3 Lesbian Artists Who Changed It All
The Female Gaze Revolution began in the early 1970s— Tee Corinne, Honey Lee Cottrell, and Patrick Califia
I’m working in my archives at Cornell Library, writing line item descriptions of each photograph, manuscript, or piece of ephemera. I’m working with Human Sexuality Library curator Brenda Marston, Senior Manuscript Processor Eirva Diamessis, and archive assistant Davis Ouriel.
I want researchers to be able to know what myself and the On Our Backs artists were up to, long after we’re gone.
Here’s a glimpse of what I’ve been working on. I’ll be teaching and offering public lectures in Ithaca through May 12.
In 1975, three friends in San Francisco’s lesbian community took up their cameras and pens, and changed how dykes saw themselves forever. —How women were photographed. —The beginning of female portrait subjectivity.
They were radical educators as well as artists. While fielding questions on the San Francisco Sex Information hotline by day, Tee Corinne, Honey Lee Cottrell, and Patrick Califia (Pat in those days) spent the rest of their time creating images that no publisher would touch— yet now reside in our Human Sexuality Archive as revolutionary artifacts.
As I catalog each photograph and manuscript, I'm preserving not only images but a moment when everything about lesbian visual identity was being invented from scratch.
I first met Honey Lee Cottrell in 1981. We would become lovers, and then family, for the rest of our lives. I became friends with Tee, and with Patrick, both my seniors, at the same time. All three were mentors, and then, my contemporaries.
I couldn't have known that one day I’d be cataloging Honey Lee and Tee’s photographs at Cornell’s Rare and Manuscript Library. Even so, I took one look at their work, even at 23 years old, and I knew, “this is a legacy.” I knew how good they were. I was bewildered, (then pissed) that Robert Mapplethorpe was ascendant, but no one outside the insider dyke diaspora knew my friend’s names. The closet was slammed shut on lesbian art.
Now, as I write descriptions of each image, I'm struck by how three lesbian artists—Cottrell, Corinne, and Califia—crafted a new visual language from a Webster Street apartment in the Fillmore. Their work deserves to be remembered long after we're gone.
Below, a black and white solarized print by the artist Tee Corinne (TC) which she eventually published in her legendary photography portfolio, Yantras of WomanLove.
Yantras was published by Naiad Press in 1982, although the photos were taken in the mid-1970s. This particular photograph was shot in San Francisco in 1976.
The two models are Honey Lee Cottrell (HLC) in repose— and the hands, I believe, belong to Pat.1
At the time, Pat and Honey Lee were roommates, play partners, and fellow artist activists in the women’s community and the sex education milieu of San Francisco. This apartment was on Webster Street in a neighborhood known as the Fillmore.
Tee was lovers with Honey Lee at the time. The two of them were extraordinarily prolific between 1975-1976, bearing the fruit of what would become Tee’s most well-known prints, her solarized, hand-manipulated erotic portraits of women.
The three were good friends and all involved in a radical sex education group that only existed in San Francisco, called San Francisco Sex Information, abbreviated as SFSI.
SFSI operated a free hotline that anyone in the world could phone, and get a live human being to answer any sex question they had, anything at all. The hotline was open for several hours every day and was staffed by the educator volunteers who belonged to the organization. I was a volunteer briefly too. HLC, Tee, and PC were involved in its heyday.
This print was solarized in the dark room by hand in a process that Tee perfected. It’s important to know that this is long before computer photo editing. Her intent with the series of photos was to capture lesbian desire from a lesbian point of view and sensibility, using classic photographic portrait technique. She wanted to give some privacy to her subjects, as so many didn’t want to be outed.
Tee’s romance with Art Deco and Edwardian era touches is why the aesthetic is formal and reminiscent of the early 20th century— even if the content was, and is, surprising. There simply weren’t any photographs like this being published or exhibited anywhere.
Of course there was Times Square-style pornography in the 70s, but it did not have this aesthetic or point of view. Note how the models hands are shown with short trimmed nails, practical and competent-looking. HLC’s body and mons are shown in the come-as-you-are state, although in the 70s, that was quite typical, even in straight porn.
The element of the houseplant leaves in the picture was intentional on Tee’s part. She often placed a reminder of women’s connection to nature, the seed of life.
Now for the amusing part: Tee was intent to show what she regarded as classic lesbian lovemaking with cunnilingus and cunnilingus foreplay at the top of the list. HLC and PC were good sports, to achieve Tee’s intent, but this kind of oral sex was not their jam. They were following her directions and, the way Honey tells it, making fun of her in the background.
Part of the reason that they didn’t publicly share their model identities at the time was because they wanted to be understood as models in service of the artist, and not as self-portraits of their erotic identity or preferences.
Such an objective model perspective would be obvious in fashion photography, where mannequins are never presumed to be interested in the things they portray. But at the time, in the “coming-out era” of the 70s and 80s, lesbians often produced work that was deliberately confessional and presumed to be the honest truth about themselves.
The feminist politics of the day were such that culture was focused on memoir and first0person, a state of “this-is-the-real-me” rather than portraying a character.
The three friends all helped each other in their projects. There were times when PC and HLC would ask Tee to do something they needed for their artwork.
It was esprit du corps, solidarity and collaboration. Also, the fact that there was no such thing as an economy or social atmosphere where you could easily find models for erotic or lesbian-centric work. The models who agreed to pose, were outlaws; they took a leap.
Tee hoped these pictures, which she conceived as tasteful beautiful portraits, would find a home in sex education textbooks that were being produced at the time. She also looked forward to gallery exhibition.
She and Honey were sorely disappointed when they found out how publishers, even feminist ones, were shocked. And the galleries said NO.
Betty Dodson, their good comrade, went through similar travails with the Manhattan art scene at the time.
What looks to our 21st century eyes, like photographs and illustrations that could be seen in Vogue or Art Forum magazine, were taboo at the time.
For the most part, Tee’s work ended up being self-published. She did not begin to see third-party investment in her work until the end of her life.
This past year, British curator Charlotte Flint published an artist’s homage: Tee A. Corinne: A Forest Fire Between Us. —A photo of Honey Lee on the cover, and many in its pages.
The trio’s aesthetic choices weren't merely artistic—they were political manifestos. As the decade shifted from the romantic androgyny of the 60s/70s to the leather punk of the 80s, the neo-butch/femme— these different approaches to representation became battlegrounds.
Nowhere was this more evident than an early rift between Patrick and Tee.
The two became estranged during the time Pat published their classic book on lesbian sexuality called Sapphistry.2
Tee did the “loving” illustrations for the book (that’s what it says on the cover! Hilarious!) but she was furious that Pat was writing positively about lesbian sado-masochism or any other kind of kink/erotic identity.
On the surface, Tee thought theatrical eroticism of pain and power exchange was immoral, and a sore reminder of men’s mistreatment of women.
PC would argue that Tee was being willfully naïve about the history of sexuality, psychology, and the layered meanings of sexual expression.
From the pages of Sapphistry:
“The women who engage in S/M refuse to accept the standard definitions of what sex should be or how it should be done. S/M is a form of sexual rebellion.
It is represssed for many of the same reasons that homosexuality is repressed. It is nonreproductive, denies any correlation between maleness and sexual control or femaleness and sexual passivity, and utilizes non-genital objects as foci of desire.”
Patrick is one of the great theorists of radical sex, up there with Foucault, Rubin, Hirschfeld, and Reich, IMO. His later work, Public Sex: the Culture of Radical Sex, is an essential to sexuality history.
Underneath the ostensible “S/M argument,” the two artists were in competition for leadership in the driving momentum of the lesbian community zeitgeist. Tee was furious that PC‘s ideas were in ascendance, whereas her 70s Art Deco “vanilla” perspective was seen in the 80s as quaint and old-fashioned. Honey Lee was caught between the two of them — remember, I’m recounting her side of the story!
In theory, HLC agreed with Pat. But she was Tee’s lover and loyal to her in that fashion. I know she wished they could breach the rift, but I gather at the time, that seemed impossible.
I am describing this story as Honey Lee recounted it to me many times over the years. Ironically, Honey shipped out to work as a steward on the Matson Lines in ‘76 and broke up with Tee, who was insisting she stay at home.
HLC remained friends with Tee and PC for the rest of her life, but often not seeing them for years at a time. They would come together when there were big transitions and they knew they could count on her.
When Tee was dying of pancreatic cancer, Honey Lee and I drove to be with her. The way they acted together, it was like it was 1975 all over again and no one had missed a beat.
They played Canasta.
“I didn’t know you played Canasta!” I said.
“Just with Tee.”
“You’re letting her win every hand?”
“Oh, yes.
I was proud to publish Tee’s work multiple times in On Our Backs.3 Even though she didn’t like the “leather” and “punk” we often published, she was not going stop from getting her work out in the public— her number one ambition.
Looking back on it, her work was as revolutionary as anything we ever printed. The glory of cunt. Women without pretense. The natural body as erotic engine. Everyone, regardless of superficial presentation, is sexual.
MORE
A Suggested Bibliography for Tee Corinne
Tee A. Corinne: A Forest Fire Between Us, edited by Charlotte Flint
Nothing But the Girl, edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener. There is a chapter devoted to Tee’s work. Gorgeous reproductions.
Cunt Coloring Book: Give everyone you love a copy with a box of colored pencils
Yantras of WomanLove, a book of the best of her erotic solarized photographs
Women Who Loved Women: this little pamphlet is one of the first publications that told the history of significant lesbian artists through time. Tee wrote the text as well as drew all the portraits.
Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, by Pat Califia with illustrations by Tee Corinne
Any issue you can get your hands on, of The Blatant Image, a magazine pioneered by Tee, and Jean & Ruth Mountaingrove
Tee standing in front of her oil painting of Romaine Brooks, her portrait series of historical butch lesbians.
In Case You Missed It:
The Daddies
The pseudo-feminist puritans did succeed in driving On Our Backs into the arms of charming pornographers— the very infidelity they accused us of.
If you were “on scene” in any of the memories I describe, please do send me corrections or further detail/commentary. It all goes into the archive.
I still consider Califia’s book, Sapphistry, as the best introduction to lesbian sexuality anyone’s laid out.
I’ve written about On Our Backs a few times: The Daddies, The Cornell OOB exhibition, the breakup of OOB, Debi Sundahl’s Memorial, “How I Got Introduced to OOB at a Baby Shower,” the birth of the bulldagger centerfold, and the location we shot 100 lesbian pictorials, 25 Bessie.
I moved to San Francisco in 1981 when I was nineteen. I brought along my girlfriend (I say this because the whole thing was my idea, I wanted to move to the Bay Area to play music) and her young son. We were escaping Oklahoma in a dramatic fashion, because her psycho fundamentalist parents were looking into taking her son from her because of her sexuality, and in Oklahoma at that time, they would have succeeded. Anyway, I didn’t know jack shit about San Francisco, except for stories I’d read about Janis Joplin in “Going Down With Janis”, a few tidbits about the Summer of Love, and that all the coolest underground comics were made there, because I’d worked at a head shop when I was seventeen and read them all the way down to the fine print.
Anyway, I moved us smack dab into the Castro, having had no clue it was the gayest place on the planet. We moved into a third floor apartment right next to the Jaguar bookstore. When I’d checked the place out I hadn’t noticed all the men cruising out front. Within days my girlfriend and I were exploring Valencia Street and quickly discovered Old Wives Tales, where we walked around like starving kids in a pastry shop. On the way back to the Castro, we stumbled into the Artemis Cafe, where my singer songwriter girlfriend thought she might get a gig. The walls were adorned with huge landscapes, and, upon further inspection, I noticed the labia. As I scanned each image, the folds of female flesh exposed themselves to me. Whoa! My eyes almost popped out of my head. It was one of Tee Corinne’s images. Her art was part of my introduction to the city, images I’d not only never seen before but never imagined were possible. It was definitely a “Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas, anymore!” moment, one of many I had during those first few months.
In 1961, a friend played the gay card to evade the draft. He was sent to an Army shrink to determine his actual gayness-or-not. The test involved questions like, quote, "You know vat iss a bulldagger?" If you knew vat vas a bulldagger, it was proof positive that you were gay. I guess the assumption was, how could any straight person possibly know that?