Mary Wings didn’t know what “lesbian” meant until she was in her late teens — but as soon as she found out, she knew it described what she’d been feeling for years.

As a footloose illustrator who moved among creative scenes on both coasts and even in Europe in the late 1960s, she hoped to find fellow artists whose work represented her experience — especially in underground comics, with their boundary-bursting depictions of sexuality in all its many forms.

Except that she didn’t. Perusing the work of R. Crumb and other comic artists, she discovered page after page of violent misogyny and homophobia. She also encountered those characteristics in person when she met some of the artists in real life.

By then, she was living in Portland, Ore., where she frequented a feminist bookshop. One day in 1973 she found a comic collection, Wimmen’s Comix, which included a stunning story called “Sandy Comes Out,” about a young woman who announces one day that she is gay.

But as she read it, her enthusiasm wilted. She felt the author, a straight woman named Trina Robbins, had failed to capture the texture of coming out.