‘The sex-toy stuff would not fly today’ – the mag that gripped ‘lesbian mecca’ San Francisco

In 1991, Franco Stevens was 23, broke and working in an LGBT bookshop in San Francisco. She thought the world needed a glossy lesbian magazine, but she didn’t have the money to launch one. So she took out 12 credit cards, borrowed the maximum on each, then gambled it all on a horse race. The horse came in. She took the money and put it on another horse, which also won, and then another, which did the same. With her winnings, she set up Deneuve.

“I almost felt like, ‘Well, if this is meant to be, it will happen’,” she says, from her home in the city’s Bay area. She lives with her wife, their two sons of college age, and a younger boy whom they call “a son of the heart”, who splits his time between their house and, so I know this business from a different angle.” Plus she had the recklessness of youth. “I just felt like, I’ve lived in my car, I’ve had nothing to eat – if it’s meant to be, it will be. And my bankruptcy would be off my record by the time I was 30. So it seemed like everything lined up.”