Perverts Of Color

queersintheoutdoors:

Came across this article today. It’s really interesting. I wish there was something like this for queer erotic and pornographic art, ‘queer’ just meaning inclusive of more gender presentations than are often found in old-school lesbian art in my experience. Though this does mention lesbians having sex with beards on :)

The first lesbian photographs to link lesbian to sexual liberation, [were] by American Tee Corinne…

‘She experimented with sexual imagery in her own art, beginning with photographs of heterosexual couples kissing and moving on to drawings of her own genitals, a subject for which she could find no other models’. (Bibliographical note in Guide to the Tee A. Corinne Papers 1966-2003 at the University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives)

She did art again after a pause of around 5 years and after coming out, using exclusively sexually explicit material. She is responsible for the ‘Cunt Coloring Book’ (1975), which is still published and was intended to be used as an educational aid for kids (renamed ‘Labiaflowers’ for a short while). International reach came with photographic work published in the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom in 1977 and, as a writer, with erotic stories collection Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex, in 1987 and winning the Lambda Literary Award in 1990 as editor of the erotic anthology, Intricate Passions.

In 1998 ‘…the Traditional Values Coalition circulated a package of what they consider “pornography” to members of the U.S. Senate. They gathered the material, including The Cunt Coloring Book and the book Nothing But the Girl — which features Corinne’s photographs — from The Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library. It was a further effort to discredit the ambassadorial nomination of James Hormel, for whom the center is named’. (Queer arts 1998)