Amber Hollibaugh
As a Senior Activist Fellow, Amber Hollibaugh established Queer Survival Economies (QSE), a project addressing the intersections of sexuality, poverty, homelessness, labor, and the criminalization of survival. This project continued Hollibaugh’s long-term collaboration with BCRW as well as her critical work as an activist, sex worker, writer, and former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice. Hollibaugh convened a public conference in 2015 in collaboration with the Murphy Institute (CUNY) bringing together organizers, activists, scholars and community members to discuss overlooked and often invisible economic justice issues at the intersections of class, race, gender, immigration, non-traditional families, sexuality, and the law. The conference led to the publication “Queer Precarity” by Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss in New Labor Forum (2015). In 2016, Queer Survival Economies presented a day-long workshop at the Creating Change Conference, the annual conference sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to support change for social justice, and a plenary panel at BCRW’s 41st annual Scholar and Feminist Conference on the theme of sustainabilities. As an Emerita Fellow, Hollibaugh is at work developing a “best practices” toolkit for legal, health, and other service providers working with immigrants who are LGBTQ, sex workers, and/or HIV positive.