Amber Hollibaugh is a gypsy girl, incest survivor, ex-hooker, civil rights protester, early feminist, leftist organizer, communist sympathizer activist, high-femme lesbian.
Her life has had more dizzying twists and turns than the two-lane roadway that leads up Pike’s Peak. Indeed, following her life story could produce a bad case of whiplash.
Hollibaugh’s new book, “My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home” (Duke University Press, $17.95), is her way of explaining all the contradictions in her life.
In this collection of essays and interviews, she recounts her days as a union organizer who turned tricks on the side. Later, she was a feminist by day, a stripper by night. She was “poor white trash” in the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was mostly middle class. She was a “femme” lesbian attracted to butch women in the gay rights movement, which had cast aside sexual roles.
To call Hollibaugh an iconoclast is an understatement. She is an outcast among outcasts.
“I’ve lived not just double lives but multiple lives,” she said, during a recent stopover in Chicago. “I’ve lived in a number of worlds that didn’t tolerate each other. I was the bridge.
“That’s been tough, because I could never give up any part of me,” she said. For Hollibaugh, 54, her life has always been about being true to her own desires, even if they were unaccepted by most of society. And that lack of acceptance has given her a savvy, outsider’s appraisal of all the many movements she has joined.
She was born the child of a gypsy father and poor Irish mother, living in poverty in southern California.
Her dark-skinned father was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, the initials KKK branded into his skin. He was a mechanic and had numerous affairs with the women in their small town. He also molested his daughter.
Her mother was a bright, unskilled, stifled woman who, in the pre-feminist era, raged at everyone who came near. She regularly beat her daughter.
To protect herself, Hollibaugh hid in her family’s basement and dreamed that her family was “normal” and that she could be “safe,” she said.
Even while her mother was abusing her, she also was looking for ways to help Hollibaugh out of the trailer park. While reading a copy of Vogue magazine in a doctor’s waiting room, her mother spotted a list of boarding schools. She wrote to each one about scholarship programs.
Hollibaugh was accepted into a “low achiever-high IQ” private school in Lugano, Switzerland. It was her ticket out, but the transition was not without pain.
“To go that far that quickly, I was miserable,” she said. “It was not romantic or fabulous.”
A poor kid among the children of ambassadors and millionaires, Hollibaugh approached a sympathetic history teacher. He put a copy of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” in her hands.
“It was a transforming moment,” she said. “I realized the world was organized a certain way, so that some people could go places and some could not.”
She graduated without knowing what to do next, so she looked up her history teacher’s family in the U.S.; they were selling hot dogs in New London, Conn., and she went to work for them.
It was 1964 and the civil rights movement was coming to life.
“The movement gave me a way to build a life, not just return to the trailer court,” she said. “I think escapes are so profoundly unexpected. They’re gifts–getting away from a place most people never leave.”
Hollibaugh called it “a remarkable time” to be involved in social change. “It was a time of real vision and hope to change America,” she said. “People were willing to risk everything to have a different relationship to power–to be able to vote, just to walk down the middle of the sidewalk.”
Later, she drifted into protests against the Vietnam War, but found herself an outsider once again; other protesters were college-educated and she had grown up in a home where the only reading material was Popular Mechanics and Family Circle.
“I slept with men on the Left just to overhear their conversations about Marx and the foundations of capital,” she writes in her book. “Sex was my tuition, and I paid it willingly.”
She began attending all-day seminars, teach-ins, debates, as well as protests. She had to face the question of how to pay the rent and buy food for herself.
She fell back on Hawaiian dancing, which she had learned as a child. For Hollibaugh, who is a statuesque, 6-foot-tall blond, the transition to exotic dancing came easily. Then stripping. Then prostitution. They were merely ways to pay the bills.
Sex work itself was not as hard as dealing with the attitudes surrounding it, Hollibaugh says. She has called on the women’s movement to embrace prostitutes and help them organize for better working conditions, pay and benefits. The women’s movement has responded mainly by shunning women who make their living as prostitutes, she adds.
When it comes to being shunned, Hollibaugh has had plenty of experience. An early feminist, she began her first lesbian relationship in 1967. But the women’s movement hated lesbians, she says.
“I had to be an underground lesbian,” she says. “It wasn’t pretty.
“It’s been difficult to be marginal within my own movement,” she said.
She hated herself for being gay.
“I knew I couldn’t change it. I knew I wasn’t straight, I was gay, but I didn’t like it,” she writes.As if being gay didn’t make life difficult enough, Hollibaugh had to take the role of misfit one step farther. She has always been open about her identity as a “femme” lesbian; she enjoys dressing in high heels, fish-net stockings and floor-length satin sheaths, while desiring women who are “butch,” she says.
It was choosing to be femme that caused her the most pain, she writes in her book.
It was this desire that brought on the loudest ridicule, the angriest name-calling–and this time from lesbians and gays, the very folks who were supposed to be her community. She was accused of “parroting heterosexuality” because she was into “traditional male and female roles.”
This conflict drove Hollibaugh to attempt suicide in 1978. After she took part in the Gay Pride March in San Francisco, she rented a motel room, took a combination of drugs, cut her wrists and passed out.
A motel maid found her the next morning.
“To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t kill me,” she writes.
In the early 1980s, she moved to New York and got caught up in the movement to build AIDS awareness, becoming the founding director of the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
She lives in the city’s East Village with her partner and two children adopted from Cambodia.
In the early ’90s, something happened that Hollibaugh thought she would never live to see: New York magazine published a cover story with the headline “The New Lesbian Chic.”
In 1994, her film “The Heart of the Matter,” about women’s sexuality and AIDS, won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. It went on to be part of the PBS series “P.O.V.”
Hollibaugh bemoans the fact that in her eyes the gay liberation movement has been co-opted. What was once a flamboyant group, with drag queens and leather communities, has been transformed, she says, into “a movement that chooses only those representatives who may sit politely in the president’s office.”
But even as the gay movement adopts a more mainstream image, it is impossible to imagine Hollibaugh ever joining their ranks.
As she writes at the end of her book, “This is what I want: To be my own idiom and my own voice.”
