Creating a First Class Lesbian Magazine
“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
In February 1990, 22-year-old lesbian bookstore clerk Frances or "Franco" Stevens took a leap of faith and developed a groundbreaking national lesbian magazine without financial backers.
Stevens 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
Historian Jan Whitt argues that lesbian periodicals, from early newsletters like Vice Versa to magazines like Sinister Wisdom, provided community, connection, and support systems in a homophobic society and even encouraged activism.3 Stevens founded Deneuve “to connect lesbians, unite our community and dispel stereotypes” and thus carried on the tradition of these earlier publications by and for the community.4
Deneuve also represented an evolution of lesbian print culture as the first lesbian mainstream “glossy magazine.” This innovation was timely; less than a year after the May 1991 launch of Deneuve the release of the film Basic Instinct sparked the era of “lesbian chic.” Throughout the 1990s, feminine and racially and economically privileged lesbians gained unprecedented visibility in popular culture, and out celebrities graced the covers of mainstream magazines from Newsweek to Vanity Fair.6
Google N-grams’ corpus of digitized books demonstrates this growing interest in lesbian, as the percentage of books mentioning the word “lesbian” skyrocketed from .00037% in 1990 to .00083% in 1997. Phrases like “lesbian community”, “lesbian couples”, “lesbian mothers”, and “lesbian identity” also increased in frequency over this period.
In May 1991, the first issue of Deneuve finally launched, with 32 pages full of stories about lesbian politicians, teachers, and musicians, travel, dating, love, and everyday lesbian life. By 1995 Denueve was the nation’s best selling lesbian magazine, but Stevens and her colleagues overcame homophobia from advertisers, distributors, and government officials to achieve that status.
2. Lee, Gretchen. "All our best." Curve, vol. 10, no. 3, May 2000, p. 18.
3. Jan Whitt, “A ‘Labor from the Heart’ Lesbian Magazines from 1947-1994,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 1–2 (2001): 232.
4. Marcie Bianco, “This Is What 25 Years Of Lesbian Culture In Print Looks Like,” BuzzFeed, accessed December 22, 2020, https://www.buzzfeed.com/marcieb4f1ba695b/25-years-of-lesbian-culture-curve-magazine.