Amber L. Hollibaugh, the American lesbian activist, organizer, filmmaker and writer best known for her essay collection My Dangerous Desires, died on October 20, 2023.
Hollibaugh was born on June 20, 1946, in Bakersfield, California, to working-class parents of Irish and Romani descent. She left home as a teenager, worked as a sex worker and nightclub dancer until her mid-twenties, and was largely self-taught. She described herself as a lesbian sex radical. In San Francisco she worked at Modern Times Bookstore, organized against the Briggs Initiative, and in 1978 co-founded the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project with Allan Bérubé. She moved to New York in 1981.
In New York she worked for the city’s Commission on Human Rights and founded the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men’s Health Crisis. She also served as a senior strategist at the National LGBTQ Task Force, directed national initiatives at SAGE, developed elder and LBTI women’s services at Howard Brown Health in Chicago, and was a founding member and executive director of Queers for Economic Justice. As a Senior Activist Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, she directed Queer Survival Economies. With Gini Reticker she co-produced the documentary The Heart of the Matter (1994), on women’s sexuality and HIV/AIDS, which won a Sundance Freedom of Expression Award.
Powers of Desire (1983), edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, is an anthology by feminist and gay writers, historians and activists on sexuality as a political question. Hollibaugh is among its contributors.
Portraits of Love (1997), from Susan Fox Rogers and Linda Smukler, gathers poetry, prose, journalism and letters on love between women. Hollibaugh co-wrote a piece in it with Marj Plumb titled “Falling in Love from Her Coast to Mine.”
Opposite Sex (1998), from Sara Miles and Eric Rofes, is an anthology on how gay men and lesbians figure in each other’s sexual lives. Hollibaugh is one of its nineteen contributors.
My Dangerous Desires (2000) gathers more than twenty years of her writing, with a new introduction and five new essays, along with conversations with other writers. It examines desire in relation to activism, class and identity, and Dorothy Allison wrote the foreword.
Brazen Femme (2002), from Chloe Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri, collects fiction, prose poetry, essays and photographs on queer femininity. Hollibaugh is among the writers it features.
The Publishing Triangle gave My Dangerous Desires its Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction in 2001. Hollibaugh also received the Woodhull Freedom Foundation’s Vicki Sexual Freedom Award in 2012, and the Publishing Triangle now presents an Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing.
Complete Bibliography
Essays and interviews: My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (2000)
Contributions to anthologies: Powers of Desire (1983)
Film: The Heart of the Matter (1994, with Gini Reticker)
Amber Hollibaugh died of complications of diabetes on October 20, 2023, at her home in Brooklyn, New York. She was 77. She is survived by her life partner, the novelist Jenifer Levin, and by stepsons Mak Levin and Van De Laurier.
Further Reading
Books in the collection that feature Hollibaugh include Del LaGrace Volcano and Ulrika Dahl’s Femmes of Power (2008), a photographic tribute to queer femininity that counts her among its subjects.