Tee A. Corinne
1943—2006
By Tirza True Latimer and Jean Sirius

Susanne Petermann
Tee A. Corinne, 2006
color photograph
--Although her friend Susanne Petermann clicked the shutter this was in effect Tee's self-portrait.

Tee A. Corinne
Sinister Wisdom Cover, 1977
Solarized photograph

I first became aware of the lesbian feminist artist and photographer Tee Corinne in the spring of 1977 when Sinister Wisdom featured her now iconic solarized photograph picturing two women entwined in an intimate embrace. Soon, poster versions of this highly erotic yet non-objectifying image proliferated in women’s bookstores, coffee shops, and households. Tee had already made a name for herself with the Cunt Coloring Book of 1975 and was showing work in bookstores and galleries around the San Francisco Bay area. In 1979, I heard that she and several comrades (including Ruth Mountaingrove, Jean Mountaingrove, and Carol Newhouse) were organizing the first of a series of summer photography workshops for women. They coined the term "Ovular" (in contrast to "Seminar") to describe the enterprise. These early initiatives affirm the concerns to which Tee devoted 100% of her energy: lesbian visibility, lesbian agency, lesbian love, and lesbian legacy. The camera, she believed, offered individuals and communities whose existence within mainstream histories has been erased an accessible mode of self-affirmation, self-preservation, and self-projection. The camera responded perfectly to Tee’s ambitions as both an artist and an activist. The Ovulars (held annually from 1979 to 1982) engendered a short-lived but influential lesbian photography journal titled Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-1983), published by a collective of 24 women whose members included the original Ovular "facilitator team." The magazine’s objectives were to ask, as Tee herself explained, "How has the women's movement changed the way we see? What kinds of photos are being produced and published now that haven't been seen before? What are the realities of our shapes and our lives? What are the differences between the ways men have pictured women and the ways we see ourselves? We wanted the magazine to be accessible to all women, strongly feminist in structure, radical both in the sense of confronting the viewer with seldom seen or hard to look at images and in going for the roots of women's vision. We wanted it to include both the work of women of earlier times and of our own, to include ideas as well as pictures." This statement of intent could serve as an overarching description of Tee’s oeuvre.

The oeuvre consists of two books of erotic fiction (Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex, 1987, and Lovers, 1989), one novel (The Sparkling Lavender Dust of Lust, 1991), three collections of short stories, four books of poetry, and numerous small edition publications, in addition to collections of drawings and photographs. The publication formats range from album (Yantras of Womanlove and The Southern Oregon Women Writers' Group Picture Book,1982, Women Who Loved Women,1984, At Six: An Artist’s Book, 1990) to the calendar (Lesbian Muse: The Women Behind the Words, 1989). Portfolios of her art have been published in Lesbian Subjects, Feminist Studies, Gallerie: Women's Art, The Advocate, Philadelphia Gay News, The Lesbian Inciter, I Am My Lover, and Femalia. She edited and photographically illustrated two anthologies of erotic fiction, Intricate Passions (1989) and Riding Desire (1991), winning the Lambda literary award for the former. Two of her photo-collaged works and one album cover were featured in the ground-breaking exhibition In a Different Light, curated by Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake at the University of California Art Museum in 1995. Her photography is discussed by Jan Grover in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (1989), in Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser (1991), and in Lesbian Art in American: A Contemporary History edited by Harmony Hammond (2000), among other publications. Most recently, Rudy Lemcke organized an on-line exhibition, Tee A. Corinne: Cancer in Our Lives, which may be viewed on the Queer Cultural Center site (http://www.queercultural
center.org/).

From the beginning, Tee took an active hand in the promotion and circulation of her own creative work and that of the lesbians she championed. To this end, she reviewed art and literature for a variety of publications. She was, for many years, the art books columnist for Feminist Bookstore News. A co-founder and early co-chair of the Queer Caucus for Art (an affiliated society of the College Art Association), she co-edited and reviewed books for the QCA newsletter as well. In 1991 she was chosen by Lambda Book Report as one of the fifty most influential lesbians and gay men of the decade. In 1997 she received the Women's Caucus for Art President’s award for service to the arts (she co-founded the Women's Caucus for Art, Lesbian & Bisexual Caucus). From the beginning, Tee was mindful of the historical significance of her work and, in addition to preserving traces of her career itinerary in self-publications such as Tee Corinne: Twenty-Two Years, 1970-1992, she has bequeathed a rich archival legacy to the University of Oregon. She encouraged others to honor their own work and communities by taking comparable steps. I will sorely miss that encouragement. Now it’s up to us.

—Tirza True Latimer

Tee Corinne lived her life in service to her art and her ideals. She was a tireless networker, taking great joy in introducing people she thought would make nice couples, or good collaborators, or who could just help each other do what they were trying to do. She belonged to a lot of organizations, and used her southern charm to bend them to her will.

She maintained long-term friendships with the novelist Valerie Taylor, columnist and gay rights activist Marie Kuda, and publisher Barbara Grier, as well as noted gay academicians James Saslow and Sherman Clarke and writer and gay rights activist Jim Van Buskirk. She was romantically linked with artists, photographers, writers, and thinkers, including photographer Honey Lee Cottrell, writer and activist Frances Doughty, novelist Lee Lynch, and, the love of her life, Beverly Anne Brown, a writer and social justice activist.

Tee A. Corinne made a lot of difference in the world. The work she did continues making change, and I am in agreement with Tirza Lattimer—it’s now up to us to keep at it.

—Jean Sirius

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Tirza Latimer is a visiting faculty member in Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, where she lectures on gender, sexuality, and visual culture. Her pub-
lications include The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, a cross-disciplinary anthology in collaboration with Whitney Chadwick, and Women Together/Women Apart:Portraits of Lesbian Paris.

__________________
Jean Sirius is a writer, artist, photographer, and storyteller who lives in Oakland, CA. Her publications include Lesbian Love Poems: an aid to the inarticulate; Seeing Double/Rose Windows (a book of collage); and My Feet Go to Europe (photographs). She took care of Tee in Oregon during the first four months of Tee's illness, and maintained the weblog http://jeansirius.com/TeeACorinne/tee_update.html for the duration.