My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Series Q)

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While some of the political debates that inspired these pieces are happily out of date, this remains a rich and evocative collection, offering bulletins from the battlefields of the feminist sex wars.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