Diane Anderson-Minshall: Where would I like to see Curve going in the next 20 years and why are we experiencing an economic crisis? I can answer this together.
I think the answer to that is multi-faceted. Industry wide magazine publishers saw newsstand and bookstore sales drop in the last two years and advertising dollars for print magazines dropped, too, as many industries like automakers, were adversely affected by the economy. So it's important to remember that in many ways, this isn't a lesbian issue--it's a publishing issue.
But what is specific to lesbian publishing is that LGBT publications--from small rural newspapers to big national glossy magazines--are feeling pressure from mainstream publishing. For 20 years, people have asked me, "What will happen when mainstream magazines start writing about lesbians? Will we still need a lesbian magazine?" And I've always said that'll be a nice problem to have. So now we do have mainstream magazines like People putting lesbians on the cover and writing occasional articles about gay celebrities or lesbian moms or same-sex couples who want to marry. It's a wildly wonderful and unexpected change that 20 years ago I didn't think would ever happen.
Younger readers who came of age after we had lesbians on TV (for women who didn't have to hang their hopes for representation on a single kiss episode on LA Law or a single politician like Sheila Keuhl) there perhaps isn't the same desperation for a lesbian magazine that we had 20 years ago.
But honestly, Curve is no less relevant today and in the next two decades to come. While mainstream publications are starting to include us--in a minority of their coverage--they still don't cover the breadth and depth of our lives. We just did a five-part series on lesbian social issues that no-one has really reported on--lesbian rape, woman-on-woman domestic violence , lesbians and poverty and more. Those articles ran online, but were a natural extension of the kinds of articles we can run in Curve that nobody else is going to run.
You may read about the newest bisexual celebrity in People but they'll ask her questions straight people want to know, not the real core issues that lesbian, queer and bisexual women would ask (just look at the difference between our cover with Chely Wright and People's story on her). So even if a young lipstick lesbian feels at home reading Cosmopolitan, replacing pronouns in her head so the sex tips apply, that magazine will still never go as in-depth into her life and her needs the way Curve can.
I think another economic factor that is facing Curve is that other LGBT publications have folded or been pulled off the newsstands in recent years. Think of the list of queer magazines no longer on the newsstands: Girlfriends, Jane and Jane, Genre, the Advocate. You might think when one queer magazine fails, it means everyone else's sales go up. But it's actually the opposite. Your strong newsstand presence--that big block of gay magazines--starts to dwindle more and more and so readers find it hard to actually see you on the newsstands. Then the less competition there is, the more advertisers start to worry about the market, and then readers worry this means if they buy your magazine it won't be around long enough to fulfill their subscription (after all nobody wants to risk losing money in this economy). So it's a slippery slope, a lot of it based on fear and invisibility.
For Curve, we're fighters and we've been around for 20 years precisely because we know how to adapt to reader needs and weather storms like this. And with our recent survey and some in-house market research we're learning from our readers how to work around the changed economic forces and how to meet their changing needs.
Readers are getting a lot of their information and entertainment online for free, so they have to know why they should pay for a magazine. And right now as much as we love their letters--we get hundreds of letters each year from women just coming out in their 40s and 50s to teen girls who are out but isolated in their little farm towns. They read about lesbian celebrities and watch L Word reruns and love all that but there's more to life than entertainment and Hollywood and if they don't get it at home, in their own community, they look for it in Curve.
Will Curve Make it to 21?
Right now, Curve is celebrating out 20th anniversary in print, and, though we've cut costs everywhere, we're questioning whether we'll make it to our 21st. We've been through this before twice in curve history (many of you were along with us as we battled a lawsuit in the early '90s) so we know what we're experiencing is survivable-especially by such crafty dykes-but we just can't do it anymore without outside support. So, how can you help? What can women do who want to see Curve survive?
Here's how can you help
- Buy a subscription for yourself or your girlfriend
- Send Curve a donation. Vote for lesbian media with your wallet.
- Buy tickets to Curve's 20th Anniversary Gala (October 16, 2010 in San Francisco) and meet some of the celebrities and everyday women who have supported curve over the years. It's a fundraiser that'll help usher us into 2011.
