Well-known lesbian artist Tee A. Corinne died Sunday, August 27 at her home in southern Oregon after a battle with liver cancer. She was 62.
Ms. Corinne was best known for her work as a photographer, although she was also an illustrator, painter, sculptor, poet, and art critic. She broke ground with The Cunt Coloring Book and her frank portrayals of lesbian sexuality.
"Tee Corinne was one of the earliest pioneers of the modern lesbian and women's erotica movements," sex educator Greta Christina wrote in a recent tribute. "She was one of the first women to create sexual images and writing for women, from a woman's point of view, outside the male-driven porn machinery."
Ms. Corinne was born on November 3, 1943, in St. Petersburg, Florida, to a mother who was also an artist. She attended Tulane University and St. Petersburg Junior College before earning her Bachelor of Arts from the University of South Florida. While living in the south, she was active in the civil rights movement. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1968, after which she worked as a college art teacher. She was married for seven years before divorcing and coming out as a lesbian in San Francisco in the early 1970s.
Ms. Corinne – who believed that open depictions of lesbian sexuality were empowering – bridged the divide between the lesbian-feminism of the 1970s and the "sex-positive" feminism of the 1980s. The Cunt Coloring Book (first published in 1975, later republished as Labia Flowers ) grew out of her work as a sex educator with the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard.
"I explored sensual and sexual imagery, both because I was interested in sexuality and because lesbians are so often identified by the who and what of our sexuality," Ms. Corinne wrote. "I decided to create images which brought all of the fine art training at my command into focusing on the hidden and forbidden activities of lesbian sex."
Ms. Corinne's photography often featured real-life lovers in natural settings, and included fat women, old women, and women of color. She sometimes used techniques such as reverse printing and collages to create abstract images that obscured the explicit nature of her subjects at first glance. She once said she wanted her images to create "a rush of desire so intense that the act of looking is sexual."
Ms. Corinne's work appeared in publications as diverse as Sinister Wisdom, Bad Attitude , off our backs, On Our Backs, and the groundbreaking book Our Bodies/Ourselves. Her Yantras of Womanlove (1982) was among the first published books of lesbian erotic photographs. Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex (1987) combined her photography with fiction and poetry. Some of her later work dealt with growing up in an alcoholic family.
Ms. Corinne illustrated numerous book covers for Naiad Press, as well as album covers for Holly Near and other women musicians. Not everyone appreciated her frankness, however, and she sometimes had trouble getting printers to publish her work and finding community venues willing to show it. A strong opponent of censorship, Ms. Corinne's popularity underwent a resurgence with the new a wave of explicit lesbian erotica in the late 1980s.
"Every new generation of lesbian photographers who follow her look back on her work as some sort of norm – the basic lesbian photograph," wrote Susie Bright in Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image (1996).
In the late 1990s, the Traditional Values Coalition included Ms. Corinne's work in a sampling of what it called "pornography" obtained from the James Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, in an attempt to derail Hormel's nomination as ambassador to Luxembourg.
Ms. Corinne was known as a supporter of up-and-coming lesbian artists. She co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the College Art Association and the lesbian and bisexual group of the Women's Caucus for Art. She reviewed art books for Feminist Bookstore News and other publications, curated numerous art shows, and spoke at many academic conferences on art, history, and women's studies. In 1991, Lambda Book Report named her as one of the 50 most influential lesbians and gay men of the decade.
In March of this year, Ms. Corinne learned that she had advanced liver cancer. During her final months, she was looked after in her home by a devoted group of volunteer caregivers.
Ms. Corinne was preceded in death by her long-term partner, Beverly Brown. She is survived by a younger brother and many loving friends.
A memorial service will be held Saturday, September 23, at 11 a.m. at the Old Town Hall in Sunny Valley, Oregon.
Donations in her memory may be made to the Tee A. Corinne Prize for Lesbian Media Artists, a newly established fund created by Moonforce Media (www.jebmedia.com) P.O. Box 13375, Silver Spring, MD 20911).