I’ll never forget the moment I first saw Curve Magazine as a closeted teen. At 16, I was strolling the magazine aisle of Barnes and Noble when I saw a cover of the long-running lesbian publication featuring the cast of The L Word. It stopped me in my tracks. I immediately plucked it from the shelf and carried it to a nearby fireplace, where I spent the next few hours poring through pages featuring more lesbians in one place than I’d ever seen before.
Franco Stevens, who founded Curve (originally titled Deneuve) in 1990 using money she earned from betting on a horse race, has stated that her mission was for queer women to feel less alone. She started the magazine at a time when few other lesbian publications existed, and many LGBTQ+ women did not feel included in the larger gay community.
I can say firsthand as I recall the comfort I felt that day back in 2006 that she succeeded in her mission — connecting thousands of women like me to a sense of community. After its first issue sold out in six days, Curve went on to become one of the most successful lesbian magazines in the world.
Over the years, Stevens’ publication featured stars like Melissa Etheridge, Martina Navratilova, Megan Rapinoe, Lea DeLaria, and Eliot Page. It even made an appearance on The L Word itself; fans of the series might remember a storyline where reporter Stacey Merkin (played by Heather Matarazzo) penned an acerbic review about the controversial character Jenny Schecter’s book for the magazine.
Though Stevens sold Curve to Avalon Media in 2010 due to health reasons, she and her wife Jen Rainin repurchased it in 2021. They then donated it to the newly-created Curve Foundation, which aims to “resume the mission of Curve Magazine and continue to tell queer stories and fund queer women’s culture,” as Stevens tells me. According to the foundation’s mission statement, it will “empower lesbians, queer women, trans people, and non-binary people to share our culture and our stories, connect with each other, and raise visibility.”
Stevens and Rainin also released a 2020 documentary, Ahead of the Curve, that documented the publication’s history and its impact on lesbian culture. It also touched on criticisms leveled at the magazine — many queer women of color, for instance, noticed an absence of representation of their experiences within its pages — and ongoing discourse surrounding the term “lesbian,” which has fallen out of favor among some who view the term as exclusionary, limiting, or old-fashioned. These critiques are especially trenchant given the rise of trans-exclusionary lesbians, many of whom have weaponized the identity to exclude trans masculine individuals.
The documentary touches on all this. As Stevens shared with me, lesbian hasn’t fallen out of fashion altogether, and the film also talks to many lesbians who claim the term in an inclusionary way, as a way to fight back against TERFs and heteronormativity writ large.
I had the privilege of interning for Curve in the summer of 2010 (shortly before Stevens sold it) and remember how inspiring and educational the experience was. Given my history with the magazine and the pivotal role it played in my earlier years, I was honored to speak with Stevens about how the brand is evolving today. Read on to hear Stevens’ thoughts on the changing needs of the LGBTQ+ community, what’s in store for the Curve Foundation, and about her first date with her wife at a vegan ice cream shop.
What are some of your plans for the Curve Foundation?
Well for one, we’ve hired a full-time archivist to digitally archive every single issue of Curve Magazine, so that anyone can search them. When it’s finished, it will tell a story about the history of the lesbian community over a 31-year time period.
In the past we had archived some of the issues, but in order to find a specific interview you had to go into the archive, then the specific issue, then search manually. Which, maybe that was fine 20 years ago, but definitely not today. If you can’t find it on Google, does it really exist?
We’re also offering awards to emerging journalists, people who are new in their field. The award will give them support — not only financial, but also mentorship and team-building.
The final project they’ll work on is to take something that’s really impacted them from the Curve archive and look at it from a fresh perspective. So if it was Cheryl Swoops coming out as a lesbian 15 years ago, how does that translate today? What has changed?
What would you say are LGBTQ+ community’s most pressing needs right now? How have those needs changed since the beginning days of Curve?
Honestly, I think we could all benefit from more sense of community right now. We’ve had a couple of years where there was no social interaction except for online. And for a lot of the lesbian bars that were already going under, this pandemic was like the nail in the coffin. I want to throw props up to @thelesbianbarproject (created by Erica Rose and Elina Street), which has put on a remarkable campaign to save some of the few remaining lesbian bars.
What’s hard now, I think, is that we’ve had a little taste of getting our rights, and now we’re on the verge of having so many of them stripped away. I think the documentary touched on this, but rights we didn’t even know we had are now under threat. Laws are being enacted to limit what can be taught in schools for instance, and people who break them can be imprisoned.
All that said, I can’t say I know what the community needs right now, nor that I can speak for everyone within it. I just know we have a long way to go and a lot to fight for.
We’re currently in the midst of Lesbian Visibility week. Your documentary posed the question of whether lesbian as a way of self-identifying was becoming obsolete, as more Gen Zers seem to be embracing “queer” over the term. Can you talk more about that? And do you still identify primarily as a lesbian?
I totally do still identify as a lesbian. And I’m fine if someone wants to call me queer. I’m fine with dyke — though it depends on who’s calling me that. [Laughs]
When I started the documentary, my thought had been, Oh, the word lesbian is a thing of the past, but I was happily surprised to discover this wasn’t the case. In fact I asked my son, who was in high school when we were filming it, Do your friends use the word lesbian? And he was like Yeah, totally.
I remember reading that without the internet, it was harder to find queer women to market the magazine to. You traveled across the country giving talks at coffee shops, bookstores, lesbian bars, etcetera. You even threw parties. What do you miss about that? And how have things changed since then?
Yeah! 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. It was pretty much, if you didn’t know somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, you weren’t going to reach those people.
Those were some of the greatest times ever, meeting people in such a grassroots way. Now, it’s just mind boggling how easily you can find people through the internet. But it’s also less personal. I would think that it would be easier now to meet people online than ever before, but in a way with so many options it must be overwhelming.
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
I hear you on that! Are there any specific moments that have stuck with you from that time? Moments when you said to yourself, “This is why I’m doing what I do?”
Oh definitely. Women would come up to me and say, You saved my life, I’d thought I was completely alone. They’d never thought there was anyone like them, and then they found out there was a whole magazine. Those stories will forever be a part of me.
That must have been really moving. You know, I was one of those women too! Before I was out to anyone in my community I’d go to Barnes and Noble and spend hours reading Curve. It absolutely helped me to feel less alone.
That’s awesome. Thank you for saying that.
Given how impersonal the internet can sometimes feel, I’m curious to hear how you and your wife met, back when dating apps weren’t an option.
We met at a holiday party for Curve, actually. My wife was like, Franco? Who the hell is that? What kind of a name is that?
I’m a hugger, so I went up to her and her friend she was with and gave them both hugs. I said to her something like, You guys are really late so I don’t know what food or drinks are left, but there are probably some cheese and crackers over there that you can have. She goes, Oh I can’t eat those. And since I have some dairy allergies, I was like, Oh really? Tell me more. Our first date was actually at a vegan ice cream shop.
So queer. I love it. Before we close out, is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Yeah! I want them to know that Ahead of the Curve, which tells the story of Curve/Deneuve’s founding and connects LGBTQ+ women's representation in the '90s to activism today, is available on Apple and Amazon. We're really excited that companies around the world are using the film to promote LGBTQ+ inclusivity and build a welcoming workplace culture.
We also have a new Facebook group called the Curve Community, which is a place for queer women to hang out, tell their story, introduce themselves, be silly or stupid or maybe meet somebody. I think we’re all just looking for a little community. And hopefully Curve will continue to provide that.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them.’s weekly newsletter here.
