I must confess, I thought something vaguely condescending about this mysterious woman when first I came across that work. Lotsa misogyny still lingering in me then--- and that particular sort was encouraged by the dead-serious sanctimonious feel of the religiously lesbian thing I was beginning to be familiar with. As it turned out, though, this woman was far from the epitome of that half-imagined kind of lesbian I didn't want to be like. I couldn't have imagined that it'd turn out she'd seem heroic to me later, and also somehow be a lesbian I very much could relate to, insofar as what I'd come to know of how she was in the world.
Here's a cool interview with her around censorship & freedom of expression issues, with pix --- be sure to go through to page 2 to see more. I love the portrait at the end, reproduced below. Not to mention a coupla those works of her own.
Just a few months ago I noticed that I still have a copy of The Cunt Coloring Book, bought as a coffee-table conversation piece, but now an item in my own little personal archive of earlier queer women making a splash in the world whose ripples kids like me would see. Thanks, now-dead person!
"Tee Corinne" by Barbara Kyne, 1998
