My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home

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Duke University Press, 2000 - Social Science - 277 pages
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. 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."
In looking at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire or how sexuality can be intimately tied to one's class identity, Hollibaugh fiercely and fearlessly analyzes her own political development as a response to her unique personal history. She explores the concept of labeling and the associated issues of categories such as butch or femme, transgender, bisexual, top or bottom, drag queen, b-girl, or drag king. The volume includes conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and CherrĂ­e Moraga. From the groundbreaking article "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With" to the radical "Sex Work Notes: Some Tensions of a Former Whore and a Practicing Feminist," Hollibaugh charges ahead to describe her reality, never flinching from the truth. Dorothy Allison's moving foreword pays tribute to a life lived in struggle by a working-class lesbian who, like herself, refuses to suppress her dangerous desires.
Having informed many of the debates that have become central to gay and lesbian activism, Hollibaugh's work challenges her readers to speak, write, and record their desires--especially, perhaps, the most dangerous of them--"in order for us all to survive."
 

Selected pages

Contents

Introduction
1
A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home 1999
12
The Defeat of the Briggs Initiative and Beyond 1979
43
What Were Rollin around in Bed With 19791980
62
Radical Hope in Passion and Danger 1983
85
The Right to Rebel 1979
104
A Conversation on Sexuality and Feminism 1981
118
Another Place to Breathe 1998
138
Some Tensions of a Former Whore and a Practicing Feminist 1999
181
Facing Our Risks for HIV in the Middle of an Epidemic 1992
187
Transmission Transmission Wheres the Transmission? 1994
192
Bravery and Fear in the Construction of a Lesbian Geography of Risk 1999
203
Sexuality Labor and the New Trade Unionism 2000
219
Gender Warriors 1997
239
Falling in Love with Stone Butches Passing Women and Girls Who Are Guys Who Catch My Eye 2000
253
Publication Notes
271

Femme Fables 19831984
161
Sympathy of the Blood 1984
173
Strategies for Freedom 1993
178

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About the author (2000)

Amber Hollibaugh has been a political activist for over thirty years. The documentary film she coproduced and directed, The Heart of the Matter, won the Freedom of Expression award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. Among her health education work, she founded and directed the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, for which she won the Dr. Susan M. Love Award for Achievement in Women's Health. She has written for, among others, The Nation, Socialist Review, NY Native, and the Village Voice. My Dangerous Desires is her first book.

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