For Amber

What a strange, stressful time. As I sit here, still healing from various health challenges, I feel the horror, grief and rage of the war on Gaza generating paralysis and an anxiety disorder. I also see the mass social movement emerging with the strength to win some battles. But we will also continue to lose some battles too—with legislatures, universities and police. I do think we will win the longer range war over the future of Gaza. Israel is South Africa now—irredeemable, doomed in its apartheid mode. But will we lose the climate war before we can free Gaza?

All of this makes me miss Amber Hollibaugh, icon of the queer left. We lost her in October and the world will never be the same. I wrote a brief introduction to a reprint of her classic article “Queers without Money” in the Baffler recently. Here it is below, the last thing I will post until the end of January 2024—I have both medical issues to resolve, and a writing deadline to meet, for Chaos Agent: Steve Bannon and the New American Fascism (forthcoming OUP).

This has been the hardest year for me since I had cancer in 2011—like a year-long extension of the covid lockdown. The injury, illness and isolation have been pretty brutal. But I plan to come back! And beginning by Feb. 2024 I intend to post 2x per week here—once with political commentary or reviews, and once with segments of a weird form of memoir. See you then! And for now……Amber…….

I first met Amber Hollibaugh in 1979 at a meeting of the New York City Gay Socialists Salon. She was fresh off a round of spectacularly successful organizing to defeat the Briggs Initiative in California, a referendum that would have barred gay and lesbian teachers in public schools. She was an electric presence, a high femme dyke in combat boots. I went on to work with her at Queers for Economic Justice in New York City, and on “A New Queer Agenda,” a special issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online published in 2011. Both personally and politically I came to understand Amber’s particular magic: she could combine issues and vocabularies commonly separated in our political movements, and do it with passion, eloquence, and wit.

Amber, who died in October at the age of seventy-seven, was always to the fore insisting on the centrality of race and class to queer politics. This was not an abstract position for her. She spoke and wrote specifically and concretely about poverty, immigration, police brutality and incarceration, aging and access to medical care, homelessness and the shelter system, sex work as a survival economy, transgender youth on the streets, drug use and HIV/AIDS, and more. She proceeded from personal experience, but she never stopped there; she spoke with, to, and for others whose experience she did not share as well. Amber advocated turning away from understanding queer issues as those affecting only queer people, and toward seeing all the issues of racial, gender, economic, and sexual justice as constituting the necessary agenda for queer politics. She dedicated herself to showing us how queer people are specifically affected by the hardships that afflict all exploited workers, people of color, and the poor.

Amber’s vision was even wider than this already expansive queer agenda. She was also at the center of the feminist and queer movement for sexual freedom. From the 1980s into the twenty-first century, few writers and activists have emphasized the key role of sexual joy for radical politics as persistently and powerfully as Amber Hollibaugh. For her, sexual and political desire are so intertwined that we cannot have one without the other. She was an advocate for queer homosexuals, perverts, and deviants—those whose experience of race, class, and gender oppression were intensified by the ways they lived their desires. 

Amber enjoyed a long career as an activist and organizer, a filmmaker and a writer. Her book, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, puts it all together—the life, the politics, the deeply affecting voice. Amber stood at the intersection of political movements against racial capitalism and for justice. She also took that word freedom away from the right-wing neoliberal oligarchs and handed it to the working class, poor, and marginalized. Following from the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement, she stirred together racial and economic justice with sexual freedom to issue a deeply inspirational call for a new world where we all belong.

What follows is her essay, “Queers Without Money,” which originally appeared in the Village Voice in 2001. You can hear her distinctive voice as you read, combining memoir, interviews, analysis, and exhortation. It is a prophetic voice, and it will live on.

—Lisa Duggan

Read Queers without Money in the Dec. 1, 2023 online issue of The Baffler