Name Heather Corinna Role Author | Education Shimer College | |
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Born 1970 Chicago, Illinois Occupation feminist activist, writer, photographer, artist, educator, internet publisher and community organizer Books Sex: The All You Need to Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College | ||
Teen Vogue bisexual
Heather Corinna (born April 18, 1970) is an author, activist, and Internet publisher with a focus on progressive, affirming sexuality. She is a self-described "queer, rabblerousing, polymath." She was one of the pioneers of positive human sexuality on the Internet. She has advocated for accepting the diverse forms of a sexual experience and avoiding "expertitis".
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Biography
Heather Corinna was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Chicago and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She suffered sexual assault at age 12, and was homeless by age 16. She has written about the role that her experience with sexual assault and other violence in her youth have played in motivating her art and activism.
Corinna is a 1986 graduate of the Chicago Academy of the Arts, where she studied music, creative writing, and art. She also attended Shimer College, then located in Waukegan, majoring in Humanities.
During her twenties, Corinna worked for several years as an early childhood educator. After working in education with developmentally disabled adults and in a Montessori elementary classroom, she founded an alternative kindergarten/pre-kindergarten in Chicago, which she ran from 1992 to 1996. She continued to work as a kindergarten teacher until quitting to work on Scarleteen full-time.
In the late 1990s, Corinna founded Scarlet Letters, an adult erotica online magazine targeted to women. Shortly after creating the site, her site was removed by web hosting provider Verio, forcing her to find alternate hosting.
Since the main content of the site was off-limits to teenagers, she posted five pages of basic sexual education content for teenagers to read. Upon being deluged with requests for further information, she established Scarleteen in 1998. The side of the website targeted to girls was originally known as "Pink Slip". In 1999, she added a section targeted to boys, initially known as "The Boyfriend".
Both Scarlet Letters and Scarleteen faced difficulty obtaining both traffic and financial support in their early years. In the 1990s, Scarleteen was often excluded by mainstream directories as too sexual, while pornographic sites also refused to provide it as a link for under-18 visitors. The site subsequently came to survive largely on donations, some of which now come from past users with children of their own.
In 2015, Corinna received the Sexual Health Champion award from Vancouver-based Options for Sexual Health.