Behind the Curve

Curve, or Deneuve, as the publishers called it for most of the 90s, was a lesbian lifestyle magazine. I used the past tense there because today it is a global media project, whatever that means. The documentary Ahead of the Curve, which premiered on Netflix on April 22^nd for Lesbian Visibility Week, neatly if accidentally highlights just how that transition happened. The title alone is probably the biggest clue to the tone this movie takes: Curve is good, because it anticipated cultural trends. Which cultural trends? Well, if you take Ahead of the Curve at face value, the idea that lesbians also deserve civil rights. If you’re even a tad bit critical, though, the answer is more that you can redefine any sort of crass commercialism as heroic if you make sufficient use of woke language.

Ahead of the Curve does have some genuinely interesting material, as it relates how Franco Stevens came out as a lesbian in the late 80s, moved to San Francisco, and came up with the idea to start a lesbian lifestyle magazine mostly because no one else seemed to have the idea yet and publishers mostly aimed existing gay magazines at men. The best stories Ahead of the Curve has to tell deal with Stevens’ hairbrained schemes to raise funding and promote the magazine, having enough passion to spend a whole day with her cohorts cleaning motorcycles, or taking cross-country tours to operate booths at regional LGBT events.

These anecdotes are very much in the minority of Ahead of the Curve’s runtime, which the film doesn’t even presentin a coherent chronological order. Before explaining who Franco Stevens is, Ahead of the Curve starts out at some sort of LGBT convention. This establishes that Franco Stevens is humble and deferential to the younger queer generation, to the point that far from pulling rank as a senior lesbian, Franco Stevens will even go so far as to let students say to her face that lesbian is an offensive word, because apparently, too many trans-exclusionary feminists are lesbians.

Ahead of the Curve obviously doesn’t agree with the idea that the word lesbian is offensive. Much of the screentime emphasizes that Denueve proudly featured the word lesbian on the cover, and Curve eventually brings it back. All the same, Stevens almost seems afraid to contradict the students who attack the word lesbian in the initial context. This goes a long way to explaining her outlook- namely that Denueve was primarily a brand. As the caretaker of the brand, Stevens is loathe to offend people, even in self-defense. Which certainly explains how she got a speaking slot on Geraldo Riviera’s show way back in the early nineties.

This TV spot recurs often in Ahead of the Curve, usually to spotlight Stevens saying something inspirational. But later clips do something odd- they feature a couple of audience members asking bigoted questions, yet do not show Stevens’ replies. This is obviously an editing decision- of course Stevens must have said something to those people at the time. But whatever she said, might have come off as rude. Or worse, it might have come off as implying that Stevens could or should have to engage with bigoted thought at all, instead of just being kind of vaguely sad about the idea that hetereonormativity even exists.

The whole viewpoint is outrageously counterintuitive. How exactly do you start a lesbian magazine in the early nineties without offending, you know, someone? And in a weird way, Stevens did manage to solve that riddle- via shameless branding. The first Melissa Etheridge issue came out in 1993- only three years into the magazine’s run, and rapidly set the tone for Denueve as a style magazine more in the vein of Vogue than as a community secret that they publishers had to mail in envelopes to women who may not yet have come out. Likewise, Ahead of the Curve proudly brags about the magazine’s progress in attracting mainstream advertisements- a far cry from the startup that got its first big publicity break by ordering a mailer advertisement from a publisher of lesbian romances.

Ahead of the Curve makes this sound heroic by echoing the usual refrain of modern woke culture. That visibility matters, often so much so that any other possible progress aside from visibility is at best a secondary priority. In one especially stark irony, Ahead of the Curve notes early on how the early nineties were a dark time for LGBT people due to, among other things, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. About an hour later, Ahead of the Curve boasts of the progress made via visibility that had Bill Clinton doing campaign events with gay celebrities. Clinton’s betrayal is completely forgotten, solely because he was willing to validate these movements with visibility in some nebulous way that could theoretically suggest that in the long run he did more harm than good.

But the biggest missed metaphor by far is the story of why the magazine’s name changed from Denueve to Curve in the first place. The short version is, Denueve had gotten so popular by 1996 that the magazine’s namesake sued them for appropriating her likeness. Catherine Denueve, if you don’t know who that is, is a longtime French movie star who’s done several queer-coded films. When Ahead of the Curve finally gets to this part of the story, there’s obvious anguish and betrayal.

The trouble with this is, of course Catherine Denueve wasn’t an LGBT ally. No one involved with the magazine had ever even spoken to her. They just had a romantic idea of her based on Deneuve’s popular image in queer culture. The whole crisis is practically a fable about the folly of celebrity worship. Rather than express self-reflection on this incident, though, Stevens just stays on brand and acts as if Curve was a brilliant name, an even better name actually, that came to her as if in a vision, problem solved.

I should note that it’s not completely clear whether they actually named Denueve magazine after the actress; the initial interviews give vague, conflicting replies. And this is the bigger sin Ahead of the Curve commits even more than its mostly unremarkable fetishization of lesbian entrepreneurs. The incoherent editing and unnecessarily obtuse chronology make it nearly impossible to get a good grasp of when the most important events in the magazine’s history happened relative to one another.

Ultimately, Ahead of the Curve isn’t really a documentary about Curve so much as it is an advertisement for the media project–or at least Franco Stevens. Her wife, incidentally, receives credit as one of the film’s directors. Because of the subject matter, and its implicitly good politics, Ahead of the Curve hasn’t received much criticism, and this is unlikely to change just because Netflix is finally putting the documentary in a place where people can actually see it. But I’ll warn you all the same–if you actually want to learn something, and not just listen to preaching as a member of a choir, you’re not going to find anything worthwhile in Ahead of the Curve.