“I was so sick of lesbians [being] treated like second class citizens. If I was going to do something I was going to do it so that we were represented as first-class, as having something nice for once.” Franco Stevens1
Franco saw a desperate need for a specifically lesbian magazine, the kind she looked for after she came out a year earlier and heard other women request when she worked at A Different Light bookstore. After she decided to "stop complaining and do it herself,” Stevens diligently studied publishing and miraculously raised the funds she needed for the first issue at the horse races. When Stevens put a flier reading “Writers and photographers wanted for new lesbian magazine” at the bookstore, over 300 people responded.2