Department of Archives | Honey Lee Cottrell Papers
BY Claire Potter ON September 30, 2015
Brenda Marston, of the Cornell University Library Human Sexuality Collection announced the acquisition of the Honey Lee Cottrell Papers this week. Cottrell, a lesbian erotic photographer, was also the first staff photographer for On Our Backs, a magazine that began publishing in 1984 and was associated with lesbian sex radicals opposed to all forms of sexual censorship in the 1980s. The name riffed off of the title of a second publication, off our backs, founded in 1970 and also associated with lesbian feminism. By the 1980s, oob had became a site where anti-pornography feminists, and feminists opposed to transgender women being permitted in “women-only spaces were more likely to advocate their views.
This is Marston’s second major acquisition of a lesbian artist/intellectual this year: on July 15, she acquired the papers of lesbian sex educator, pornographer and activist Tristan Taormino.
Correction: the first version of this post listed Cottrell as a founding editor of On Our Backs; she was the founding staff photographer.
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