Sex radical Amber L. Hollibaugh may be best known for the classic "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With," the edited transcript of a taped 1979 conversation on butch/femme desire between Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga. This influential article, steeped in the lesbian feminist lingo of the 1970s, still reads almost as a confession, in which socially and economically disadvantaged women--both ardent feminists and one of them an ex-hooker--nervously admit to each other the polarity of their sexual needs. This article showcases the great strengths of Hollibaugh's work: courage and insistence on the truth. The most moving essay in My Dangerous Desires, which covers work of the past two decades, is a memoir and meditation on aging called "Femme Fables" (a collection of three shorter pieces from Hollibaugh's column in the New York Native in the early 1980s), in which she recalls returning to her working-class home after a year away at an upper-class boarding school. She had brought back a suitcase of books, to which her parents responded with awe and respect. One day she came home to find her mother sitting on her bed, crying, surrounded by these open books, unable to understand them. Years later, Hollibaugh admits: This is a pain I cannot avoid each time I sit at my typewriter or assemble my office. The ghost of her narrowed options and all the dreams she had to defer to me, the confusions and bitter separation between us, are shapes which hang in my house now and live with me. In order to give me a chance, my parents had to create a child they did not understand; they had to endure my shame of them. The pride we carry about each other is surrounded by a sadness none of us can dissolve. While some of the political debates that inspired these pieces are happily out of date, this remains a rich and evocative collection, offering bulletins from the battlefields of the feminist sex wars. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
It's not every day you meet a self-identified "lesbian sex radical ex-hooker incest survivor rural gypsy working-class poor white trash high femme dyke" who has founded a major AIDS prevention program, won an award at Sundance, organized unions and written for the Socialist Review. In this stunning collection of essays and interviews, Hollibaugh describes herself as having led a "double life"Dsavvy union organizer by day, stripper and sex worker by nightDbut the truth is that she's led multiple lives. Painfully excluded from the very movements she's helped to build, Hollibaugh repeatedly disguises herself, whether hiding her role as a prostitute (knowing it would alienate other feminists) or pretending to be a slumming college dropout (like other antiwar activists). These complicated negotiations contribute to her fresh perspective on a variety of issues. She sharply critiques what she sees as feminism's unproductive refusal to understand prostitution's class basis, contending that sex work is work, labor that can be more economically viable or safer than working in a dry cleaning factory or sweatshop. Hollibaugh's writing is sharp and glittering. Take her dead-on description of the barter system she exploits with sexist intellectuals: "I slept with men on the Left just to overhear their conversations about Marx and the foundations of capital... Sex was my tuition, and I paid it willingly." This provocative, challenging collection could become a feminist classic. (Nov. 8) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 f earlessly 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 Cherr￯﾿ﾽe 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.AUTHOR BIO
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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Laura Flanders - Laura Flanders, The Progressive

￯﾿ﾽLike the discoverer of longitude, Hollibaugh has given new coordinates to a whole generation of activists who are trying to find themselves and their way. She￯﾿ﾽs added contours to the topography of sexual politics. With any luck, the benefits won￯﾿ﾽt be felt by the queer world alone.￯﾿ﾽ

Nancy Traver - Nancy Traver, Chicago Tribune

￯﾿ﾽ[Hollibaugh￯﾿ﾽs] life has had more dizzying twists and turns than the two land roadway that leads up Pike￯﾿ﾽs Peak. Indeed, following her life story could produce a bad case of whiplash. [Her] new book is her way of explaining all the contradictions in her life.￯﾿ﾽ

Heather Findlay - Heather Findlay, Girlfriends

￯﾿ﾽThis memoir-cum-collected-works is a seductive tour through Hollibaugh￯﾿ﾽs thirty years as an activist, lover, and political theorist. It is also a biting critique of gay politics today.￯﾿ﾽ

Meryl Altman - Meryl Altman, The Women￯﾿ﾽs Review of Books

￯﾿ﾽ[Hollibaugh￯﾿ﾽs] willingness to take her own body, its desires and scars, as her primary text, to risk turning herself into spectacle in order to claim a voice, stands at the head of this collection. . . . That most of the book￯﾿ﾽs pieces were written for occasions does not make it less satisfying; just the opposite￯﾿ﾽyou have the sense that each was written because it was something somebody needed to hear at that moment. . . . This book could easily have been a pathology witten from the outside￯﾿ﾽor from the inside. It is only sheer will and good writing that resists an easy coherence, that insists on leaving the fragment fragmentary, glowing with bitter edges. . . . Amber Hollibaugh offers more than history here. She offers a method.￯﾿ﾽ

The Advocate

￯﾿ﾽ[Hollibaugh￯﾿ﾽs] essays, spanning 20 years, read like a radical, captivating autobiography.￯﾿ﾽRead all 14 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Amber Hollibaugh is a brilliant activist intellectual from trailer park America.Her particular queer working-class life has taught her the skills, risks and pleasures of radically changing society-and social movements-from their despised edges. We're lucky she hasn't kept this angerous knowledge a secret. For years her written and spoken words have made history. Now we have them all in a book that belongs in the toolbox of every working person. Pick it up and put it to work.--Allan B￯﾿ﾽrub￯﾿ﾽ — Allan Berube