Amber L. Hollibaugh (born 1946) is an American writer, filmmaker and political activist, largely concerned with feminist and sexual agendas.
Sex may be private in the way that you make love, but it's not private in the context of the world we live in.
In some ways, the challenge of staying political is to stay a dreamer at the same time.
No political movement can avoid the reality of desire in its midst. Every office building is full of the illicit affairs, the unwanted pregnancies, the crises that happen in human lives.
I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.
Everyone's always told about politics you have to be practical, but I actually think that's not true, you actually have to hold to a dream. . . and desire is part of that dream.
I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.
I feel really - actually - quite terrified about the world as it now exists. The kind of sucking the world dry for a dollar seems to me to be even worse (though it was hard for me to imagine 30 years ago that it could get worse) and the idea that bling and profit over human beings is really more and more a credible idea; people don't even examine it with any kind of question: I find that really terrifying.
Is it different to come out now than it was to come out thirty-five years ago? Sometimes. But if you come out now and you come from poverty and you come from racism, you come from the terror of communities that are immigrant communities or communities where you're already a moving target because of who you are, this is not a place where it's any easier to be LGBT even if there's a community center in every single borough.
There's a profound price to the incorrect assumption that LGBTQ movements are white, male and wealthy. That is not a good thing to be dealing with if you're in the midst of a conversation where the recession profoundly impacts you at the same time because people say well, "Really? What's your issue? I mean you all have money. You all have access. "
I think social change work is some of the most extraordinary dreaming that any of us have the possibility of doing.
If you can't do anything but fight, so every single solitary thing, every single solitary day, then the privilege of dreaming becomes something that only a few people have.
I think that white people are not seen as people with racial histories.
Being respectful of extraordinary work that has happened in the last thirty-five years is not the same thing as it reflecting my values. I'm not sorry that gays can now enter the military and I'm not sorry that we can marry, but frankly I come from a moment in time, a radical vision in time that never made marriage or the military my criteria of success.
I'm a high femme lesbian who loves butch women. That erotic identity has an enormous amount to do with how I live my life, who I live my life with and what it is we can or can't do.
I didn't come out and pay a really painful price often, to be LGBT, to not claim my sexuality at the same time. It's not all right with me to not talk about it so I don't make anybody nervous.
In a different moment, in the 60s and 70s, I did believe we were going to succeed - that we were going to create a revolution, that America was going to be a completely transformed nation state and that there would be an amazingly different set of beliefs; that this country would reflect. And I thought that that was the fulfillment of the American democratic dream and I believed in it passionately.
If you're a person with resources who is LGBT, you may have some problems with that - but, frankly, you'll probably have an apartment. If you're poor, if you're transgender, if you're a person of color, if you're HIV positive and you're homeless, the ability to act on desire, the ability to be safely somewhere to make love with anybody that you want to make love with is unlikely.
We gain power in our refusal to accept less than we deserve.
I was a commie and I fought about Marxism and class and race and it informed everything I did.
I think desire gives us - imagination - as well as actually often we pay a terrible price for it. Women are punished around their sexuality and perceived to be immoral if they practice a certain kind of promiscuous sexuality. It's a very different thing still if you're a guy, if you're a woman and you're straight.