LIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF SEX.

• Author: Flanders, Laura

Amber Hollibaugh kicked off her book tour last fall at a large Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan. The polite, male store manager who introduced her to the crowd read the book's title with care: "Ms. Hollibaugh will be reading from her first book, My Dangerous Desires, A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home." Characteristically, Hollibaugh laughed, tossed her long, peroxide-blond hair out of her eyes, smiled a crooked smile, then raised her voice above the classical aria that was playing just then on the store's in-house loudspeaker system.

"I have lived on the wrong side of sex since birth," she began. "This is both who I am and who I was meant to be, though it isn't all there is. I grew up a mixed-race, white-trash girl in a country that considered me dangerous, corrupt, fascinating, exotic. I responded to the challenge by becoming that alarming, hazardous, sexually disruptive woman."

By the time she got around to describing the dangerous desires of the title, the people in Barnes & Noble were no longer buying or browsing, and someone had shut off the aria. Hollibaugh's desires rang through the store like a fire alarm--"a woman's relentless mouth and a cock deep inside my body"--and the words brought shoppers flocking to see the pervert at their store.

The shoppers came "lemming-like," says Katy Taylor, a longtime Hollibaugh friend and ally who was there. Then they stood captivated--captured watching her speak. "You put all the parts together--incest survivor, gypsy, dyke--and it's not supposed to add up to what Amber is: beautiful, articulate, strong, alive."

For more than three decades, Hollibaugh has been active in the movements for civil rights, labor, women, people with AIDS, and lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender persons. Along with her activist credentials, she's an award-winning filmmaker and a powerful essayist for, among others, Socialist Review, The New York Native, Outweek, and The Village Voice. Her weapons are surprise and honesty: She says what you don't expect, in a way you don't expect, about tricky things activists prefer to sidestep, like sex.

"I live in a world that makes wanting sex, actualizing and realizing desire, a thing of danger," she writes at the end of My Dangerous Desires. "But this is what I want: to fight for a world which values human sexual possibility without extracting a terrible price. To battle human greed and human fear in any of its forms. To create a movement willing to live the politics of sexual danger in order to create a culture of human hope."

If lesbian know-how had ever been seriously valued instead of just temporarily chic, Hollibaugh would be a household name (at least in progressive neighborhoods). As Lisa Duggan, professor of American Studies at New York University, has...