Latest Amber Hollibaugh Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If you want to be backed by corporations so that you're elected mayor, then it's going to be very problematic for you to support a living wage campaign that would shift the minimum wage to something else.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Support, Campaigns, Minimum Wage

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• In women's shelters the kind of clothes that women are given to go to job interviews are all girl clothes: little heels, little skirt. If you're gender nonconforming, you're a lesbian, you're not going to put those clothes on to go to a job interview.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Girl, Jobs, Clothes

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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."

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Mean, Impact, White

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Dream, Fighting, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• When people give up sex and give up love or they only have love in the context of tradition then I think we're missing the opportunity of saying to each other building community, building desire in community gives all of us the possibility of learning how to be who we always were terrified we'd find out we were, and then not be ashamed of it and to not have our desire and our love embedded in shame is a profound thing and it's part of what drives the movement.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sex, Giving Up, Opportunity

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• To actually be possessed or possess someone in a way that is unimaginable when you're a young person struggling about your body and whether anybody would ever want you, that's a huge world and that doesn't shift because you're fifty; it doesn't shift because you're 80. It's a vision of the possibility of claiming the right to dream and imagine an impossible place that you were never allowed to go, but you want the world to have as a possibility in the future.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Dream, Struggle, Vision

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I think social change work is some of the most extraordinary dreaming that any of us have the possibility of doing.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Dream, Thinking, Possibility

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• In some ways, the challenge of staying political is to stay a dreamer at the same time.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Political, Challenges, Dreamer

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Thinking, Practice, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We're targeted as LGBTQ people because we make people nervous around sex and we practice desire or have the possibility of practicing desire in magical and very, very profound ways. We shouldn't be giving up the possibility of articulating the claim of our body and the claim of our desire as something distinctive and erotically profound.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sex, Giving Up, Practice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• If I'm fighting for the possibility of having a kind of desire and possibility, that right now is not too likely, it gives me a different kind of engagement with the future, than if I say, "sex doesn't matter; it's private."

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sex, Fighting, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sex, Making Love, World

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Pregnancy, Reality, Office

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• For a political movement to not understand that sexuality is a profound component of both how people are oppressed and how people dream, is not to recognize the reality of political power and where it's centered.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Dream, Reality, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Erotic, Identity, Living My Life

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Lgbt, Pay, Nervous

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I think that the power of a political vision is deeply engaged with the possibility of how you can live out the liberation that you seek and part of that vision is very much about desire, about the erotic.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Thinking, Political, Erotic

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The economy is not removed from the way you live out your private life.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Way, Economy, Private Life

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• If you struggle with issues of documentation, issues of your health care, issues of whether or not you'll be punished for being open about who you are, those things affect how you can be employed or not employed, how you can get an apartment or not get an apartment, how it is that you feel free or not free.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Struggle, Issues, Documentation

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Color, Making Love, Desire

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Issues, Identity, Economy

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We're impacted by all the intersections of our identities and those then are reflected on what our choices are.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Choices, Identity, Intersections

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Do we now fight for the kind of passionate belief that I have about sexuality, about the importance of the erotic, of people actually getting to fulfill desire and not be punished because they have it? No, we're nowhere near close to that. We're dealing with an AIDS epidemic that continues out of control globally and in this country, NO, THIS IS NOT the movement that I am fighting to create. Has it succeeded in places that are very significant? Yes it has - and it would be foolish to say that those things don't matter.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Country, Fighting, Epidemics

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Moving, Years, Racism

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sorry, Military, Gay

  Source: www.truth-out.org