San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HOLLIBAUGH
her partner, author Jennifer Levin. The cause of death was complications related to Type 1 diabetes, which she’d gotten in her late 40s, Levin said. She was 77.
“Amber was entirely passionate about everything in her life, whether it was politics, sex or what kind of beans she used in her chili, and she made good chili,” Levin said. “Her entire life was about the integration of sexuality into sociopolitical change and action.”
Hollibaugh had been active in the New York LGBTQ political scene for four decades, compared with one decade in San Francisco. But that decade was the 1970s, when every small victory and advancement in gay liberation was crucial to everything that came after. According to Ammiano, Hollibaugh was crucial in bridging the gap between the misogyny of some gay men and the separatism of some lesbian women. Back then it was a fractured community.
“She had an ability to see humanity in individuals,” Ammiano said. “When it came to the differences in philosophies of the various elements in the movement, she was empathetic and nonjudgmental, and always put the emphasis on moving forward.”
Amber Lynn Hollibaugh was born June 20, 1946, in Bakersfield. Her father, Ace Hollibaugh, was descended from a line of Roma, and her mother, Margaret McCune, was Irish American. Their circumstances were poor and they mostly lived in trailer parks, moving around the farm areas of the Central Valley. Though an underachiever in school due to her family’s chaotic home life, she was able to qualify for a scholarship to spend one year at the American School in Lausanne, Switzerland, when she was 15.
“Amber was a victim of incest, which she wrote about in her memoir,” Levin said, “and she left home as soon as she could, at age 16 or 17.” She drifted south for the Civil Rights Movement and supported herself as an exotic dancer and sex worker in Las Vegas and elsewhere. She made it to San Francisco in 1972 and became a member of the collective that owned and operated Modern Times, a Castro bookstore with a strong feminist and gay rights orientation.
“Amber contributed richly to that orientation and taught us all a great deal about sex-positive feminism,” said Pam Rosenthal, a member of the collective.
John D’Emilio, a retired LGBTQ historian and scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago, met Hollibaugh during formation of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project in the summer of 1979 and stayed close to her for the next 40 years.
“We saw each other at activist conferences, like Creating Change, where she’d be a speaker at various panels,” D’Emilio said. Once, in the summer after the White Night riots, Hollibaugh addressed the topic of police relations with the LGBTQ community at a packed San Francisco auditorium.
“The title of the event was ‘spontaneous combustion,’ and Amber spoke with such passion about her experience with police and the gay community that you thought the audience was going to explode in spontaneous combustion,”
D’Emilio said. “She had the capacity to directly engage and draw in her audience. If Amber was addressing outrage, the audience would feel outrage.”
During her 40 years in New York, Hollibaugh was a founding member of Queers for Economic Justice and worked for the New York Commission on Human Rights, AIDS Division, and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, where she was founding director of the Lesbian AIDS Project, to advocate for women who had gotten AIDS through sexual activity and drug use, an oftenoverlooked population during the AIDS crisis. She later worked for SAGE, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ elders in New York.
“She was larger than life,” Levin said, then reconsidered her words. “Actually, she was just the way life-size should be.”
In 2018, Hollibaugh was given the David R. Kessler Award, presented by the Center for LGBTQ Studies at City University of New York. In her remarks, she expressed some themes in which she found comfort as her health started to fail.
“You need to dream and you need to hope and you need to imagine, before you can build something,’’ she’d often say. ‘No political movement or economic analysis must ever diminish or disparage the need for human desire.’’