She was born Debra Dianne Wood in California in 1957. Born with the external features of a female, she lived the first 37 years of her life as a woman, but since then has been attempting to live as both male and female--as intersexed.

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Grace was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute. She obtained a Master's degree from the University of Derby, England. One of the best-known lesbian photographers, she is famous as much for her exhibitionistic shifts in persona as for her sexually explicit work.

The S&M chic of her photographs, combined with her preference for young and attractive models, made her the darling of the heterosexual press and the scapegoat of pro-censorship feminists. However, the theme that dominates her work is not sex but gender.

Her photographs betray an anxiety about the performance of gender, in particular, the performance of masculinity by lesbians. Whether you find her work revolutionary or reactionary depends upon whether you read her use of semiotic codes from gay men's pornography as triumphant appropriation or envious mimicry.

Grace courts notoriety with some skill. Her own identity has metamorphosed from lesbian to hermaphrodyke to transman to intersexed, and her work frequently addresses issues of chrysalisation or mutation. Here, "truth" becomes irrelevant. For example, her famous beard is variously claimed to be natural or the result of artificial hormones taken as part of a gender-transitioning process.

Similarly, she has never bothered to engage thoughtfully with criticisms that her work degrades women. Critics, especially feminists or lesbians, are met with insults or posturing. "Some French lesbians seem to be deeply resentful of anything that throws them off their precarious pseudo-feminist perch," she remarked, and added: "BOLLOCKS to that, I say! I'm a Gender Terrorist, a walking, talking bomb in The Boys' Club."

Grace's gender politics are deeply felt, but they are highly subjective and do not hold up well against the challenges of her more articulate and politically informed critics.

Grace's photographs, however, are important on several levels. By pillaging gay men's porn and simply not caring whether men get off on her work, she became one of the instigators of polymorphous perverse queer culture. In producing the most unapologetically blatant representations of sex between women, she effectively confronts the desexualization of lesbianism.

Also, by photographing demonstrations, scenes in bars and clubs, drag king contests, and other queer tribal events, she has produced important documentary images of an ever-changing community.

Finally, her portfolio of drag kings ensures that culture is no longer so dominated by the stories of queens, fairies, and male-to-female transitions.

Grace has also experimented with strategies to interfere with the traditional pornographic dynamic between the voyeuristic gaze of the (usually male) audience and the objectified (usually female) body of the model. These experimentations culminate in a series of sexually explicit images of Grace and a lover fucking with dildos, rimming, and butt-fucking.

By exposing herself as she has exposed her models, Grace asserts community with the women who have posed for her and interrupts the voyeuristic gaze with her own controlling presence. Few women struggling with the male-dominated conventions of erotic art have confronted them with such courage and audacity.

Since Stonewall, lesbian artists in America, from installation artists to filmmakers and photographers to performance artists and painters, have become increasingly diverse and visible.

A recent arrival in the drag arena, drag kings are part of an international drag movement that emerged in London and San Francisco in the mid 1980s.

Considering the unique set of problems facing lesbians who want to produce erotic art for the enjoyment of other lesbians, it is remarkable that so much lesbian erotica has been produced in so brief a time.

Since Stonewall lesbian photographers have created an enduring archive that documents lesbian lives, searches for a lesbian sensibility, and explores various issues of particular import to the lesbian community.

Most of the pornography that features transsexuals is neither made by nor for them, but in recent years trans porn activists have began to produce pornography for transsexual and other queer audiences.

While nude depictions of women appear in most cultures, on both sides of the equator, and in rich variety, lesbian artists have been particularly resourceful in their use of the female nude.