About Amber Hollibaugh

Amber L. Hollibaugh is an American writer, filmmaker and political activist, largely concerned with feminist and sexual agendas. She is a self-described lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. Her first book, My Dangerous Desires, presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh’s writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including “A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home,” “My Dangerous Desires,” and “Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism.”

Amber Hollibaugh is Senior Activist Fellow Emerita at the Barnard Center for Research on Women where she directs Queer Survival Economies (QSE). QSE addresses the intersections of sexuality, poverty, homelessness, labor, and the criminalization of survival. This project continues Hollibaugh’s long-term collaboration with BCRW as well as her critical work as an activist, sex worker, writer, and former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice. In 2015, Hollibaugh organized a public conference in collaboration with the Murphy Institute (CUNY) bringing together organizers, activists, scholars and community members to discuss overlooked and often invisible economic justice issues at the intersections of class, race, gender, immigration, non-traditional families, sexuality, and the law. The conference led to the publication “Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence” by Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss in New Labor Forum (2015). In 2016, Queer Survival Economies presented a day-long workshop at the Creating Change Conference, the annual conference sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to support change for social justice, and a plenary panel at BCRW’s 41st annual Scholar and Feminist Conference on the theme of sustainabilities. As an Emerita Fellow, Hollibaugh co-authored “Immigrants Are Welcome Here: Best Practices for Service Providers Working with Immigrants who are LGBTQ, Sex Workers, and/or HIV-Positive.”