Page 28 - AVN December 2015

IN MEMORIAM | |By Kimberlayne Poubelle
WHO’S WHO
Remembering Honey Lee Cottrell
A tribute to the pioneer lesbian filmmaker
which was very much in the tradition of ’70s hippie-style lesbian feminism—down
to the tie-dyed curtains!—with an emphasis on oral sex and community joie de
vivre.
With Debi Sundahl, Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, Cottrell created On Our Backs,
the first “magazine for the adventurous lesbian.” When the magazine started in
1984, Cottrell proposed a “Bulldagger of the Month” centerfold for the first issue.
She explained that the idea was “to stand this Playboy centerfold idea on its head
from, I would say, a feminist perspective … what would I do if I was a centerfold
and how can I reflect back to them our values?”
Her idea was not to be “the regular kind of centerfold, but something that will
make a difference, shake people up, show the other side of the mirror”—and of
course she became the magazine’s first “Bulldagger of the Month.” Cottrell was a
contributing photographer to On Our Backs for seven years.
Cottrell, with the rest of the pioneering lesbian founders of On Our Backs,
ventured out into the pornography world to become a cinematographer from 1985
to the early ’90s for Fatale Video, which is regarded as the first lesbian-created
erotic movie company.
The beginnings of Fatale Video, which today is still producing lesbian-centric
films, were gritty, tough, raw and real, with many of the features filmed by
Cottrell. Her approach was to ppeal to a spectrum of viewers—from women
starting to acknowledge their attraction to women to men who wanted to see “real
lesbians” having sex.
Bright continued, “She was the cinematographer for the G-spot orgasm story
in CLIPS, made by Fatale Video in the early 1990s. This was the first movie
that anyone had ever made to display a woman’s ejaculation. Honey Lee did an
incredible shoot with Fanny [Deborah Sundahl] to capture the whole thing and
she edited it, too.”
Bright’s memories of the filmmaker ventured into her adult cinema experience
as well. “Honey Lee worked as cashier/front office manager for the Market Street
Cinema for a couple years, which was an old-school porn theater during the mid-
’80s, photographing the women and men who worked there and developing the
‘How to Read a Dirty Movie’ presentation with me, a cinematographer’s view of
adult film. She documented Kamikaze Hearts being shot there by Juliet Bayshore,
which featured the unparalleled Sharon Mitchell in the starring role.”
As a trained cinematographer, Cottrell would take often take Bright to view
35mm porn films and break them down auteur style. She could spot every
influence and behind-the-scenes moment and immediately knew who in the
industry had been trained in the Signal Corps as opposed to film school, industry
films, etc. Bright gives a lot of credit to Cottrell in creating her Penthouse “Erotic
Screen” column, as it was like going to grad school in movie history. She was the
first one who spotted Orson Welles’ techniques in Gary Graver’s adult work and
pointed it out.
Cottrell’s experience often continued in front of the camera, too. She gave the
“extra mustard” in Bound, the Wachowski brothers’ first mainstream crime thriller
with heavy lesbian overtones. Honey Lee played the bulldagger extra in the bar
scene and was the one the Wachowskis singled out when they asked her to “do
more of that: give it the extra mustard!” Bright shared one of the scene’s biggest
secrets: “We always laughed about that, because I told the Wachowskis that they
wouldn’t be able to find bulldaggers in L.A. casting halls. I had to bring the real
deal from S.F.”
Ah yes. Honey Lee Cottrell was definitely the real deal from San Francisco,
leaving an indelible mark on the history of genuine, real, honest, lesbian-made
porn. Go out and watch some short-nailed, short-haired hardcore butch/femme
action and raise a glass in the memory of such a talented pioneer in the world of
adult cinema.
Kimberlayne Poubelle is a former contributor for On Our Backs.
feminist pornography. You may not know who she was. But now you
will. Honey Lee Cottrell, a pioneer in lesbian photography/erotica/
You may not know her name. You may not know the impact she had on
porno, succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 69 on September
21 in Santa Cruz, California.
Cottrell was part of a fearless team of daring feminists who decided
to change the image of women loving women in the world of lesbian erotica.
The images she created through her photography showed strong women, butch
women, feminine women, women who proudly proclaimed their lesbianism with
no shame. She was the official photographer for the groundbreaking publication
On Our Backs, published from 1984 to 1994, as well as co-author of I Am My
Lover, a 1978 feminist book celebrating masturbation that she created with Joani
Blank (the founder of the sex positive store Good Vibrations) and Tee Corinne,
an accomplished lesbian artist who self-published The Cunt Coloring Book, which
remains in print today.
Cottrell acquired a filmmaking and photography degree from San Francisco
State University in 1981 and quickly began to create films celebrating real lesbians
having real lesbian sex, and that included butch women with femmes to reflect
the true dynamic of many lesbian relationships. She was also an accomplished
cinematographer, script writer, editor and film and photography historian.
Susie Bright, the iconic sexual historian and a pioneering friend of Honey Lee
Cottrell, shared the following: “In 1979, Honey Lee directed, produced and edited
Sweet Dreams for the National Sex Forum, with star Pat Califia. It was about the
nature of sexual fantasy and how one articulate person, Pat, describes how she
masturbated and fantasized to orgasm. Includes kink and outlier fantasy material
and reenacted fantasies with other actors.” (Pat herself became an outspoken
lesbian writer, observer and activist who later transitioned into the man we now
know as Patrick Califia.)
Cotrell acted with Tee Corinne in We Are Ourselves, directed by Ann Hershey,
28 | AVN.com | 12.15