A look into the life of long time activist Amber Halloway

Amber Halloway became an activist as a 15 year old. Growing up as a poor girl in California, Amber was given a scholarship to attend a school of ruling class students in Switzerland. After nearly flunking out, she joined her professor and his family as members of the communist party and spent time alongside Lebanese communists doing activist work. Amber, a woman with a very impressive resume of different activist work, now turns her attention to a the LGBT community. This is her talk at the Sager Symposium on aging for LGBT elders and the importance of paying attention to all demographics when fighting for social change. As she says, "I'm interested in movement for social change through a lifetime, not generational or situational change."

See her video below or at this link: http://www.youtube.com/user/SagerSymposium#p/u/4/G89zXtIT58k



Amber begins by talking how absent LGBT aging is from conversation, both in the context of social justice and in terms of "queer issues". She makes an interesting point that aging is not considered an important political issue in the dialogue of change because aging is not look at as a "queer issue." The limits of identity politics for queer people means that when something that is not identified as queer becomes an issue, the activist community has problems figuring out how to fight for it, no matter how "profoundly impactful" they are.

In terms of what is seen as an LGBT issue, marriage is generally on the top of the list, whereas universal health care and aging often do not make the cut. Aging is looked at as the process of creating a dependent, less vital, less important community. Some people when thinking of LGBT elders have even said, "we don't have any of those".

But as America's baby boomer generation is getting old, the demographic of the country is going to change. In other words, there is about to be a huge constituency here that we are entirely unprepared for. And this is not just people in their 50s, but people in their 80s who currently are not even being considered. As Amber says, "America is becoming a country of old people" and the problem is we haven't figured out how to deal with them yet.

But she doesn't give up. As she says, "I'm an activist because the world isn't what I want it to be." Don't expect her to stop fighting any time soon.