Sunday 30 December 2007

The most influential bis in British politics?

As gay news site PinkNews.co.uk unveils their list of the "50 most influential LGBT people in politics", I find myself writing on BiMedia.org asking: where are the bisexuals?

Sure, there's Lib Dem Party President and London MP Simon Hughes, and Green MSP for Glasgow Patrick Harvie who never returns emails from the bi press. There are a few debatable names in there too: does Michael Portillo count for your definition of bisexuality? He reminds me of a late-night Channel 4 show in about 1990 where Jimmy Somerville did a piece to camera saying "a short message for Cliff Richard. Cliff, if the rumours are true, please, please, please, don't come out you would set the whole movement back years."

But the whole list reflects the relative strengths of the L, G, B and T strands of the queer community. Lots of gay men, quite a smattering of lesbians, not a lot else. A lot of people who we infer are gay men because there really isn't any further evidence and it's not in their interests socially or politically to be anything beyond gay or straight.

But it shouldn't be like this. Every half-decent bit of research out there says there are more bisexuals than lesbians and gay men put together, almost no matter how you happen to define "bi". Bisexual politicians should be making up more than half the list.

Well. Here's hoping 2008 is a year when a few more people in political life can put their heads above the parapet as openly and proudly bisexual politicians.

Thursday 13 December 2007

It seems obvious once you think of it

One of the problems with the Bisexual Recruitment Army website has been the lack of interactivity. It's pretty and silly and we've made a biiiiiig banner for waving on parades, but it's terminally "web1.0" as things stand.

But if we made a Facebook group to associate with it... well, it's still not a completely web2.0 project, but at least it has cranked up to web1.1!

Sunday 2 December 2007

Growing the bi profile

For what I think might be the first time, a bisexual event has made the top five LGBT events of the year in gay newspaper The Pink Paper’s reader’s poll of the year. In the category, “Best festival, Pride or event” the shortlist on which readers will vote in a second round of polling in the next few days is: Manchester Pride, Brighton Pride, BiCon, London Pride, Glastonbury.

That's fantastic as you'd expect me to say - even moreso if that list is in order of popularity rather than randomised, though that's probably overoptimistic! It also perhaps reflects that while more people go to some of the Pride events around the country than go to BiCon, people probably get more out of BiCon and it's a more motivated, politicised community than the cross-section of average Pride goers.

The awards voting page is at http://www.pinkpaper.com/awards/ppra08b.html by the way - I do hope we get a good showing for BiCon even though to be honest, the competition is pretty tough there and fifth place will still be an amazing placing to pull off.