March–April 2024 9 she plunged into the fight against it. She worked for the NYC Commission on Human Rights combatting AIDS discrimination and for Gay Men’s Health Crisis, where she created the first lesbian AIDS project. She was a staffer at the National LGBTQTask Force. She advanced queer aging issues at Chicago’s Howard Brown Health Center. For years, she directed Queers for Economic Justice—one of the few LGBT organizations that recognized the impact of class oppression on the lives of many queer people. Amber always managed in her activism to “say out loud what everyone had agreed not to notice.” She constantly called for a “new revolution” that included the sexual desires that so many experience with shame and feel forced to keep secret. She insisted that we embrace “our most dangerous desires” and “fight for a world that values human sexual possibility without extracting a terrible human price.” She strove “to create a movement willing to live the politics of sexual danger in order to create a culture of human hope.” I, and so many others, will never forget her bold, daring, and inspiring work and the smile, laughter, and hugs that kept spirits high even in times that seemed desperate. Rest in power, Amber Hollibaugh. John D’Emilio, author of Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives, is professor of history at the Univ. of Illinois, Chicago. Amber worked in Chicago. But mostly it was a long-distance relationship, connecting at national conferences like Creating Change and on my trips to my hometown of New York. Through these decades, our conversation never ended. That Saturday in San Francisco, a major topic was the Briggs Initiative which, the year before, had launched the biggest organizing campaign that queer folks had seen. Amber described making her way through the small communities of northern California and the Central Valley, engaging in conversation with countless individuals who had never met a lesbian before. For this guy who had lived his whole life in NY and had a large queer community around him, I was awed by the courage of this remarkable dyke. We discussed many other things as well, topics that we never stopped talking about. We talked about the state of the left in our ever-more conservative political environment; about our movement’s evolution from lesbian and gay intoLGBTQand the tendency toward respectability that drove us both crazy; about the increasingly conservative sexual politics of what once was a liberation movement; and about the class and racial boundaries that many movement organizations refused to acknowledge. Through all these years, Amber remained a bold and tireless activist, translating talk into working for social justice. Arriving in New York just as AIDS began devastating our community, Amber Hollibaugh. Courtesy Nat’l LGBTQTask Force. “ vention of poetic in d Trojan Hoar heart-catching iceless, Plain Sight pr is a t d.” s . . . DAVID BERGMAN PLAIN SIGHT new VAMP UNTIL READY james magruder ve the world andmo ft of grace able to lif e acts these poems ar ve t o o poet c on available fro passager books & amaz mp s| age $18 er| y ft cov 106 p | poetr so david bergman Award winner Lambda Book A and G&LR Poetry Editor from
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