Ten Years of Themes in Deneuve and Curve
Deneuve and Curve promoted lesbian visibility in the mainstream while also fostering pride and activism within the community.
Romantic, sexual, and even platonic relationships formed the heart of the magazine, and factored into over 57% of its articles, as evidenced by the pie chart summarizing its major themes in its first 10 years. In the more detailed bar chart below, I added the word lesbian to topics like music, writers, and civil rights to signify this overlap. Like older lesbian publications, many of Deneuve and Curve’s articles existed to provide support and advice to readers who might feel isolated in a homophobic society.¹ For example, readers sought relationship advice from the “Ask Fairy Butch” column from the fall of 1996 onwards on issues ranging from finding a partner to avoiding lesbian bed death.² Lesbian love and sexuality informed the magazine’s content as a whole, from articles about marriage equality to those profiling celebrity crushes.
The graph of articles throughout the 1990s illustrates when issues tackled particular themes and a few general trends, like an increasing interest in personal essays about travel and relationships. On June 28th, 1994, the LGBTQ community celebrated and marched in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Deneuve commemorated the event with a special issue featuring articles like "It Wasn't Just One More Raid...Stories from '69", which profiled six prominent lesbians across the country about how they experienced the uprising and its impact on their lives.³ In September 1997 Curve launched their first annual music issue, which they framed through the lens of lesbian culture. As Stevens wrote “Music unites us…In many ways our community revolves around music. It defines eras, creates memories, and gives rise to role models.”⁴ Writers and editors approached film and television through a similar lens. In February 1993 one of Deneuve’s first features focused on the lesbian writers who produced “conservative” daytime soap operas. The article’s semi-closeted author wrote under a pen name about the ironic reality of working in an industry “virtually overrun with lesbians and gay men.”⁵ In the future soap actresses like Anne Heche and Eden Riegel would grace the cover followed by the many stars of The L Word, but Deneuve valued more behind the scenes experiences as well.
Editor Dianne Anderson Minshall worried in 2010 that the magazine was often “forced to focus on what's new, who's hot, which celebrity has come out recently” to appeal to readers in the era of lesbian chic.⁶ Indeed, 43% of articles covered the entertainment industry, while only 27% focused on civil rights issues. Scholar Erin J. Rand argues that admiring white and traditionally feminine lesbian celebrities became popular because they allowed straight fans to feel tolerant without necessarily abandoning their anxieties about the AIDS epidemic.⁷ However, for the magazine’s lesbian audience culture held even more complexities.
While the magazine helped make lesbian and queer actors, musicians, and writers visible in mainstream culture, this coverage was not completely divorced from politics and conflict.⁸ Topic models, which assign topics based on the amount of times words appear in an article, can easily miss intersectional analysis or social critique because algorithms look for similarities not differences.⁹ For example, Tatiana de la Tierra’s article “In Living Color at Michigan” profiled women of color who formed a separatist camp at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and delved deep into their experiences of marginalization in the women’s music community.¹⁰ The model categorized it as a lesbian music article, not as an article about racism, which lacks its own topic. The text of articles also doesn’t reveal how Curve rejected the mainstream emphasis on conventionally attractive women by regularly including positive photographic depictions of androgynous and butch lesbians.¹¹
By 1998, Curve began to increase number of travel articles, which often covered lesbian friendly destinations or personal travel narratives and coverage of international LGBT politics. For example, the September 1999 issue included lesbian themed tourism articles like “On the Road”, “Hawaii on a Bikini String Budget!” and “Against the Odds,” a profile of South African lesbian activists Palesa Bev Ditsie and Prudence Mabele, which covered local activism for lesbian rights and people with HIV and AIDS.¹² While the first type of coverage was more common, writers did highlight the struggles of lesbians in Canada, Australia, Europe, and East Asia throughout its first 20 years.
Ultimately, the magazine mirrored wider trends in the lesbian and queer community, from a more representative music and television industry to a growing lesbian travel industry. Through it all, it stayed focused on examining and strengthening the relationships at the heart of the community.
