Monday 24 September 2007

Bi Day

Happy Celebrate Bisexuality Day, dear reader. Last year I was running round frantically making a Manchester BiFest happen to mark the occasion. This year I'm not doing anything - just not enough hours in the month - but the Scottish lot have a special event on with Bi Flag coloured cocktails which I definitely want the recipe for to use in future!

One of the things I'd tried doing a lot in the past was getting the various Bi Day events around the globe to link up, at the simple level of having a shared poster or something that we could each print off in our own countries with messages of solidarity from other bis around the world and what they were going to be up to by way of marking the date. "Greetings from Manchester where we will be holding a day of workshops for bi, bicurious and bifriendly folks in the local LGBT community centre" and such. Sadly, though I floated it the last few years on international lists, it seems to be one of those "just me then" things.

Maybe I'll get all fired up again next year. Or more likely 2009.

Friday 21 September 2007

Student Outreach, again

Tonight was the annual "end of freshers week" LGBT society bash at the local university. This one was better organised than the previous couple I'd been to, though once again the PA system was bust.

The bi stall signed up a dozen or so prospective new recruits. The difficulty with student recruitment is twofold: first we're not a student group so don't meet in a nice familiar place on campus; second most bi stuff in the city is on Tuesdays, and so are the student LGBT meetings. We tried tackling that problem a few years ago, moving the night BiPhoria met on - from Thursdays to Tuesdays. Within a year the uni groups which had been meeting on Thursdays at the time moved to also being on a Tuesday.

Our other problem with recruits at the student event is that we wind up running a community group stall in the midst of a bunch of nightclubs offering free membership to new students; you can never be entirely sure whether someone is giving you their email address because they want to tackle bisexual invisibility or because they think they'll get a free keyring and allowed in to an imaginary club cheap on a Saturday night.