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 HollibaughEveryone'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 HollibaughThere'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 HollibaughFrankly, sex work and stripping is very good if you have radical politics. You can go to meetings all night long.
Amber HollibaughWe'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 HollibaughFor 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 HollibaughBeing 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