Amber Hollibaugh Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“We gain power in our refusal to accept less than we deserve.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Gains #Accepting #Refusal

“Everyone's always told about politics you have to be practical, but I actually think that's not true, you actually have to hold to a dream... and desire is part of that dream.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Dream #Thinking #Desire

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I feel really - actually - quite terrified about the world as it now exists. The kind of sucking the world dry for a dollar seems to me to be even worse (though it was hard for me to imagine 30 years ago that it could get worse) and the idea that bling and profit over human beings is really more and more a credible idea; people don't even examine it with any kind of question: I find that really terrifying.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Years #Ideas #People

“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

“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

“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

“Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Issues #Identity #Economy

“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

“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

“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

“My father is a gypsy. He traveled in caravans and was branded by the Ku Klux Klan. You know I have a history about race in my family that has very much to do with the other things that you name about poverty, about class, about access - or lack of it.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Father #Race #Class

“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

“In some ways, the challenge of staying political is to stay a dreamer at the same time.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Political #Challenges #Dreamer

“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

“I think that white people are not seen as people with racial histories.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Thinking #White #People

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Thinking #Rights #Movement

“To take on the question of race in America and believe that you could transform this country so that it would actually be a place that was welcoming for everyone that was here, including dealing with the history of slavery and the kind of oppression this country is based on, that's an amazing moment to begin to find your own political ideals.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Country #Believe #Race

“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

“The economy is not removed from the way you live out your private life.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Way #Economy #Private Life

“I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.”
-- Amber Hollibaugh

#Dream #People #Community