We recently connected with Jen Rainin and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jen, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

When I married Franco Stevens, I knew she had started Curve magazine but I didn’t know the whole history. Over the first years of our marriage, she would drop little nuggets in my lap about cashing out 12 credit cards in one day and betting everything at the racetrack to fund the magazine, or going to loansharks to make payroll, or being sued by Catherine Deneuve. I realized this was a fantastic story that would make a terrific narrative film, so I set about writing a screenplay. But as I researched, I quickly realized how little of queer women’s history has been documented and saw
the importance of documenting this piece of lesbian history accurately. So I began filming the documentary AHEAD OF THE CURVE. This project changed the course of my life.

Jen, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I consider myself a late bloomer. I knew I was queer at 14, but I was alone and didn’t feel safe to come out. It wasn’t until my late 30’s and a difficult divorce that I found my community. If I had found Franco’s magazine and connected with community earlier, my life would have been very different. I could have started living more authentically so much sooner. But I might not have found my way to marry Franco, which has become the foundational relationship of my life.

Franco’s contribution to the lesbian community inspires me, and it vexes me that like so many stories of influential queer women, her story was largely unknown. My creative partner Rivkah Beth Medow and I felt a deep responsibility to tell Franco’s story as completely and honestly as possible to honor our community and our rich history, and to tell the story of a strong female role model who, in manifesting her own dream, made space for hundreds of thousands of others to have a chance at theirs. We want young women seeing this film to find a model for how to meet the needs of the community by meeting their own needs. We want these audiences, who are hungry to know our movement’s history and lineage, to be inspired to look within themselves to understand their own value and what they need, then to use their voices and act, just as Franco did.

Rivkah and I are worried that our society is becoming increasingly fractured. After a remarkable decade of progress under Obama, the Trump administration stirred conflict and division, and rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ people. Many believe that LGBTQ+ people have full rights since we got marriage equality. That couldn’t be further from the truth. There is deep societal change work that we need to be doing now. Discrimination in the workplace, in the military, and even in the bathroom is being legislated. This matters because the quality of our lives – and even our lives themselves – depend both on our civil rights and on the perception by broader society of the value of our lives.

Within the gay community, we see that many people — mostly younger generations — are chafing against the words we use to describe ourselves. The label LGBT calls out only lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and does not perfectly reflect genderqueer people, intersex people, asexual people, pansexual people, polyamorous people and those questioning their sexuality or gender, to name just a few. And acronyms such as LGBTQQIP2SAA are so unwieldy
that they can further fracture, rather than unite the community. The current conversations stress our differences and leave many people feeling unheard and disconnected. We want young queer women to better understand the history of the words we use and to open to conversations with their elders. The people who live the spectrum of these identities everyday are the experts, and yet they are often systematically excluded from decision making about how their lives and communities are addressed or represented.

Rivkah and I saw such deep impact with AHEAD OF THE CURVE that we started our production company, Frankly Speaking Films, to tell mesmerizing stories about strong queer women and non-binary people. We work with all-female / female-identified crews across a spectrum of identities, races, and ages. Since AHEAD OF THE CURVE, we’ve created the award-winning short documentary HOLDING MOSES about a queer performer learning to mother her profoundly disabled son, executive produced the feature documentary JEANNETTE about a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre, are producing the fiction feature AMERICAN DOG, and are developing several other projects.

We want to live in a world where all queer women and non-binary individuals are valued, and we believe that visibility in media is the most powerful tool to realize that vision. Franco’s magazine was born in a time when writing the word “lesbian” on the cover of a publication was a triumph. In a world where visibility does not yet equal safety, the need for positive stories about queer women has never been stronger. Representing a spectrum of our stories, both to ourselves and to dominant culture, is one of our most powerful tools to forge a world that is safer and more equitable for everyone.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My personal mission is to create the circumstances where others can be inspired to excel and create positive change. That mission informs every business and creative decision I make.

With Frankly Speaking Films, Rivkah and I focus our storytelling on LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people to increase visibility, empathy, and connection in order to create the societal change we need. We are driven by an encompassing desire to beat back the monolithic myths and sad stereotypes rampant in media by telling more of our positive stories and telling them well. And we put the same effort into both the stories we tell and how we tell them. We ensure that the core creative team behind each of our projects has a stake in the communities that the project represents. We embrace inclusivity, recognizing the key role of advisors who strengthen the creative process. We equally value ambitious cinematic projects and social impact, cultivating partnerships and building paths toward social change from day one.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When we began making our first film, AHEAD OF THE CURVE, the Trump administration had recently been voted into office and begun dismantling the progress made over the past 30 years. That got us thinking about broadening the story to include more historical context and lit a fire around why this story needed to be told now. Then Franco got the call from Curve magazine’s current publisher saying the magazine was on the brink of failure. It was a complicated gift which turned out to be the key to unlock the film. It gave us a path to connect Franco’s journey with the phenomenal intersectional work that queer women like Amber Hikes, Kim Katrin, Denice Frohman, and Andrea Pino-Silva are doing today and to tell that story alongside the historical story. That really opened our eyes to the activism happening today, and awakened a desire to carry on the work that Franco started, but through a philanthropic structure. As a result, Franco and I are now committed to building the Curve Foundation to lift up queer women’s voices and tell their stories and Rivkah and I dove into telling more stories that center LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people through Frankly Speaking Films.

Contact Info:

• Website: curvemagmovie.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curvemagmovie/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CurveMagMovie
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frankly-speaking-films/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CurveMagMovie
• Other: https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-shorts-holding-moses?c=series

Image Credits
Jen Rainin