Ahead of the Curve. Directed by Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow. Tel Aviv: Film Platform, 2020. 98 minutes.

In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction. Directed by Lisa Marie Evans and Marianne K. Martin. Portland, OR: Collective Eye Films, 2022. 99 minutes.

Lesbian visibility is often framed as a concept from visual culture, referring to the evolution of lesbian representation through paradigms of silence, suppression, tragedy, or sensationalism.1 Yet the story of lesbian representation in the last century is incomplete without consideration of print media. The history of lesbian writing and publishing is interwoven with the progress and setbacks for lesbians, women, and LGBTQ+ people more broadly. Two recent documentaries explain different areas of lesbian production and representation in print. Together, they demonstrate the power of sprawling networks to support and propagate lesbian media.

The first of these films, In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction, directed by Lisa Marie Evans and Marianne K. Martin, is a treasure trove for the queer literature classroom. Beginning with Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, and culminating in Sarah Waters’s 1998 Tipping the Velvet, the film offers a chronological tour of English-language lesbian novels, focusing primarily on those by American authors, in spite of the British bookends. Historian Lillian Faderman’s commentary anchors the literary developments in a narrative of mostly American history (1991).2

The film proceeds through a collection of interviews with authors expounding on the personal and cultural importance of encountering lesbian and gender-expansive narratives. They share their influences, detail each other’s legacies, map the publishing challenges they faced, and explain how they overcame these obstacles. A strong sense of a subcultural tradition emerges as the authors’ stories intersect. Not only do viewers begin to see the effects these novels had on subsequent fiction, so too do we see the lives of readers, authors, and publishers intertwining. They built on each other’s work, advancing fictional representations alongside the development of real infrastructure—publishing houses, bookstores, and audiences united by newsletters—also intersecting with the Women in Print and larger feminist movements.3 Author Sarah Waters encapsulates the feeling of momentum as she reflects on her career in the interview; she began as a student of gay and lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s, a path opened, in part, by the intensifying lesbian publishing activity interwoven with activism across the century. As Waters describes it, Tipping the Velvet was building on a “bedrock” of established lesbian writing that had long since broken free from homophobic narrative tropes of pathological and tragic lesbians.4 In the fin de siècle proliferation of lesbian narratives, these representations were, importantly, no longer niche.5

In Her Words concludes after covering the late 1990s, a moment of flourishing lesbian representation that coincides with the advent of Curve magazine, the subject of the second film under discussion. Ahead of the Curve, directed by Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, tells the history of the magazine amidst news of its uncertain future. Founded in 1990 by Frances “Franco” Stevens, Curve was a glossy magazine focused on lesbians. No longer niche, but not quite mainstream, Curve was the preeminent lesbian lifestyle magazine in the contradictory time of “lesbian chic.” As a narrow representation of lesbian identities became a fashionable aesthetic in popular culture, legal and material gains lagged behind. Funding for a pop culture periodical that featured actual lesbians was not easily procured. Like many of the publishing stories featured in In Her Words, Curve’s path to production involved a lot of ingenuity (and a few well-placed bets on horse races to fund the first issues, as the story goes). Ahead of the Curve documents the community process of making the magazine successful while it memorializes the product and its lasting impact on readers. Here again, a picture emerges of media forged outside or tangential to mainstream publishing channels prospering through lesbian subcultural support.

It is not surprising, then, when a crossover figure appears at a pivotal moment for Curve magazine, connecting the two documentaries. Franco recalls meeting publisher Barbara Grier, co-founder of the influential Naiad Press, who is mentioned repeatedly in In Her Words. After Stevens ran out of initial funding, Grier offered to share information about Curve with her “legendary” mailing list, which set off a flurry of requests for subscriptions that kept the magazine in business.6 The interaction between lesbian media personas secured Curve’s subscriber base as well as its place in the history of lesbian print media.

In the queer, digital era, however, Curve has struggled to keep its identity and its readership during two very twenty-first-century transitions: a changed understanding of “lesbian” culture and a changed media landscape. It becomes Franco’s mission and the premise of the film to explore the history, impact, and future of Curve, which are entangled with her own legacy in spite of the magazine having been sold to Avalon Media in 2010. The film manages an upbeat tone, and deliberations about the magazine’s impact on the next generation are hopeful. Relatedly, insofar as Ahead of the Curve pleasantly revisits the first twenty years of publication, it is likely to appeal to audiences in this moment of 1990s nostalgia.

Both documentaries pose questions about what specific lesbian media and physical spaces are desirable today. This topic is implicit in the way In Her Words presents history but is more explicitly considered in the conversations shaping Ahead of the Curve. The documentaries dovetail so well that it would be illuminating to pair them in classes on LGBTQ literature or history, lesbian representation, or the Women in Print Movement. Further, the concepts of cultural visibility and representation emphasized by both documentaries would make either a compelling investigation in communications, media studies, and publishing studies courses. Each film would also be aided in classroom use by the digital archives and supplementary information on their respective websites.7

1For example, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Andrea Weiss’s Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema, and Patricia White’s Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability are texts that identify lesbian tropes in cinema, helping to establish the parameters for discussions of “lesbian visibility” in film history.

2When the film occasionally forays into British or Australian literature, the novels tend to be considered in relation to American history.

3For a brief background on the Women in Print Movement, see Trysh Travis, “The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications” (2008).

4Sarah Waters contextualizes Tipping the Velvet: “For me, I couldn’t have written my novels, and I certainly couldn’t have written Tipping the Velvet, without having had this kind of bedrock of lesbian and gay, but mainly lesbian, writing behind me” (94:50).

5Waters continues to highlight the sense of possibility and acceptance for queer fiction in the 1990s, arguing that the “mainstream” adaptation of her work is evidence “that queer stories have got more and more, that they’re not just niche, they’re not just niche stories with a niche interest. They’re much bigger than that, too” (96:54).

6Many In Her Words interviewees reference Grier, and others mention the impressive reach of that mailing list. It is Touchwood author Karin Kallmaker who describes it as “legendary,” adding that the list included “tens of thousands of women” (61:50).

7See the “About” page in the In Her Words website for a list of authors and novels discussed in the film. Though the fate of Curve is unknown at the end of the documentary, the magazine was reacquired by Franco Stevens and is now part of The Curve Foundation. Curve publishes digital issues quarterly, and past issues are conveniently digitized and available online in the “Curve Archive.”

Elizabeth Venell, PhD, is an instructional associate professor of gender studies in the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi. After years of teaching at universities across the Atlanta area, she now specializes in asynchronous, online instruction, earning a “Wow the Online World” faculty fellowship in 2023-2024. Her research is in feminist and queer cinema studies with special interests in horror and the avant-garde. She was recently starstruck seeing Jewelle Gomez and Cheryl Dunye leave a screening at Atlanta’s Out on Film Festival.