Remembering Honey Lee - The 7th Year

Honey Lee Cottrell January 16, 1946 - September 21, 2015

Lee Ray on Ocean Beach, 1970s

When I think of Honey Lee, I always see that scene from Casablanca in my mind: "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

This chapter requires my most personal disclaimers. I lived with Honey Lee for six years, and produced lesbian photography with her for almost every day of that period. When I had my first child in 1990, she became my daughter's godmother. I don't believe in God, but I have to admit I believe in Honey Lee, mythically as well as personally.

Honey Lee was my second butch girlfriend, but she was my first famous love, my first older woman lover . At the end of our first date, she dropped me off on the curb and said, "Bye--You're a nice kid." I was put out by that, but I was dutifully intimidated. Honey Lee had already been partners with a string of women who were like the Who's Who of Lesbian History. I looked up to all of them, from Melinda Gebbie, the virtuoso artist of the underground comix scene, to Tee Corinne, with whom Honey Lee had done legendary collaborations. Just before me, her lover was Amber Hollibaugh one of the architects of modern queer radical politics.

I don't know how much these lovers were influenced by Honey Lee, but I had never met anyone like her before. She was an adventurer, one of the first astronauts of lesbian eroticism, looking for women and places and circumstances that had never been seen before. 

Although she photographed every kind of person and sexuality imaginable, her most memorable portraits for me were of working-class women, people on the street, women who lived by their wits, women who the mainstream cameras never see. She took their pictures with complete empathy into their sexuality. Her models, both men and women, knew they could trust her with their sexual secrets, and she collaborated with these friends to make those ideas visually alive.

"In the 60s and early 60s," she wrote, "The ambition of the people surrounding me was to build an alternative society and then live in it...forever. The reward would be that then you wouldn't have to live out the big lie so thoroughly absorbed by the 'others.' Our secret hope was that the 'others' would see the errors of their ways and come over to our side. 

"I think they have seen the error, but sadly they haven't migrated to our side so...now we have been invited to show our wares to them. I am skeptical. You could say that I'm not ambitious, but to me the notion of ambition is a distortion of my original intention. My work, and I believe this is true of other lesbian photographers, is tied to the context of the community that it has emerged from. Most of my work is a point-for-point retaliation for damages done to me. The problem is that the Art Establishment won't allow such vindictiveness to be certified as true art. Especially when it is done so blatantly, blatancy of course being a source of great pride to us.”

Rachel and Elexis, 1985

Honey Lee has always been in love with not only blatancy, but beauty; her photography is melodic that way . I used to tease her because every time she would be given some anti-romantic, shocking subject, she would come back with the taboo content delivered in an absolutely classic style: poignant sado-masochism, dildos as still life, conceptual beaver shots. She was incorrigible at mixing races: the fine art and the pornographic.

"If you're photographing your tribe from the inside out, she says, "to use as publicity for the outside world - then I want the outside world to see something that is not typically included in their label of queerness. Many of my photographs have this lovely quality ... I don't know if it's a desire to be seen more positively, but something like that, some of the reasons have washed away, because a lot of the hard-edged images of queers these days are just repelling.”

Honey Lee was forever inspired and amused by making lesbian eroticism out of her fine art and fashion photography inspirations-- as in the "Helmut Newton" scene in a lesbian leather tailor's studio, a Bruce Springsteen version of dildos, "Born In the USA", the famous Bulldagger centerfold. 

"The context that I created for the Bulldagger self-portrait was lifted from the Playboy centerfold," she writes. "The response to that picture was amplified by the context of presentation in a lesbian sex magazine. The variety of responses was truly astounding.