Ahead of the Curve | Little White Lies

Ahead of the Curve

01 Jun 2021 / Released: 04 Jun 2021

Three young women at an outdoor event, smiling and embracing one another.
Three young women at an outdoor event, smiling and embracing one another.
3

Anticipation.

Looks interesting but hardly as groundbreaking as its subject matter.

4

Enjoyment.

Franco Stevens’ charm and grit are irresistible.

4

In Retrospect.

An unexpectedly insightful look at a piece of lesbian history. Long live magazines!

This engag­ing doc­u­men­tary cel­e­brates the work of an icon­ic les­bian pub­li­ca­tion and its fear­some creator.

On paper, it looks as if Ahead of the Curve might, iron­i­cal­ly, be out­dat­ed. This exu­ber­ant doc­u­men­tary tells the sto­ry of Curve mag­a­zine, undoubt­ed­ly the most influ­en­tial les­bian lifestyle pub­li­ca­tion in the world, and its irre­press­ible cre­ator, Fran­co Stevens.

Found­ed in San Fran­cis­co in 1990 at a time when a mag­a­zine hid­den under a mat­tress was one of the few sources of rep­re­sen­ta­tion for LGBT+ peo­ple, Curve dared to print the word les­bian’ on its cov­er and quick­ly became a life­line for queer women across America.

But this isn’t mere­ly a nos­tal­gia trip, or a rev­er­en­tial por­trait of Stevens her­self (though she deserves one). Co-direct­ed by Rivkah Beth Medow and Jen Rain­in, Stevens’ wife, Ahead of the Curve dares to both hon­our this pio­neer­ing magazine’s place in LGBT+ his­to­ry and inter­ro­gate its rel­e­vance today.

Stevens was forced to step away from Curve after an acci­dent in 1997 left her per­ma­nent­ly dis­abled, and the mag­a­zine is now in seri­ous finan­cial trou­ble. With online spaces becom­ing havens from shame and fear of per­se­cu­tion, do les­bians still need Curve? It’s a ques­tion that’s cru­cial but painful for Stevens to contemplate.

Just as this is posed, we’re trans­port­ed back to the mid 1980s via crack­ly home video footage of 18year-old Frances Stevens’ lav­ish white wed­ding. But her fairy tale fell apart when she attend­ed a class called Vari­a­tions in Human Sex­u­al­i­ty at San Fran­cis­co State Uni­ver­si­ty and was hit with an almighty real­i­sa­tion. Swap­ping the name Frances for Fran­co, she was kicked out by her fam­i­ly and forced to start anew.

Medow and Rain­in cap­ture the col­li­sion of the free­dom but bru­tal real­i­ty of com­ing out in the late 80s with a mon­tage of images of lib­er­at­ed les­bian love fol­lowed by news footage of homo­pho­bic protests and graf­fi­ti read­ing KILL LES­BIANS’. Talk­ing heads, large­ly Stevens’ friends and col­leagues, describe the hos­til­i­ty they endured daily.

Curve, first pub­lished as Deneuve but forced to change its name after a law­suit from French screen icon Cather­ine Deneuve, was a risky ven­ture from the out­set. No bank would give Stevens a loan, so she cashed in a stack of cred­it cards and head­ed to the race­track where she bet on hors­es that mirac­u­lous­ly kept winning.

The magazine’s rise is deft­ly inter­wo­ven with Stevens’ cur­rent work as an activist. Accom­pa­nied by Rain­in and her ser­vice dog, she tours uni­ver­si­ties and con­fer­ences, meet­ing young LGBT+ artists and cam­paign­ers. While you might expect inter­gen­er­a­tional clash­es, espe­cial­ly when a pan­el dis­cuss­es whether les­bian’, the word Stevens fought so hard to print on Curve’s cov­er, is still an appro­pri­ate term. Yet Stevens her­self is always warm, recep­tive to a chang­ing land­scape, and curi­ous about what les­bians and queer women need from media today.

Tonal­ly, the film effec­tive­ly strikes a dif­fi­cult bal­ance between the hard­ship of Stevens’ strug­gle to keep the mag­a­zine going, espe­cial­ly while she expe­ri­ences chron­ic pain, against the joy and con­nec­tion she has clear­ly inspired. In terms of form, Ahead of the Curve doesn’t earn its title. And yet it’s dif­fi­cult to care when this com­pelling sto­ry is told with so much heart. Curve might not sur­vive in print, but the sense of belong­ing it sparked has endured.

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