Remembering Queer Femme Author Amber Hollibaugh
By Sassafras Lowrey
On October 20th femme icon, social justice activist, author, and filmmaker Amber Hollibaugh passed away at the age of 77. Amber’s life work focused on queer rights, feminism, and sexual freedom all through an intersectional lens of liberation with a special focus on socioeconomic class. Over the years Amber worked in a variety of leadership positions with some of the largest and best-known LGBTQ+ rights organizations including Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), Howard Brown Health in Chicago, the NYC Commission on Human Rights, and Barnard Center for Research on Women. To anyone who met her Amber was a force, always saying truth even when it was uncomfortable and pushing to create the most inclusive communities possible.
Queer Femme Author:
For queer femmes, especially femmes of specific generations Amber Hollibaugh’s life, work, and her collection of essays “Our Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home” wasn’t so much a roadmap, but a rallying cry to outsider femmes grappling with identity, body, belonging, culture, community, class, and where they belong. I remember buying a used copy (the same copy I still have) of this book in the early 2000s from my local independent bookstore and read it cover to cover. Femme to many of us is an inclusive and expansive term. In the book she wrote:
“the others I’ve most looked to, in order to understand and construct my own identity, have been drag queens. Drag queens are familiar to me in the way I feel about my own sense of femininity, and drag queens often have a physical effect very similar to mine when they enter a room. Being femme, for me, is a conscious way to be female- it does not mean merely accepting and existing within the preconstructed boundaries of “natural” womanhood. Daily I construct it and remove it, live it totally, betray it, reconstruct it from dust and fear, find it again.”
As femmes we found ourselves in these pages and are inspired to write about our own genders, bodies, and desires.
In her introduction to the collection, Amber wrote
“Each of us creates the boundaries of our own myths and legends, our own truths, and faulty actualities. Each of us remembers selectively and with ragged difficulty. Even the events that have fundamentally marked us lose their immediate power and detail as we age and our memories can often be, they are also resilient and insistent, demanding that we not forget the textures, shapes, and meanings of our authentic and indispensable selves.”
This book tells the intersectional story of one femme’s survival, finding herself and identities, building her own life, home, family, and community. It also speaks more broadly to community mobilization and connection. Amber’s bio reads
“Amber L. Hollibaugh is a 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.”
Amber never shied away from any part of her history. She was brazen, and open. She was not afraid of the truth and telling her story even if it made people uncomfortable. She also was always ready to uplift queer lives explaining
“I believe that gay people are different, uniquely gifted with the insights and brilliance that stepping outside the heterosexual norm has given us. That is exactly the source of our power.”
Amber wrote vividly and candidly about her queer feminist politics, her experience growing up in a trailer park, leaving home as a teenager, supporting herself as a sex worker and finding power, agency, and desire as a high femme. A lover of butches and butch/femme relationships as subversive, sexy playgrounds of desire. Amber wrote:
“It was there in butch gender-fuck, that I could see my own femme drag queen self. Bigger than life, turning gendered bodies inside out, shooting them through with the ironies that have always contradicted biology, the dreamed-about spheres of the possible.”
Meeting Amber:
I met Amber for the first time in 2009. It was a year before my first book was released, and I was just starting to tour to colleges facilitating queer writing workshops and doing readings. Amber and I were both brought to a college in Pennsylvania as part of a campus queer week. I got to hear her read, she heard me read. I was enthralled by Amber. I’ve had a long and strange gender journey and haven’t always felt hailed or like I belonged in femme spaces, in fact I’ve usually felt the opposite but hearing Amber read, I knew I was in the company of greatness. Because I’ve used the same email address for over fifteen years of my professional life, I was able to go back through my email and see that after we both left the gig, I emailed her:
“I feel like intergenerational community is something missing for so many, but especially as femmes. When you were talking about wearing a negligee being a different experience at different ages, and wishing there had been older femmes in your life to talk about those experiences was so poignant and something that I really believe is such a universal experience for femmes.”
She wrote me back a generous response about how much she appreciated my reading as well. We saw each other again briefly that year when our paths crossed at the Creating Change conference where we had both been attending as part of the Sex Liberation Track presenters and I loved seeing elder femmes owing their sexuality.
A year later our paths crossed again through our coalition work with LGBTQ nonprofits in New York. At this time Amber amongst many other projects was the executive director of the social justice focused nonprofit organization Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ). QEJ advocated for homeless queer people of all ages, and poor people continuing to push the need to look at all social justices internationally and prioritize access to community for low-income LGBTQ+ people. At the time my day job was working as the program coordinator for a very small LGBTQ+ center in an outer borough. I was shocked to see her across conference room tables talking about the city budget and advocacy efforts to increase quality of life for LGBTQ people across the city. She gave me one of her knowing smiles when she saw me come into the room trying very hard to look like I knew what I was doing, like I belonged in these meetings my femme version of business casual dress was a bit frayed, tattered and just slightly too punk. Amber was confident and in command of every room she entered. We attended these coalition meetings together along with dozens of other NYC nonprofit professionals seldom interacting until one day she reached out to my personal email in response to news that there had been a major funding cut that impacted my job. She wrote:
“Hey Doll,
Are you okay with [REDACTING the nonprofit I worked for] in trouble?
Amber”
As it turns out, I was both okay, and not okay. After I lost consciousness that this femme author whose work, I so admired knew my name, remembered me, and had sent me a literal email I responded:
“Hey Amber,
Thanks so much for remembering I was out there [the organization I worked for was in an outer borough] and checking in on me. No, I got laid off three weeks ago — thankfully collecting unemployment and looking for a new job.
xoxo
Sassafras”
I share this exchange because I feel like it exemplifies who Amber was as a person, and a community organizer. We didn’t know each other well, casual acquaintances at best and yet Amber took the time to find my email and reached out upon hearing I likely would have lost my job when the center lost their funding. Amber genuinely cared. I awkwardly followed up with another email asking if we could get coffee (since I was newly unemployed and had a lot of time). She invited me to have coffee with her at the QEJ. I remember being terrified about what dress to wear to sit and talk with a femme I so admired! We met at her office, and she immediately put me at ease. Less than a month later I was facilitating a new program at QEJ we called “Shelter Stories” where I facilitated a weekly writing group of adult queer people living in the NYC shelter system. Each week shelter residents would come to QEJ, eat pizza, and write their stories. Unfortunately, the funding to allow QEJ and I to continue the program never panned out, but I’ll never forget the opportunity I had to collaborate with Amber.
Remembering Amber’s Legacy:
When I learned that Amber had passed my first thought was that our world was now a little less glittery. I feel so queerly blessed to have come of age with so many queer elders, truth teller activists who were not afraid to be who they were even when it was not socially acceptable. I feel honored to have been able to learn from queer elders, femme leaders who not only were literally part of building the modern LGBTQ+ rights and social justice movements we know today, but also were their complete and authentic selves. Late in her book Amber writes about building connection with other femmes, about the intimacies of community.
“Across generations and genders, through differences in color and class, I have listened with ongoing fascination and respect to other femmes’ stories and survival strategies. I’ve been honored by the gifts of those tales, and I’ve been challenged by these women in ways that no one else has ever managed to do.”
May we all, especially those of us of all genders who find a home in queered femininity continue to connect, to tell our stories, and uplift each other. Perhaps this is one small way we can continue to honor Amber Hollibaugh’s legacy.
About the Author
Sassafras Lowrey’s novels and nonfiction books have been honored by organizations ranging from the American Library Association to the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Dog Writers Association of America. Sassafras’ work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, and numerous other newspapers and magazines. Sassafras has taught queer writing courses and workshops at LitReactor, the NYC Center For Fiction and at colleges, conferences, and LGBTQ youth centers across the country. You can find more of Sassafaras’ written works, including an edited collection exploring LGBTQ+ youth homelessness entitled Kicked Out, at www.SassafrasLowrey.com.
