movement bookstore and meeting-place.As discourse on sexuality in the feminist and lesbian-feminist movements picked up in the late 1970s, 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 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 became known as the feminist sex wars. Hollibaugh has written on the marginalization she experienced afterwards as a result of her being a former sex worker and involvement in the sadomasochism community.
Filmmaking and later work
Hollibaugh and Gini Reticker produced The Heart of the Matter, a 60-minute documentary film about the confusing messages young women 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.Hollibaugh and Nikhil Pal Singh's 1999 essay "Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism" in Social Text 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."
Anika Stafford analyzed her memoir My Dangerous Desires in terms of femme lesbian narratives.
Meryl Altman described 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 in New York.