General
Cathy Cade, Groundbreaking Lesbian Photographer, Dies at 82
The she became a photographer the same year she came out, chronicling the lives of women in same-sex relationships — something most people had never seen.
Cathy Cade, an activist and pioneering photographer who chronicled same-sex female relationships, producing a 1987 book that was hailed by feminists and gay-rights advocates as a classic, died on Nov. 16 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 82.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of dementia, her son Carl Cade said.
While she never broke into the mainstream, Ms. Cade was prominent in the women’s movement of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she settled in 1969, the year of the Stonewall uprising in New York City, often considered the first broadside in the battle for gay liberation.
Having spent nearly a decade working on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Ms. Cade turned to photography in 1971, the year she came out as a lesbian. Her work was featured in feminist periodicals like Off Our Backs, in gallery shows and in books on feminism and gay life.
Unable to elicit interest from publishing houses in her book, “A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists,” she published it herself. But that did not diminish its influence in the gay community.