Artist, writer and lesbian activist Tee Corinne concluded her life much the way she lived it: by making her own choices.

Amid an exhausting two-year battle with bile duct cancer that
was diagnosed after her partner’s death in 2005, Corinne researched physician-assisted suicide. She invited 18 women from her community to her home in rural Southern Oregon, sang songs with them, and held two friend’s hands as she drank liquid barbiturate.

“It’s all been so wonderful,” Corinne said minutes before she died Aug. 27, 2006. She said this despite what she had to overcome during her 62 years.
As a child, Corinne was exposed to her mother’s alcoholism and abused by her family. She was later molested. Her mother was her first art instructor, but confined her own creative energy. Corinne married her best friend and taught art, but slipped into a suicidal depression before embracing her lesbian identity and working in sex education.

Corinne became emblematic in documenting lesbian women’s lives and history during the Back-to-the-Land Movement. She moved to Oregon in pursuit of an intentional women’s community, lived on a piece land called Poppyseed and spent the last 25 years of her life in women’s company.
Corinne created the pen-and-ink “Cunt Coloring Book,” photographed erotic images of lesbians with a solarized process that dissipated voyeuristic scrutiny, penned and edited lesbian literature, and advocated for lesbian self-expression. She was a founding member of “Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography” and co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars, a workshop for woman photographers.
“Woman Love: The Life, Art and Legacy of Tee Corinne” is exhibited on the first floor of Knight Library through Dec. 31. Corinne donated her personal collections – correspondence, literary manuscripts, artifacts, artwork and photography – to the library’s special collections.
“This in an opportunity to talk about diversity important in Oregon’s history and to offer accessibility to Oregon researchers studying lesbian culture,” manuscripts librarian Linda Long said. Long personally asked for Corinne’s donation during the late 1990s and called Corinne “gracious, articulate, educated, and focused.”
“She never had a lot of money, but she had a rich life and made the choice to do art,” Long said.
Corinne also donated her estate proceeds to special collections and specified in her will the money would be used to care for lesbian land collections the library has acquired, and for a national scholarship for academics studying lesbian culture to visit and use the University’s collections.
University student Rebecca Sprinson first learned about Corinne and the Back-to-the-Land Movement during the spring of 2007 in her lesbian cultures class. She has since aided Long in processing the Corinne collection and sifted through “thousands of iconic photographs” last summer while preparing the exhibit. Spinson expressed gratitude toward the library for its dedication to feminist and lesbian collections.
“We still have a long way to go in our openness and equality,” Sprinson said. “This exhibit follows in a path committed to Tee’s desire: to celebrate a vibrant and dynamic community. She had a passion to make an unknown history of lesbianism in the U.S. known. I find it very moving and culturally important.”
While Long said she has heard positive feedback about the exhibit, she acknowledged that it has the potential to be controversial. She has not loitered around the exhibit enough to speak to passersby’s reactions. The library has not received written complaints since the exhibit opened Sept. 29, but fielded one formal, in-person complaint from a male student who found the artwork offensive.
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