'Ahead of the Curve' Tells a Tale About Lesbian Visibility
The story of Curve magazine
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The story of Curve, the first glossy lesbian magazine in America, began with a lucky day at the racetrack, and a dream. Ahead of the Curve, a documentary now streaming on Netflix, tells that story.
In her early 20s, Franco Stevens was married to a man when she realized she was a lesbian. She told her husband, he outed her to her entire family, and suddenly she was on her own. Living in her car, Stevens wound up in San Fransisco, where she got a job at the gay bookstore A Different Light. It was there that Stevens found her community and her calling in life. The bookstore sold several different magazines for gay men, but none exclusively for lesbians, and Stevens set out to change that.1
In 1990, at the age of 23, Stevens founded Curve (then called Denevue), the first glossy lesbian magazine in the United States. With little money to her name, she maxed out a few credit cards and spent the day at the horse races, leaving with enough cash to fund the first few issues. When she sent out a call for editors and writers, she got hundreds of responses, and Curve was born. After much deliberation, Stevens and her team resolved to put the word “lesbian” on the cover, which would likely scare off some customers but they felt was necessary to make a statement and take up space.
The next step was building up their subscriber base. Stevens reached out to Barbara Grier of Naiad Press, a lesbian romance publisher, who agreed to promote Curve to her extensive mailing list (for a steep fee, of course). With Grier’s stamp of approval, Stevens and her editors received boxes and boxes full of subscriptions, and they were off to the races, so to speak.
That doesn’t mean things were ever easy for Curve, not by any means. Money was always an issue. Stevens recalled a time when she and her editors, strapped for cash, posted up outside of a bar and offered $20 a pop to detail motorcycles driven by the local dykes on bikes. They often took the magazine out on the road and tabled at women’s music festivals to make a name for themselves. “That was the only way to get the word out; you had to go from city to city and town to town, and peddle the magazine like a vacuum cleaner salesperson,” Stevens told Them.
During its first few years in publication, Curve depicted everyday people on the cover and within its pages. That changed in the December 1993 issue, which featured lesbian superstar Melissa Etheridge as the cover girl – the first celebrity to grace the cover of the magazine. This broke the seal, and other celebrities soon followed.
Things took a turn for the worse in 1996, when French actress Catherine Deneuve sued the magazine – still called Deneuve – for copyright infringement. (The reason Stevens named the magazine Deneuve in the first place remains a mystery – a humorous segment of the film depicts her friends telling their own version of its murky origin story.) Stevens worried the magazine was done for, but it was miraculously saved due to a massive fundraiser supported by influential lesbians and others in the community. The magazine was reborn as Curve, which Stevens contends is a better name anyway.
Stevens was injured in 1997, which led to a lifetime of chronic pain, and she decided to sell the magazine. It continued circulating for two decades, until the events of the film, which depict Curve’s financial troubles and questions about the future. (One of the changes the new CEO made in recent years was to remove the word “lesbian” from the cover.) The documentary, directed by Stevens’ wife, Jen Rainin, along with Rivkah Beth Medow, follows Stevens as she decides what’s next for Curve, leading to its current iteration, a non-profit called The Curve Foundation.
Ahead of the Curve follows two tracks: the history of the magazine and its struggles to stay in print, and Stevens’ search for what the future of Curve looks like. The documentary’s primary question is about lesbian visibility. What did it look like back then, and what does it mean today? In that vein, the film follows Stevens as she travels around meeting with young lesbian and queer folks to ask them about what they’re looking for in terms of representation and how they see the world. During a ClexaCon panel,2 she asks attendees about their relationship with the word lesbian and gets a variety of responses, though she’s surprised by how many still use the word at all.
While the questions posed in the contemporary portions are interesting, most of these discussions contain rhetoric we’re all quite familiar with at this point. Indeed, the most interesting parts of the film are the historical segments, which tell a story most younger viewers probably aren’t aware of. The archival footage of the parties, events, and community gatherings in the 1990s are indispensable in and of themselves, and provide an evocative time capsule of the era.
Even more important are the lessons we can take away from the Curve story. The documentary shows us what it took to get the magazine running (and stay running), the community support that powered the project, and what it meant to walk into a bookstore and see the word “lesbian” on a shiny cover. Stevens and her friends discuss the countless messages they received from readers describing how life-changing the magazine was for them. People would frequently call the Curve office just so they could talk to another lesbian; these calls would sometimes last hours. Curve made lesbian culture something you could see and touch. It did the work of exploring and defining the community, inviting new people into the fold.
It goes without saying that a lot has changed since the 1990s. The kind of niche lesbian communities and spaces that existed during this period just don’t exist in the same way. A great example of this change involves a little company called Bud Light. Bud Light was Curve’s first national advertiser, which might seem odd considering contemporary controversies surrounding advertisements and “wokeness.” Remember when Bud Light put trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in an ad and conservatives had a total meltdown? Well, that didn’t happen in the ‘90s. As co-director Rivkah Beth Medow tells it, “Not everything was connected. Not that many mainstream people were aware that Bud Light was advertising to lesbians because things were more siloed.”
To be sure, there are still pockets of queer community online, and physical lesbian spaces have not totally gone the way of the dinosaurs. And yet, the question of visibility remains. Do we want to be visible on a massive scale and subject ourselves to the machinations of mainstream culture and its attendant backlash? Certainly we want to be visible enough to find each other, but we mustn’t move forward without also looking back at where we came from.
So we’re left with the questions Stevens ponders in the film. What’s next? What kinds of representation do we need today? Is it journalism? What is journalism today? Does TikTok and other social media do the job of representing the community the way Curve once did?
The film’s epilogue gives us an answer to Stevens’ questions, though perhaps not to all of ours. In 2021, Stevens re-acquired Curve and donated it to the non-profit Curve Foundation, “The only national nonprofit championing lesbian and queer women's stories and culture.” Per their website, the foundation brings “the Curve magazine archive to life, providing context and a throughline between the critical conversations in the 1990s and early 2000s and today; we support the journalists who tell our stories; and we host events that bring our community together.” The magazine “relaunched digitally,” and as noted in the documentary, the word “lesbian” is back on the cover.
The question of capitalism comes into play here. Now that Curve is part of a non-profit, perhaps it can embody different goals than the for-profit magazine did. The idea of representation is frequently tied up with economics, as the images we see most often are assumed to be the most profitable ones. One of the reasons lesbians became more visible in the 1990s and 2000s was because the concept of “lesbian chic” opened a door for lesbians to enter mainstream culture in a way that allowed advertisers and industry heads to make a profit. Curve was a huge part of this moment, though its editors aimed first and foremost to generate lesbian stories for their own community.
We’re living in a volatile time for a magazine like Curve, and for publications of all kinds. Journalism is under threat, both in the states and abroad, and LGBTQ rights are under fire. There’s no doubt we still need journalism to function3 as a society, and we must support it, even if it looks different than it has in the past. As Ahead of the Curve reminds us, it’s also imperative that we remember our history and how we got to where we are today. This means paying our respects to those who’ve come before us, but also taking the values they espoused and the tools they used into our current and future struggles. As Stevens reminds us in the documentary, “The work is not done.”
If you have any personal memories of Curve magazine (or other lesbian magazines), I’d love to hear them in the comments below!
I previously spoke with one of the editors of Lesbian Connection, a community-based lesbian magazine that’s been around since the ‘70s.
A fun fact is that I was at ClexaCon that year doing research for my Master’s Thesis. Sadly, I am not featured in this documentary.
For some good and important journalism, check out this dispatch from the NYPD’s raid on the Columbia encampment.
Loved the magazine and loved the documentary!!
Thanks for this small and important piece of history. And yes, our work is not done.