Either / And

Maler (not Paler)

2012-01-19T15:25:00.001Z

I see Diana Wallis has just stepped down as Lib Dem MEP for Yorkshire. In a "time to move on" way, before anyone thinks this is a defection or what have you.

This follows fairly close on from Liz Lynne's move in West Midlands recently, halfway through the parliamentary term giving her successor a fair amount of time to build a profile in the region. As in Liz's case I suspect this means we get the number 2 from the Yorkshire 2009 list and so gain a male MEP in Diana's place?

In 2009 we saw 6 of 11 Lib Dem MEPs were women. That's now down to 4 of 12.

Can I get a lolcat of "becoming less 'male and pale': u r doin it wrong"?

(Seriously: that's zipping for you!)

How much of the "elected in 1999" team does that mean we still have in place?

Back in the army

2011-12-31T17:55:00.000Z

A few years ago - gosh, it must be about five years now - local bi group BiPhoria dressed up in bad camo print and waved a banner for the Bisexual Recruitment Army as our Manchester LGBT Pride presence.

It was all in good fun and we filled a website with bad punnery - like how we were challenging bisexual invisibility through the use of bad camouflage, capable of marching both ways on the parade ground at the same time, and had a regimental motto of all we need is a few good men, and a few good women, and a place that sells really sturdy beds.

Well, the website stayed up for a while but in the end it wasn't going anywhere fast and so we let the domain lapse, and so while the B*R*A Facebook group is still there, there was no more sign of the B*R*A.

Until now. Back up as a subsection of the BiPhoria website, I give you: The Bisexual Recruitment Army. Hope it gives you a good giggle.

New Year's Promises

2011-12-30T17:12:00.000Z

Wearing my BiPhoria hat I've written a New Year circular to people who we have met at outreach stalls at Prides, Freshers fairs and suchlike. It offers up three suggestions for new year's resolutions for bi folk.

Maybe you’ll want to take one of them up, so I'll share them here too!

* going along to a bi group – there are groups in Manchester, Bristol, Swansea, Sheffield, London, Edinburgh, Birmingham and so forth; see the UK bi calendar.
* booking for BiCon, the year’s biggest bi event – this summer in Bradford and bookings are now open. It makes BiCon runners feel much happier when people book early - and when I say 'feel happier' I mean 'able to sleep at night'.
* subscribing to bi magazine BCN. Because it's remarkably affordable a way to support there being a bi voice alongside the gay and lesbian voices that titles like GT and Diva provide, and because it gives you oodles of writing about bisexuality popping through your letterbox six times a year.

Whether you take up one, all or none of these suggestions – a happy new year to you

How LGBT is your LGBT Pride?

2011-11-25T19:19:00.001Z

About ten to fifteen years ago, there was a trend of "lesbian and gay" organisations and events in the UK shuffling over to calling themselves LGBT, or "lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender".

London L&G Pride and the L&G wing of the Lib Dems were the first I noticed make this change, around 1996. Slowly other Prides and LG(B)(T) organisations around the country followed suit. We've advanced to the point that now, fifteen years on, it looks a little peculiar when you see something that is, at least on the label, LG rather than LGB or LGBT.

But changing the label on the tin is one thing, how far have we changed what's in the tin?

This came back into my mind as I was bumbling around the Manchester Pride website this week. I'd never noticed their Pride Surveys before, but here were some remarkable results.

At the 2008 and 2010 Manchester LGBT Prides, they conducted some kind of survey of attendees. Each time the best part of 1000 people were interviewed, so you would imagine there was some degree of statistical validity to the findings.

I'm going to put trans/cis matters to one side for a moment and ask: what did they show on sexuality?

Lesbians and gay men form the lion's share - 80%+ - of those attending. The next largest sexuality grouping is heterosexual people. Bisexuals only make up about 7% of those attending - a tenth of the attendance by gay and lesbian people.

A remarkable statistic, that hugely underlines the need for bi work and bi visibility at that event, given every study of sexuality worth reading finds more bisexuals - especially when it comes to women - than gay and lesbian people. It is on a par with the stats from Kairos' London LGBT Almanac, which suggested that of all LGBT service users in London, only about 6% were bi.

It would seem we have a long way to go yet before the label "LGBT" really means it.

Inky goodness

2011-11-04T00:09:00.000Z

One of the enduring strengths of bisexual community focused activism or bi organising in the UK over the last three decades has been the arc of newsletters and magazines giving us a tangible existence outside of groups and events. You might be fifty miles from the nearest bi social meetup and nine months from the next BiCon, but there was the prospect of the secret newsletter of the bisexuals dropping onto your doormat any day now.

Originally there was Bi Monthly, which grew from the newsletter of the London Bi Group in the early 80s to being a national forum for bis to talk to one another. When that ran out of steam at the end of the 80s, a successor grew up called BiFrost. It ran for four years and 40 or so issues, some of which were slender and others quite chunky black-and-white magazines.

BiFrost burned bright and then burned up, and in its place came Bi Community News, or BCN. That started in 1995 and is still around today, as the magazine cover with Gwen and Jack from Torchwood above will suggest. With over 100 editions published it's now got glossy with a splash of colour, comes out six times a year, and is one of the two best queer magazines in Britain. As its editor for the last decade, I am entirely unbiased when I say that!

What always seems peculiar to me is that BCN and its counterpart in Germany BiJou seem to be the two big names. Because in the USA things should - to my mind - be at least five times as good. After all, they have a much bigger population than the UK does, and economies of scale in print should mean that a magazine with five times the sales of BCN can do quite delicious things in being bigger, brighter, more colourful and having a higher profile. I've thought enough about what that shift in numbers would do for us here to feel sure of that.

Yet - with all the love I have for the Boston-focused Bi Women newsletter, there isn't anything quite like BCN that seems to have such a national aim or reach. I'm not aware there's even more than one bi magazine in print in the USA any more, since North Bi North West and Bi Tribune folded a few years ago and more importantly since legendary 90s bi and queer magazine Anything That Moves shut down. There is the Journal of Bisexuality but it's an academic quarterly book rather than coffee-table reading.

So it's good to see Bi Social Network trying to break out of that with its bid to launch an offshoot Bi Social magazine, albeit as an electronic magazine for most editions with inky print specials.

I grew up addicted to magazines, the things I was passionate about as a teenager were there in piles of inky paper by my bed, be they Private Eye, Smash Hits or the geekier end of the home computer magazine pool. That might be colouring my judgement, but for me print publications - things you can hold in your hand, leave next to the loo, spill coffee over at breakfast and leave to dry out over the radiator - mean much more than electronic ones.

So I hope that - though their original fundraising plan seems not to be going as well as you'd hope - Bi Social Network can get their magazine into shape and into print too. America could use a vibrant bi press, and the sense of a little competition from over there could only do good things for BCN and BiJou too.

(However, if you're in the UK, BCN needs your donations more than BSN does!)

Bonus

2011-10-09T20:39:00.000+01:00

OK, from now on some of my blog posts are going to be carried on my favourite left-wing blog aggregator as well as on the bi one.

Awesome :)

Harriet Harman has another dime bar moment

2011-09-30T18:15:00.017+01:00

Onetime trans-bashing clueless-embarrassment-to-the-nation equality minister Harriet Harman now has a new role - as a clueless opposition MP.

On balance it's an improvement. Her inability to grasp even pretty damn simple ideas while governing the country damaged our equality legislation and made life worse for people. Now she just embarrasses herself and her party. I'm a lot more comfortable with incompetents in opposition than in government.

So today she's getting herself in the headlines for condemning the left-right coalition's plans for individual voter registration to replace household-based registration. She says it's a terrible thing to do: it will disenfranchise people who are young, black, or poor, and suchlike. It is the act of politicians who are seeking to rig elections.

And the BBC reports her as bewailing that "the Lib Dems - to their eternal shame - (are) colluding with the Tories in changing the law on the electoral register."

So, changing to individual voter registration bad. Apparently. What does Harriet want instead?

She wants ...individual voter registration. Only, rolled out in 2015 not 2014.

Now, maybe I'm just peculiar (it has been suggested) but it seems to me that either this is a terrible thing to do, it rigs elections, disenfranchises the black / poor / young etc... or it isn't. Which year you change over to it isn't going to change that, not when your wiggle room is a matter of twelve months.

Get a grip, Harriet, you election-rigging, youth-hating, poor-bashing [etc!]

With an official opposition of this calibre no wonder the only effective opposition to the coalition is also on the government benches.

Highlighting the differences

2011-09-30T11:34:00.000+01:00

The announcements today and tomorrow from the government will be fun.

In the past with one-party government, (or one-effective-party as in the Lab/Co-op coalition) you had all the exciting pronouncements in one go at the start of the relevant conference week. Now with an openly talked about coalition, each side gets its hot topics to display separately.

So two weeks ago the ministers in the left side of the left-right coalition were the ones getting their special announcements out. Rolling back of the blood ban, same-sex marriage, gender-free passports, to cite the ones that caught my LGBT-centric eye. Now we get the ones the Tory ministers wanted held back til their conference for them to celebrate: so far we've got the extra money for going back to weekly bin collections.

What else will there be to delight the blue-rinse conference audience?

Lost Girl's gorgeous cliche

2011-09-30T00:10:00.000+01:00

Lost Girl is now up to episode four on SyFy.

If you liked Buffy and Angel, you'll probably like this. It's got that vampires-are-real kind of world mythology, with the more 'adult' themes (aka people don't just fancy those of a different gender from themselves, and sex happens) that Angel and later seasons of Buffy had.

But where Buffy dodged the bi bullet with Willow's instant gay/straight flip, Lost Girl takes the bull by the horns. Our central hero, Bo, is a succubus, feasting on the sexual energy of whomever comes to hand without regard for gender; and when faced with a choice of joining the 'light' or 'dark' supernatural sides, she walks the line between them instead, not feeling herself to be either one thing or the other, and thus faces bewilderment and opprobrium from either camp.

You know, I think there might be the odd hint of the Big Book Of Bi Cliche there.

The first season finished showing months ago in the USA so as it starts showing here, I hear of it getting renewed for a second season. Our two lead characters are both women, and programme commissioners on the other side of the Atlantic don't seem to like their scifi to have too many strong women in it: see the cancelling of Caprica or Firefly. Hopefully they'll continue not to notice that our hero in this one is a woman for another couple of years.

Happy #bivisibility Day!

2011-09-23T11:03:00.002+01:00

Happy Bi Visibility Day everyone!

As I was reflecting with someone earlier this week, there's a lot of mirroring between being a bisexual and being a Lib Dem:

It's not either of the two big, popular choices that everyone's heard of.
If you say you are, people will try to get you to admit you're not perfectly equidistant and are therefore one of the two popular choices really.
There's a popular image that it's just a 'stopping off' point and not a real, coherent, long-term thing to be.
It attracts nowhere near the financial and social support that the easier options get.
And finally in this dubious list: after a few brief bursts of fashionability, it's starting to get a little bit more sustained and serious recognition in the public eye.

So hurrah for the growing number of (mostly female, but that's another blogpost) actors and popstars and other such celebs who are coming out and staying out as bi. Hurrah that they are doing so despite the idiot responses of people like Beth Ditto. And hurrah that for the first time, this year Stonewall have given a little nod towards Bi Visibility Day with their tweet linking to the September 23 website.

Happy bi day folks :)

The least trumpeted success of the week?

2011-09-22T13:32:00.001+01:00

This has been a week of three dollops of good news from the government on LGBT issues, but two of those seem to have garnered the most attention.

So while the news of the left-right coalition's plans for same-sex marriage and for changes to the restrictions on donating blood are fab, here's a cheer for the other one that has slipped out.

The government are considering - and presumably with a fair chance of it happening given that these things are more rarely kite-flying under the rigour of the politics of coalition - options for degendering passports. That you could have your passport record you no longer just as M or F - but as M, F or X: Male, Female or Other/Refused.

Brilliant. Brilliant for those of us for whom either our gender does not fit the popular two categories, and those for whom their sense of self is more mutable or shifting; also brilliant for anyone who doesn't think the state has any business recording extraneous data beyond "this is who this is, this is where they are allowed to travel" on a passport.

I wonder if, when it comes in, I could upgrade my old gender-infested passport for free?

So where would they go?

2011-09-13T13:49:00.002+01:00

The Catholic clergy are revolting. Ahem, that is, they are up in arms at the prospect of same-sex marriage in Scotland. Today PinkNews reports:

Bishop of Paisley Philip Tartaglia, who is expected to become the next Archbishop of Glasgow, claimed yesterday that Catholic voters would desert the SNP if marriage equality becomes a reality.

Well where exactly does he think these voters are going to go?

Not the Lib Dems, obviously. The original party of this terrible 'treating all people as if they are created equal' thing that is so anathema to the Bishop's version of Christianity.

Not Labour, who are always just a few years behind the Liberals on these issues.Not the Tories any more, who have been proudly a few decades behind for, well, decades - but who are now playing catch-up as hard as they can.

So... what's left to try, the Greens? Their ideology wouldn't stop the Greens from being awful on queer rights, but their nose for electoral fluffiness and popularity means they aren't making the noises the Bish wants either.

Like the previous lot of dinosaurs, you've got nowhere left to run, mister pointyhat.

Seen through other people's eyes

2011-09-12T22:19:00.001+01:00

Not least because of the dearth of other bi glossy and zinestery titles even internationally these days, BCN-making is sometimes a bit of a lonely furrow to plough*.

As such, early this summer I started doing a little bit of consciously trying to hook into the places where other small press / zinestery types might be found. After all, while I do my best to make BCN look as much of a Serious Queer Press Contender as I can, the 'independence first: advertising is just to help pay for shiny extras' attitude of rugged small-press publishing is entirely zinester culture. I know where my roots are, even if I do get to do the cover in colour these days :) and it might be good to recharge those firey batteries of WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US representation rage and OOOH CLEVER layout creativity.

This led to finding zinewiki, and to a couple of delicious mornings where I dug out a wodge of my 80s and 90s bi zines and tried to remember enough about them to say something meaningful on zinewiki, and thus built up a bi zine(ster) category on it. It was a bit of a shock to find the zinewiki had so many hundreds of hundreds of zines and none of the bi stuff was out there. A happy, heady mix of improving bi visibility, nerding on one of my favourite subjects, and happily reminiscing about the days of buying stuff from abroad before PayPal made it all so simple ("hello little tourist currency exchange shop that I've caught two buses to get to, I'd like to buy five US dollars please, as notes. Um. How much is that?")

In turn this led to a little flurry of zine-buying, feeling a little more inspired to make another issue of QUelectionEERing, and then finding BCN got offered a writeup by people who read lots of zines.

And here it is, over on SpillTheZines. As the doting mother to BCN you have no idea how much trepidation there was in clicking on the link! But silly of me, they were very kind. It is interesting to see it through someone else's eyes though: for instance, I take all the stuff on the website, the links and such, for granted because I've been doing them for a billion years**.

* I originally wrote "plough to furrow" here. It can be hard some issues to get together all the content for the deadlines I aim for, and be artworking promptly when life gets in the way, but it's not THAT hard! :)
** or is it ten years? one or the other.

Is Your Homo Hero Bi?

2011-08-31T12:29:00.001+01:00

A remarkable four of the seven categories in this year's Homo Hero awards have bi nominees!

Have you voted yet?

I'm delighted to be on one of the shortlists - other prominent bi activists are on two of the others, while community press magazine BCN is nominated in another category.

This is an amazing level of bi representation - our community volunteers getting shortlisted alongside people like the director of Manchester Pride or Sir Ian McKellen is amazing in itself.

It's a long shot, but we might win one or another category - there's no judging panel, it's all about the votes cast by the public. So please - get over to the Homo Hero site, show your support for the work done by the nominees and many other people in building us a bi community. And stay tuned for news from the awards 'do' on 22nd September (the day before Bi Visibility Day!)

Manchester Pride

2011-08-31T09:54:00.010+01:00

Most years Manchester Pride seems to get a little better than the one before (2010 was an exception where they regressed to the 90s and went all biphobic on us) and this time around it was lovely, if chilly and wet. There was a new all-time-high in the number of stalls with bi material on them: five! BiPhoria (naturally), Albert Kennedy Trust, LGBT Youth NW, Unison and the Liberal Democrats.

Lots of interest in the stuff BiPhoria does and in other bi projects like BCN, a fistful of people from the Leicester / Nottingham area who got excited when we told them about BiCon this coming weekend, and a whole heap of new signups for the info and events email list. Oh, and the use of "bi-furious" as a neologism continues to be a winner at getting people to come over and ask the kind of questions that lead to education.

Also, the bi pride colours bunting looked fabulous.

Regrets: being so worn out from being bouncy at people all day that I couldn't face staying around for the evening and so missed things like the Sugababes; though unlike my last Manc Pride weekend, there wasn't anything of the "oooh" oomph of the Human League to make me fight to overcome the floomp.

Oh, Stonewall....

2011-08-01T20:23:00.003+01:00

an opinion piece for BiMedia:

The UK's leading "lesbian, gay and bisexual" (according to its Christmas cards) charity Stonewall has published its response to the government consultation on reforms to marriage and civil partnership legislation. It seems that bisexuals have dropped off the Stonewall radar once again.

Stonewall have published their draft submission to the Coalition Government's review of the restrictions on marriage and civil partnership. The submission form first asks for comments about marriage reform to open it up to same-sex couples, and then goes on to the subject of civil partnerships and whether those should be open to mixed-sex couples. In the UK at present civil partnerships are only open to same-sex couples, and marriage only open to mixed-sex couples.

Stonewall's submission begins:

Stonewall seeks to secure marriage for gay people as a civil vehicle on the same basis as heterosexual marriage, available in a registry office but without a mandate on religious organisations to celebrate it. We seek to retain civil partnerships for lesbian and gay people recognising their special and unique status.

And it carries on in that vein. Indeed, after talking only and quite explicitly about lesbians and gay men over marriage reform, the Stonewall submission then responds to a question on Civil Partnership by declaring that as this only affects heterosexual people, it's a matter for them of which Stonewall therefore has no opinion, thus:

This is a matter for heterosexual people and Stonewall would recommend consulting with them and stakeholder organisations representing them.

And, er, that's that.

Newsflash, Stonewall: bisexual people get married. Bisexual people get civil partnerships. Some of the bis who do the one would like to do the other, in either direction, but the law won't let them.

A charity claiming to give voice to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, really ought to be listening to and giving voice to those bisexual people too - even when it does make the answer on a form a little more complicated.

Come on. A campaigning group that was working for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights, would be able to remember bisexuals existed all the time rather than just now and then.

And the most frustrating thing is, in discussing the marriage / civil partnership divide that currently exists, bisexuals are a brilliant case to cite for what's so broken. Ten years ago, bisexual people found their relationships were treated differently in law based on the genders of themselves and their partners: today, after so much equality campaigning and the introduction of civil partnerships, that situation is exactly the same.

Bi people get into relationships with lesbians, gays, straight people and other bis. Gay and lesbian people get into relationships with bis. We are your queer family. And LGB equality is only worthy of the name if we break down the barriers around civil partnerships as well as marriage: campaigning and lobbying for anything less puts the lie to a claim to be campaigning for equality for lesbians, gays and bisexuals.

Queer Left gathers

2011-07-01T15:50:00.002+01:00

It must be something in the air.

The weekend before last was the bi activist gathering; last weekend was the twice-yearly queer left gathering. This time it was in Manchester - and where last time it had been the dayglo surroundings of the Lib Dem party HQ press room, this time it was one of the swish new hotels that have popped up near Piccadilly station.

There was some overlap with the previous weekend's bisexual activist - talking about diversity work, the left-right coalition government's action plan on LGBT equality, and suchlike. There was welcome praise for my inky press efforts here just as there was there!

It's a lot more fun being in government than in opposition: the things you get to talk about are much more likely to lead to real change.

It's also lovely to be able to sit back and let the new generation of officers lead the discussion and planning, and just interject when you're feeling wise or motivated on a topic. Having been Chair, I now know quite how much work doing that role in the organisation takes; it probably makes me a lot more tolerant of this one than I was of the ones who came before me!

Bi activists get together

2011-07-01T15:32:00.000+01:00

The weekend before last was one of the irregular Bi Activism Conferences. I nearly didn't go - being there, with travel and all that, cost me about £100 so it meant there would be nothing in the kitty for playing out the rest of the month - but I'm glad I did.

About 25 of us were there from various roles or interested backgrounds - local group runners, academics, event organisers, the bi press, and more; and we talked about a whole heap of things including some diversity issues around bi spaces, academic projects, how to interact with the left-right coalition's recently announced Action Plan on LGBT issues, ways we could use computer software to aid specific projects, skills swapping and more besides. To break up the talking there was a fun exercise with bits of coloured paper and felt tip pens, and to my relief one bit where it all went over to flipchart.

The academics bit was especially useful - there is now quite a backlog of data from the annual BiCon surveys and it produced a plan for where we go from here with that. A plan which involves me only producing one more survey before it becomes Someone Else's Problem! More widely, the BiReCon project rolls on which is brilliant for academic / activist / community links and communication.

I came away having talked myself into doing a few more bits of activist work - but I'd talked other people into doing one of the big projects I'd been contemplating taking on myself so that's probably a win overall!

The main thing we need to get out there about these weekends though is that you really don't have to be that much of a Big Activist to join in. There were people who were just thinking about having a go at a one-off project there, with voices just as big and respected round the table as the old guard of been-doing-this-for-years activists like myself. It is a space that doesn't suit all bis - it's for people who want to get their hands metaphorically dirty in order to get bi community and visibility building work done, but the door is very open. The next one's in six months: care to join us?

A final note: I hadn't been in the last four years or so, on account of being extra busy with my three-year stint as Chair of Delga, but as I quietly ease down the level of commitment that queer left organising takes from my time, there's a bit more wiggle room for going to things like this. It was a positive thing all round to have the break away, I think: I've been at or involved in so much 'bi stuff' over the last ten years that stepping back made it less easy for others to take me doing things for granted, and more easy for other people to start doing things that I'd been taking care of. But it was good to be back: the energy in lots of areas was really good to see.

LGBT History Flickbook

2011-06-24T00:00:00.001+01:00

Following on from the LGBT History display that LGF had up back in February, earlier this month I found a shiny little booklet. And lo, there are online versions of both.

They're very pretty with a good smattering of dates and range of 'stuff' from queer history. Groups, theories, therapy of varying reputability, events, legal changes for better or worse, and so on. It has a healthcare theme but lots of stuff beyond that too.

There are a few problems with it, it has to be said. There is a dollop of inappropriate party bias: a good Labour thing is ostentatiously credited to Labour, a bad Tory thing to the Tories, a good Liberal thing carefully skims giving any credit. And particularly grating, there is a noticeable lack of the B strand in LGBT. The North West has been quite a hub in the bi movement of the last 20 or 30 years: we've the longest-running bi group in the UK, and a record of bi social and political organising stretching back before then. Big events have been held here, like the 6th International Conference on Bisexuality (with 20 countries represented). But where things like Lesbian Community Project or trans group TREC, LG and T newsletters and inky magazines are talked about, the bi counterparts go unmentioned. Which is a shame, and consistent enough to look like it might be deliberate.

And NHS North West has 'form'. In their 2009 report 'One Year On' they proudly proclaimed of their diversity work that:

"These agreements allow cross-cutting issues to be tackled by all groups, for example the lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) stakeholder organisation has been able to address how issues of sexual orientation affect gay men and lesbian women, BME people, people with disabilities, people at different ages, trans people, and LGB people’s religion or belief."

I've tried a couple of routes in to NHS North West for some kind of comment on how and why
that editorial balance decision on the L, G, B and T was made this time; no answers yet. Expect more blogging here if I get an answer out of anyone, and I'll enjoy scribbling some kind of a writeup in the queer press either way.

But still: a fabulously designed, deliciously informative set of publications. Hurrah for it being there: remember how long it used to take to find out about your queer history?

How to research bisexuality well

2011-06-20T20:41:00.000+01:00

A year or so ago, on a bi academics email list, I wrote - following one of those emails asking for research participants that make you reach for the clue-bat:

Could there be some kind of "what people doing bi academia and bi activism suggest" web page, for students to compare their design against.

Then when such requests come in, we can suggest that they check their design against this established set of guidance. That it's not compulsory to meet all of the guidance but that it will greatly enhance the value of your research (with a sly hint that you may have a better chance of passing on your course, to appeal to self-interest!)

It would need some worked examples on questions around gender and sexuality that we reach some consensus around as good ways of phrasing.

Probably we'd have a couple of suggested solutions to problems rather than a One True Way. And examples of Getting It Horribly Wrong, with why it will produce less useful or misleading data.

Maybe it's already out there. In which case lots of us having it bookmarked would be clever.

It's lots of potential drafting and honing work I'm magicking up, I know, and I also know that I'm just about the least able person here to write it!

But it could perhaps de-personalise such arguments in future: not starting at "I think your survey design is awful" but at "have you looked at this established resource on designing research in this area to acheive effective results?"... then if they blithely carry on regardless, it's their own lookout!

It got a fairly positive response as an idea but no-one picked it up and went with it, so recently I had a first stab at drafting it. Does the below make sense? Is it any use? Bear in mind that at BCN magazine and at my local bi project, we get undergrads doing BA work as well as PhDers and so on, so it's to my mind more worth talking about basics like accountability to the community than one would perhaps like to think of as needed with PhDers.

Feedback from all quarters welcome!

--------------------------------------------------------------
"Researching and reporting (bi)sexuality - well"
--------------------------------------------------------------

**Why we have written this**

As bisexual community activists and / or academics working in and around issues of sexuality and bisexuality, we come across many researchers seeking participants for, guidance or, or peer review of work. There are some common questions, and unfortunately frequent errors that people make when first embarking on research around bisexuality.

So we felt it would be helpful to have a fairly simple "FAQ" to help you get the right start.

We think it's important because we've run into issues like:
- whether researchers feel they are accountable or not to the community
- problems where badly planned or implemented research fails to distinguish sexuality (and particularly bisexuality) well - situations where those problems in turn lead to poor evidence
- this damages academic rigor and reputation
- it also damages the wider bisexual community through misleading findings, reporting, and through impacts on policy making and public discourse.
- and it poses problems for a researcher whose work may be less highly reviewed, or who may gain a reputation that makes it harder for them and others to find willing participants for future work.

**Poor Practice**

Among the issues we've come up against are problems:
- in definitions and research assumptions
- in defining the group of people surveyed or researched
- and with analyses that group or equate "all LGB", "all L+BW", "all G+BM" where it may be that bisexual and homosexual experiences differ in important regards.

**Why It Matters**

- better research is in everyone's interests
- a better understanding and modelling of sexual orientation leads to more honest findings
- it helps in building an evidence base on bisexuality and bi experience
- in turn funding academic work
- and also the results of research that distinguishes bi experience and bi needs helps with funding of nonacademic work of direct impact on bisexual communities

**Good Practice**

(this is where I'm just not an academic and it shows!)
- there are a number of print and online spaces where you can advertise for participants, and a number of groups and events which you could attend to talk to people.
- however, use these spaces appropriately and with respect; remember you are working with people not some kind of exhibits or reference books. State who you are, have the option of people contacting your institution / tutors, be clear what the research is for and if people are not comfortable with you being in a space as a researcher respect that they may well need to be in that bi space more than you do.

- respect of the diversity of labels, beyond straight and gay
- diversity of labels vs practice: bi, pan, omni, and how these are all imprecise
(aside: what I want to get over here is what I tend to phrase as "bi is to pan as lesbian is to gay woman" - there are not neat discrete boundaries - someone can probably explain that better)
- "bisexual"/"bisexuality" not "bi-sexual"/"bi-sexuality". You wouldn't write "homo-sexuality" or "hetero-sexuality"; similarly the "b" words have been around long enough not to count as neologisms and so there is no need for a hyphen to impart meaning.

**Considering your target research subjects:**

Bisexual People Are Not All Going To Be
- polyamorous / non-monogamous
- white
- academic or comfortable and familiar with academic terms / language
- out as bi
- taking on or owning the label
- in the lgbt scene
- in agreement
- in the bi scene / spaces
- willing to be interviewed

**Question Structures**
- this bit I really am over to you Proper Academics out there, with the textbooks and the library access! Can we have some good and iffy examples to help people?!

**Getting Further Help And Advice**

- this is only a sketchy guide because of trying to fit so many areas of research into one document
- engage with groups like biuk and academic_bi e'list and seek peer review of your questionnaires etc before going 'live', or if that has already happened, be open to positive critical examination of wordings and engagement
- talk to bcn & bimedia or equivalent groups in your own country / catchment area
- commit to sharing your findings with the wider bi community both academic and nonacademic e.g. through submitting articles or precis in Journal of Bisexuality, Bi Community News, etc, so that others benefit from your work as well as you.
- deliver on that sharing of findings when your research is done.

Like I say: feedback very welcome. And when the polished version is written I shall link to it from here so y'all don't try and use this early attempt!

Shiny shiny

2011-06-17T19:54:00.000+01:00

Yay, a few days after one of my magazines comes back from the print shop, here comes the other one.

First 200 stuffed and stamped and ready to mail :)

This time they do look very good and shiny. I think I might have to do some photos!

106

2011-06-12T21:48:00.000+01:00

Sometimes it amazes me that this big ole monster of a zine is still going. The lovely fresh ink on the cover says it's issue 106; when you add in the ones with funny numbers that's more like 116. Since some time around #32, it's been my baby. By now we should've all moved on, and I should be doing something more grown up than throwing together zines,

Sometimes, like this week, friends come crashing up against the biphobia in the queer communities that reminds me why it, and spaces like biphoria, still have to be there.

Also, I love making these inky things happen.

We agreed, no leaders!

2011-05-26T22:21:00.001+01:00

When I first got talking to people about the bi scene beyond my home city, I kept coming up against a quote from the film Time Bandits:

We agreed: No leader!

For a long time I didn't realise this was a quote and - as you do when you find yourself around people who've been doing something longer than you have - assumed it was the distilled wisdom of bisexual activists who had gone before. We shall have no leaders, no-one shall be a spokesperson or able to claim to be giving a bisexual voice.

Well, it turned out the full quote is

Randall: do you want to be leader of this gang?
Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader!
Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say.

Which is more of an amusing analysis of how formal and informal power structures work.

Til I found that out, the turn of phrase troubled me as I thought it was a recipe for floundering and getting nowhere fast. Leaders of any social strata community are by definition a bit mis-representatitive, but when one compares how far gay and lesbian liberation / equality / visibility / callitwhatyouwant has gone in the last twenty years with the leaders they've had, and compare it to bi progress in our ostentatiously leaderless (un)structures... well, leadership sometimes looks like it might have been a clever plan. There's lots we might find ourselves at odds with in how LG things have shaped up, and lots of things that I might argue the bi movement has done better thanks to the way our projects and groups have worked, but on balance, and at the risk of deviating from the party line our non-existent leaders don't issue: we had better parties but the other lot got further along toward an arbitrary set of goals.

Leaders are divisive, sure. Anyone having an opinion and holding it up in public is divisive, mind. So long as you have several voices, there's room for additional or replacement voices, and the people involved disagree reasonably on a reasonable amount of turf, leaders are probably a good tactic. Since Bisexual Index formed, for instance, you'll find Bisexual Index voices get quoted in bits of the press and even invited on TV and radio to put a bi viewpoint. To a lesser degree, the same thing has happened with BiPhoria (the longest-running bi group we have now) and Bi Community News.

Having high profile figures connected to the community gives people outside the bisexual community whirl someone to connect to, a way "in" or a voice to draw into their own conversations. A person to invite as a speaker. A person to call for a quote. A person to ask when you need signposting.

I think that's a good thing. Not that I'll always agree with whoever that person is on whatever they're talking about - damn boring life would be if I did, even if I am mellowing into pragmatism in my middle age - but then one hell of a lot of gay people have disagreen with Angela Mason, Ben Summerskill and Peter Tatchell down the years. The fact that a Ben or an Angela or a Peter was there was still mostly a good thing, even if I might have liked to swap someone else into that role.

Which takes me back to the original point of this posting this blog post, which has been a little bit meandery. You know I was talking about this Health Summit the other day? On the same weekend, also in Cardiff as part of an entwined conference series, there is one on LGBT Leadership. A networkingy trainingy event to skill up, empower, develop and all those kind of shiny words, lesbian, gay, bi and trans leaders in activist circles, business circles, political circles, etc.

And on the weekend when the UK's most committed bi political and community activists - bi being probably in this country the least vocally represented of the four strands - are all tied up elsewhere.

Grrrr!

Sigh. Maybe it'll happen again next year.

Let's not be healthy then

2011-05-25T18:44:00.001+01:00

As BiMedia reports, this year's LGBT Health Summit has been announced for the first two days in September. It'll be in Cardiff, having previously gone to places like Newcastle, Manchester and Bristol: I think this is the first time it's been in Wales.

Chances are, dear reader, that you've never been to these conferences, so I shall observe that these are quite useful events with a lot of interesting research shared and best practice (and bad practice) highlighted. From an individual queer activist perspective it's a brilliant opportunity to meet people doing all kinds of work and to learn about what's going on out there, bringing so many strands together in one place. I've gone to quite a lot of LGBT 'sector' things and the Health Summit is toward the top of the usefulness puddle.

However, the first two days in September are also when BiCon falls this year. For the small strand of the LGBT communities who are engaged in bi activism or want to connect to bi issues and community, that's a damn hard clash. For a lot of us, it's a decision that will naturally fall down on the side of being in a properly bi-welcoming space for the few days of the year when that's an option.

It's not the first time these two have been up against each other: when the summit came to Manchester in 2007, it overlapped with BiCon that year too. That conference was one of my Activist Regrets: at the very end of the conference, I was scheduled to talk. I went with the speech I'd prepared rather than do what my instincts told me which was to do one more off-the-cuff about what I had seen in the part of the Health Summit I had been able to attend. I really should have gone with the impromptu one about the things that weren't being talked about, primarily bisexuality but also genderqueer matters. That year at least - I've not been able to go since - it was remarkably centred on lesbian and gay experience and the small-c conservative end of transgender. By the time I and the keynote speaker on trans matters were lined up to talk, most attendees had already left.

There are many many queer events every summer and a lot of them have to overlap. It's blooming frustrating though, especially when from what I can make out the Health Summit has been inching toward being more bi positive / inclusive. If you're just not cut out for BiCon and make it along to the Summit, I'd love to know how it goes.

Preferably not

2011-05-13T19:10:00.001+01:00

This icon hits the buffers then, and needs to drop off the set of images in my blog's right hand column, since it's all over now and in the referendum on changing the voting system last week the Yes campaign died on its arse.

I think the voters went the wrong way on it, and that it was lost for a number of reasons most of which I'll not rehearse here. But the public have spoken, or at least that slice of the public that cared to express an opinion, and fear has triumphed over hope again. At a guess it'll be thirty years before we get another chance at reform of the Lower House.

So: maybe next time :o)

(Such politicking is why I've been quiet here for the last two months. Normal service shall soon be resumed)

What do bis want?

2011-03-30T19:27:00.000+01:00

A bold and overly ambitious title, so I'll reduce my scope in two big steps right away by asking making it "what do people who visit the Bi Community News website want" and then basing my answer on what sections of the website they browse, which is an answer limited to the things that are there for them to look for. If most visitors actually want slash fiction, they won't be showing up here, cos it ain't there.

In the past month - since BCN went over to the new website - the most popular bits of the website according to the analytics data are:

1) The home page.
2) The local groups listings
3) Resources info
4) Subscribe (if only they all did!)
5) Bi Sex & The City, our relationships advice column
6) Both Directions (the guide to the bi scene)
7) Diary of a Crap Lesbian, more relationships and dating stuff
8) Back issues
9) BiCrushing, again relationships stuff, from a different angle
10) Latest stories

What does this tell us?

First, that whatever's linked prominently off the front page attracts people. No shocks there. Second, that people are looking for advice about love and dating, in total in similar numbers to those looking for real-life meetings and advice. And third, that the "subscribe now" page needs to be more hard-hitting to convert all those visitors into subscribers!

I think one of my next tasks with that website might be varying the front page material to see how that affects where people navigate to.

Say what?

2011-03-27T23:44:00.000+01:00

And now with subtitles... A while ago I looked at the very shiny videos that came out of BiReCon 2010 and thought, these could do with a bit more work. I've already variously posted transcripts of them (with, on more recent listening, the odd word awry - sorry!); I suggested that subtitled versions of the videos would be good thinking someone else might have the skills and a little time and take the idea up.

Well, no-one else did that, so now I've started work on putting subtitles on each film so that people who are deaf, h-o-h or whose main languages are not English have a better experience of the videos. It takes a bit of voom and my life's quite busy in places so they are happening on a one-or-two-a-week basis, but getting there.

Here are the first few:
* Robyn Ochs: Why we need to 'get bi' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_1gfjWBZVo
* Anna Einarsdottir: Civil partnerships http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9np9ChMfZs
* Miguel Obradors: biphobia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thWLNFJgtsA

It's been very interesting starting to play with video software and quietly inspiring some thoughts on other work I want to do with youtubey material.

It's not that easy being purple

2011-03-07T22:10:00.001Z

I thought I'd share a (very debateable!) bit of thinky theory I was having a while ago with the wider world.

One of the reliable old debates to set gay and bi teeth on edge is the "who has it easier?" one about the LG and the BBB ends of LGB. I shall try to render it here: try to imagine the voice of The Book in Hitch Hiker's guide for this bit, and some line art graphics of people arguing, example images and all that.

"Lesbians and gay men have it easier" say bis. "They have gay bars, special dress codes and haircuts so they can recognise one another, a sense of community fostered by a more similar experience of sexuality. They are better represented in the media and their sexuality is - after a lot of hard fighting that we helped with - taken seriously and respected in a way that ours is still not".

"Ah no," say the gays, "bisexuals are the ones who have it easier, they have the chance of being in a relationship that gives them heterosexual privelige, they blend into mainstream society. They don't have such a strong political profile because they never had it so tough".

"Urk." The bis pause then retort with, "but look at these stats on things like mental health, they show that we have a rougher deal than you do. And there is so much more work done that is targeting lesbians and especially gay men on things like sexual health, whereas it's assumed we will pick up the straight leaflet and the gay leaflet and work out how to interpose everything neatly together for ourselves."

Both sides of the argument are quite sure they're right.

So, I wonder if what is going on is like this: first, that the conversation above is a kind of class-based analysis, in other words, it leads to sweeping statements that are a pile of steaming piffle when it comes to actual lives. All gay men do not have the same experience of oppression, ditto all bi women, etc. Everyone's experience of oppression is complex and varies through their life and indeed the course of each day.

So it might go a bit more like this diagram here. Pink line for gay/lesbian, purple line for bis. If bi folk tend toward one end of the range of experience or the other, and gay to the centre, then both observations would hold. Because of the options of mixed-sex relationships, more bis would have a low-stress experience of how their sexual orientation affected their lives than would be the case for lesbians and gay men. At the other end of the range of experience, because there is more of an infrastructure of support for gay people, those bis who needed more support would find it lacking and so be pushed further to the right hand end of the graph - even moreso than for lesbians and gay men who might be more likely to be able to find the help and support they needed.

This might also explain why there is more support for lesbians and gay men than for bis: if you are up at the right hand end of the graph, it's probably harder to give support to others since your own needs are quite pressing. Whereas the bulge in the middle of the gay curve causes more people to think that there needs to be something and that they can find the time and energy to make it happen.

I stress, this is just a thinky exercise. I've got no research data, just a bit of a thought that came to me a while ago!

New shiny bi booklet

2011-02-22T13:53:00.030Z

It's taken a good bit of work, but I'm delighted to be showing off about Getting Bi in a Gay / Straight World, a new bookletty publication that I've led on putting together, with the aid of a posse of people from inside and outside BiPhoria.

It's glossy, it's pretty, it's colourful. It is chatty and uses simple words where it can. It does, I think, a pretty good job on including genderqueer well within a publication that is about B not T, sexuality not gender.

And - this is the biggy - it's free and we've made more than 10,000 copies to give away thanks to some very good grant application writing. Once I've got some sturdy enough hosting to cope with people grabbing the PDF, there'll be an online PDF version too. Bear with me, just now I have a lot of work I'm juggling along with a day job and a real life!

Many years ago - 1996 I reckon without looking it up - the then Bi Community News team produced an 8 page info sheet The BCN Starter Pack. It was like a cut-down version of (the then very newslettery) BCN, focused on coming out and what bi resources were out there. What mostly stuck with me at the time was the information about queer zines, but I know there was mythbusting and recommended books and films and so on. It underwent a few updates over the years including being rebranded as Everything you always wanted to know about bisexuality in the UK but didn't know who to ask, a title which at least would stand out in a booklist.

A few years later, around 2005, a gaggle of bi activists got together following one of the Bi Activist Weekends to write Both Directions, a remake from scratch of the Starter Pack. This time about 16 pages long, but on smaller pages - A5 not A4 - with information about things that hadn't been so relevant in the mid 90s like email lists and websites. It was, I'd have to admit, very wordy and lacking in pictures to break up the page: we were going for the cheapest possible print options and those can mangle photos into disasters. Both Directions has needed a decent makeover for a while, but sometimes it's easier to start with a blank sheet of paper.

And so the new guidebook. 28 pages, though that's about as much paper as was in the other two as it's now A6 - the right size for many pockets and postcard or flyer racks. And with 1000s of copies already making their way into display racks across the county. Hats off to CFGM for funding the printing, and many thanks to everyone who helped proof-read, scribe, tweak or otherwise generally encourage this one into life: I'm really proud of it!

lgBt History Month in the North

2011-02-20T13:49:00.000Z

As a part of the events for LGBT History Month, I spoke at a BiPhoria event in Manchester earlier this week.

There was about a half-hour of me talking about the evolution of the bi scene in Manchester over the last 30 years and exploring what I've found so far in looking at stuff from before I was around, in the 1981 - 1993 era. Then there was a kind of Q & A / share your memories discussion for about an hour which was brilliant and I hope some of the people who brought things up there will carry on talking to me about the stuff I don't yet know!

It's been quite a fascinating bit of research, reflecting how far we've come in some ways and how stuck we still are in others: in particular a council with one of the best reputations on LGBT in the country yet with a gulf between their delivery on LG and the rest, and a particularly sharply defined sense of 1980s gay and socialist-feminist politics. And I know I'm just past scratching the surface, with various sources now in mind for where to explore next. Damn but it's addictive!

I've learned things I never knew about the evolution of the bi spaces the city has had, and discovered there's way more than you can fit into a half-hour so started picking particular narratives to explore in the story. And I promise to write it up properly over the coming year to record our history rather than just let it sit in my head.

BCN banner

2011-02-15T14:41:00.007Z

How about a nice little "subscribe to BCN" button? Suit your blog's weblinks down to a tee!

Looks like so:

Example code:

<a href='http://bicommunitynews.co.uk/subscribe'>
<img alt='' height='62' id='Image3_img' src='http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I-zhlMUI5mM/TWELmDrGQrI/AAAAAAAAADg/AjoD9ksvkVg/s214/bcn-subnow.png' width='214'/>
a>

Are bis boring?

2011-02-10T22:34:00.003Z

Because I'm a hip, happening, party animal kind of a person, I've been reading the research findings of the Government Equalities Office's work on "experiences of and barriers to participation in public and political life for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people". Now it's a huuuge great long report and there are some useful and interesting things in there both as a queer activist and as a left-wing politico. But there was one thing that really leapt out at me after a while.

They aimed to recruit 80 interviewees. 20 L, 20 G, 20 B, 20 T. That in itself is a bit iffy - there are for instance almost certainly more bi people than lesbian and gay put together - but let's accept it as a way of getting a broad L+G+B+T cross-section for now.

They recruited 20 lesbians, 22 gay men, 21 transgender people, and ...13 bisexuals. Apparently, we were really hard to find. So they gave up looking?

And then they interviewed this group of 76 people (apparently no-one was both B and T, or what have you) and picked the most pertinent quotes from the panel to intersperse through the report, as you do when a long wordy publication needs a bit of colour. Quotes were anonymous but tagged [G] for a quote from a gay man, and so on. I thought there seemed to be a bit of a dearth of [B] so counted them up, as I had a long train journey to pass.

Lesbian: 20 people, 31 quotes
Gay: 22 people, 32 quotes
Transgender: 21 people, 27 quotes
Bisexual: 13 people, 12 quotes

Gosh. L, G or T, get interviewed and we'll use on average one and a half snippets of what you contributed. Bis? One quote each, form an orderly soundbite queue please.

So: are bis boring, is this within normal statistical distribution, or is this a somewhat suspicious bit of subediting from GEO?

From inventing homosexuality to erasing bisexuality in few years

2011-02-08T23:48:00.020Z

So, I was down at the LGF for a bi group meeting and discovered upstairs from our meeting was a great big exhibition display doodah about LGBT history, focused on health issues and in the North West in particular.

It was ever so pretty; I must post pictures here (I did take a few snaps). However, it is rather lacking in one of the four strands of LGBT. You can guess which, it's the one I'm almost always grumbling about when I say things like that.

Now the early stuff, fair play, it is really a matter of debate to try and apply modern labels and meanings to relationships before words like homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual were in circulation. Sappho, for instance: lesbian icon, killed herself over her love of a bloke, but where would her sense of self have been if she'd had the modern Western-European sense of identities and life choices.

Even 100 years ago, when we started to have a notion of homosexuality but for many people things could lead to social ostracism, imprisonment and more.

But in the last 30 years - let's call it the "post Bowie era", there has been a growing amount of definitely, definedly B stuff.

When you're doing a timeline that talks about the first lesbian and gay things in modern Manchester, stuff like the arrival of LGF on the scene or the lesbian newsletter, the TV/TS helplines and groups... to not include similar things in the bisexual community looks like a deliberate omission.

Who was involved in putting it together? Damnit, display boards without email contact addresses on them...!

The BiReCon Files 9: Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

2011-01-29T19:18:00.001Z

Christian Klesse - Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

"OK, the first set of problems I want to briefly relate to, refer to questions of identity and identification.

You know, if you look at the historical and sociological literature on LGBT sexualities, there is a common sense, I suppose that non-heterosexual relationships are often constructed as deviant, there is something wrong with it, pathological, they are considered to be more problem-ridden and also you know less stable more fragile.

And you can find these descriptions in academic literature but you can also find these ideas in popular culture.

I suppose, you know, that some of these themes which I would argue are targeted, address non-heterosexual sexualities in a more general sense, are even more pronounced in the case of bisexuality. Because as David Bell said in an article in the mid 1990s in 1994: bisexuality is a kind of identity which is often assumed not to exist at all. So you know, problems around bisexual identity take often a particular twist, let's put it this way, because, you know, bisexuality is considered to be 'just a phase', an issue of immaturity, indecisiveness, of internalised homophobia or lesbophobia and so on.

We find bi-negativity across various discourses social life worlds. And I think bi-negative thought and bi-negative ideology very often finds a quite distinctive way of articulating itself in distinctive sexual cultures so there's no - I am going to talk a bit about biphobia in a while - but I think there's no such thing as biphobia as a universal force operating in society. It depends very much on the context.

The BiReCon Files 8: Bisexuality as Portal to More Sustainable Use of Resources of Love

2011-01-27T19:04:00.003Z

Last but one transcript from the BiReCon videos.

Serena Anderlini D'Onofrio - Bisexuality as Portal to More Sustainable Use of Resources of Love

"My thesis is that we are perhaps the pioneers of the future of bisexuality and that we can see it as - just to try on for size, we can see bisexuality as a portal, as a portal in a sort of a digital metaphor, to a future that is more sustainable in the way we use the resources of love. This is a significant concept.

You know, as lovers we are resources, as people capable of emanating, of radiating, of offering love, we are resources, we are resources to other people who are seeking this love. And they are resources for us. Often our species has claimed itself outside of the resource chain. There is a mistake in that, we all are resources, to some extent, even though we are not just resources. And the presumption that our species is special and that everything else is resources for us is a bit of a problem and it can lead to our extinction. So we better figure it out before that happens, is my suggestion.

The BiReCon Files 7 : Heterosexual Men, Bisexual Behaviour

2011-01-25T19:01:00.003Z

It's been a while since I posted one of these, transcribing the videos from the BiReCon youtube channel. Only two more to go after this one!

Eric Anderson -- Heterosexual men, bisexual behaviour

"we have so many young guys come up to us, five-fold what we had guys in their late 30s and 40s. And actually, it became quite more, much more difficult to find men at 42 years of age than it did to find the 18 year olds and younger. We had a 14 year old come up, said he's a black football player in Compton. Wow. It says something about times changing.

Now all of the sociological literature on homophobia and on sex in general shows that in the last two decades we have made great strides. Thanks to identity politics, thanks to legislation, thanks to all of our efforts, we've made great strides in changing the cultural landscape in terms of stigma. The traditional double-standard for women having sex is falling.
A strong hookup culture is emerging for university students.
Homophobia is dropping away.

All of the qualitative longitudinal research shows that, whether it's the General Social Survey if you're familiar with in it the United States or the British Survey of Social Attitudes. All shows for example that for instance homophobia is dropping at an incredibly rapid rate.

As a side note, the one thing that's not changing is our belief
that monogamy is the only right and proper way to go.

So this is Coalition, erm, four in a row?

2011-01-21T19:22:00.013Z

The penny just dropped with me that while we have a left-right coaliton just now, we had a centre-right/centre-right coalition in the previous three parliaments due to the Electoral Pact Of Complete Submission between the Labour party and the Co-Operative Party. The Co-operative lot insist they are definitely a real party: I wonder how hard they negotiated their coalition in the days after May 1st 1997?

Almost there...

2011-01-21T09:13:00.002Z

Oh, the shiny things I shall unleash upon the world!

But first there's a bifest to get out of the way 8)

A Bit Quiet

2011-01-03T13:06:00.000Z

Seasonal mega-lurgy has been keeping me quiet here the last couple of weeks and various things will probably keep me tied up for the next month or so too.

So by way of a brief new year's message, an old comparison came into my mind this weekend that fits the LiberaTory Coalition and its "cutting public expenditure back to slightly less unsustainable levels" agenda well. You don't like doing it, but it's the same as wiping your bottom: if you didn't do it, the mess you'd end up in would be even less appealing.

Sharing

2010-12-18T17:18:00.002Z

A little geeky update for you about some of the bi news intermawebs.

I've added to BiMedia.org a bunch of share icons on each post so people can easily repost / link to news items on twitter, digg, facebook and suchlike. Almost as soon as I do that, I read that they're closing down del.ici.ous

*hacks a bit out of the code*

OK, that's back to looking shiny and with-it :)

The Sekrit Squirrel project of building a new BCN website is coming along nicely, and I now realise that having a similar easily-shared arrangement for material on there would be clever. Yay for content management systems, implementing it on the existing website would take ages!

If as you look around them you have any bright shiny ideas about the bi news sites, let me know: I won't think up everything on my own.

TV: tempting yet dangerous

2010-12-12T15:07:00.000Z

Every so often we get emails seeking camera-friendly bis to the BCN Towers mailbox: so here comes another one...

OMG! Totally Peaches is a brand new take on a problem show, hosted by Peaches Geldof. With professional advice from experts we will aim to help find a resolution to your problems. The show will revolve around the confessions, compulsions, problems and obsessions of you, the ITV2 viewer.

Dare I pause for a cheap remark about that last sentence, given I only found out there was an ITV2 about three months ago? No... OK, on we go:

If you have a problem and you’d like some help and advice please fill in the attached application form and email it back to problem@itv.com with a photo asap!

We look forward to hearing from you.

It's always a thorny dilemma. You want bi visibility - you perhaps don't want the kind of visibility this show is likely to generate as your preference (or even, in the land of AV, your second or third) - but while this might not represent you, it does represent a slice of bi life.

In the mid 90s the pages of BCN were filled for a couple of issues with the stories of some bi folk who had gone on a popular TV chat show - I could name names or I could just say that at the time the future's bright, the future's being an MEP for three parties in the space of five years. It was apparently sold to them as a chance to raise visibility, but after the event seen as more of a 'sting', with an audience weighted towards biphobia. Then the presenter got in a bit of a pickle and that episode of the show was never broadcast, so we're left guessing about how the balance in the final cut would have gone.

So... do you have a bisexual dilemma that you want to share with the nation, yet salacious enough to tickle an ITV programme maker's fancy - if possible coupled with a desire to meet Peaches*? Will it definitely not muck up your life or the lives of those around you? If so, go for it. See you on the digibox from the safety of my sofa; and ITV2, consider your show plugged.

* I searched the web for pictures and wouldn't blame you on that bit, she looks a bit soft and fruity.

Makes yer proud

2010-12-08T15:51:00.001Z

I see John Hemming MP says he is now going to vote for the fees proposals after a group of people campaigning against the proposals occupied his office, consciously premeditatedly and deliberately prevented his staff from being able to do their work -- and thus will have affected the vital stuff MPs offices do supporting all sorts of people.

Knowing the kinds of things that go through those offices it's a selfish, wilful, damaging thing to do - often MPs staff are helping people who have gone to them in a state of desparation or last resort. Hardline Thatcher's children that the protesters are, the idea that anyone else might matter is evidently beyond them - there is no such thing as society, only what I want, with the new codicil paid for by someone else, and whenever I want it. The spoilt, arrogant, BNP-think-alike tossers.

Hemming has now said he'll vote in the opposite way to what the demonstrators wanted to pressure him into doing. Genius - I'm not especially convinced either way on this fees vote, but in the circumstances you can't fault his actions - it's what the hashtag #standuptobullying was all about.

The BiReCon Files 6: American Institute of Bisexuality Projects

2010-12-01T23:11:00.000Z

Another transcript for turning into video subs.

John Sylla - American Institute of Bisexuality Projects

TBA is to be announced - cos we haven't, ah haven't have not considered, because we haven't - well, not considered the scholarliness.

Well, Eric Anderson announced the first one - different cohorts of bi men. We have one on polyamory and hormones in women and its relation to sexual orientation: how do people percieve themselves and what is their hormone level, does it fluctuate?

[audience: what's tba?]

To be announced, not published yet, but well along - funded. Approved by the - already studies underway.

We've got a longitudinal study with a scholar who is working with women over one to two years and they'll be checking in with them every month saying what is your sexual orientation, level, what is going on with you, what are your fantasies and please rub this, spit in this jar, and measure your hormone levels in your saliva. And then another one, a very interesting one, seeing during menstrual cycle, during the times when a woman is more fertile, is her sexual orientation or her fantasy somehow different. And maybe people have experience of this but it's never been academically rigorously studied.

We have another viewing patterns one - coming out of the gate that we approved at a meeting last night.

Here's an interesting one, does the timing of maturing, sexual maturity in puberty does that have some organisational effect, like if you have a late puberty do you have a different sexual orientation on average than if you have an early one or a normal one. Because some people think we have periods of plasticity during which you know maybe it can get reorganised so maybe bisexuals are somehow different that way and they don't grow into being monosexuals.

Body image issues, do bisexual men have different body image concerns than straight men do and gay men do?

And then, ah, Amanda's work the straight identified men who like to have sex with men. More on that in a second. Here I say "tba squared" because tt's not only to be announced, it's to be approved but these are sort of in the pre-pipeline.

Um, Studying the trajectory of development of sexual orientation.

One of the interesting results in this author's proposal is he says, he looks at the data and there's some old work out there that say you'd be happier if you could just be gay and accept the gay identity because men or women who accept the identity then get more mental health.

And his - he says no, that's not it, the problem is that they're not accepted as bi. There's no cultural affirmation, there's no community. And it's the non-acceptance, not the bi label itself that is causing the problem. So it's a society problem not an individual problem. Backed up with real data.

More on learning processes and sexual preferences; and here's one that just came in, it's pre-pipeline. Correlating attention, and that feeling of I can't take my eyes off them, of someone, and how does that correlate with bisexuality? Can you measure that attention [fades out]

Lumme. There is so much research going on out there. I wish they'd damn well write it up for the community press! 8)

It gets better, says Minister for LGBT

2010-12-01T19:12:00.001Z

I missed it at the time but I see that Lynne Featherstone MP - the Minister for LGBT Equality in the Coalition Government - has made a short YouTube film as part of the It Gets Better... Today campaign. She talks about how remarkable the story of LGBT rights in the last 20 years is: "from legal stigma to legal recognition", "the swiftest and most profound social change that I have witnessed in my lifetime".

It's noticeable how well she keeps talking about LGB&T rather than lapsing into "lesbian and gay". For a moment she talks about homophobic and transphobic bullying, which reminds me the importance of teaching people B-related words as well as "bisexual" itself.

She may be slightly kidding herself that it has got better for everyone, but overwhelmingly she is surely right.

the state of 'left' discourse....

2010-11-29T09:14:00.000Z

I know Labour don't have a working majority, but given what's sauce for the goose... Labour have BETRAYED US ALL by not being in government any more, they LIED because Gordon is no longer prime minister, and worst of all they have already U-TURNED on their promises of increasing VAT, implementing the Browne report, holding a referendum on AV, slashing housing benefit... the FIBBING ROTTERS!

The BiReCon Files 5: How Civil Partners Meet

2010-11-23T09:19:00.000Z

Another BiReCon video transcript for you. Anna Einarsdottir - How Civil Partners meet

Thank you very much Meg.

So actually this project is entitled "Just like marriage: a young couple civil partnership". And I work side by side with Dr Graham (??) who unfortunately isn't here and Professor Carol Smart. Now, we've been doing this project for the last two years and so I'm really really grateful for the opportunity to come here, I really appreciate that.

So my focus for today will primarily be about how civil partners meet. What kind of stories people tell about this exciting part of the relationship
and then their intentions, what are their intentions when they start to set out. What I must say is that they're not necessarily looking for a long-term relationship, it's more like just go and see,
how it, you know, take it with the flow kind of thing.

[.fade out/fade back in.]

Slightly different circumstances. While most men meet online, women meet through their existing social network - through work, through friends, through church.

What about the process from casual dating to a relationship? Well to begin with the importance of transparency and honesty were stressed by many. Which included not playing games or getting into merry-go-round situations such as "I'm not texting you because she isn't" or "I've rung him so he must ring me" or "I will leave it for two days" or "she doesn't think I'm too keen". You know, and perhaps this can be interpreted as a sign of how few if any dating rules apply to same-sex relationships as opposed to opposite-sex relationships. And finally what I would like to say is something about how people transition from a relationship to a committed relationship.

Now the future of a relationship is often determined by critical moments, such as hospitalisation, death in the family, or one party moving away. It's the reaction that matters and how partners handle the situations, these difficult situations, which win people over largely because they feel they are cared for - but also to think that they are able to handle the responsibility of the future, They don't run away or panic: in other words, for our participants, they become CP material.

I found this one a really interesting talk in the gendered divide it highlighted - it was about LGB people rather than just bi in its research, looking at same-gendered couples, and so there was a lot the chimed with my own non-academic observations about the human geography of queer space and life.

Rose... actors speak out on how "It Gets Better"

2010-11-16T09:56:00.001Z

It's great to see that there are now more "It Gets Better" videos being made aimed at supporting bisexual young people who are being bullied. Actors Stephanie Riebel, Fay Wolf, and Kristen Howe from web mini-series "Rose by any other name" have got back together to film one - with the help of filmmaker Kyle Schickner and the American Institute of Bisexuality. Here's what they have to say:

Bi Telly day?

2010-11-08T15:44:00.006Z

Yes, I do want to have my televisual cake and eat it

Coming to this a little late - back on August 1st, over in the USA the Logo channel ran a “bisexual marathon,” airing a series of bi related films and documentaries: Imagine Me and You, Bi the Way, Can’t Bi Me Love, Bisexual Girls, and Three of Hearts.

I wonder when we might see TV over here do that, and without adding a sensationalist "now let's look at one or two very specific bi experiences and pretend they're all bis are about" show or three to the roster. Anyone got a friendly ear at Channel Four?

Though as I think about it - surely Channel Four would probably decide it should be the Top One Hundred Bisexual Characters On Television Night. Good luck researching that...

The BiReCon Files 4: Why We Need To Get Bi

2010-11-07T14:46:00.008Z

Another transcript from the BiReCon videos for you: here is Robyn Ochs -- part of her talk on why we need to 'Get Bi', which looked rather like this:

Robyn says:

Isn't this exciting? Hehe! I am so happy to be here. Wow. So quick audience survey - how many people are here from outside of the UK?

Wow. If you're from outside of the UK and you're in the first row where are you from?

[audience: Germany, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, US, Israel... fade out]

We love binaries. And when you think of how sexual orientation is constructed in most places by most people, it's constructed as having two boxes. Gay, and its opposite, straight, right.

And of course in this binary construction we have one box that is more valuable and more honoured than the other - culturally, right, the straight box is more valuable - not by us, by them.

The straight box is considered you know a much better box and a bigger box and the gay box is considered a subordinated box

And in betwen those two boxes. It's like the boxes
they have walls. They have solid steel walls, right, and lids to keep the people in. And in this kind of social construction they are separated by this big void. Like they are opposite sexualities. We even use terms like opposite - like "straight is the opposite of gay" - and they are separated by the void, the void of nothingness

I think that is another challenge to understanding bisexuality, is that people don't - they have a hard time imagining any space between the two.

The only time people can imagine something between straight and gay is when it's a transitory thing, when someone might be sliding from one to the other.

But it's seen as a temporary place, as an unstable location that isn't real because it's in the void

And this is something that is a big challenge for us and one thing that helped me not be so frustrated by this is that we do this with a lot of different things. We like to put everything into binaries.

The BiReCon Files 3: Finnish Bisexuals in 1999 and 2009

2010-11-06T14:22:00.004Z

Another transcribing of the YouTube shorts from BiReCon. Jenny Kangasvuo - "Comparing the Experiences of Finnish Bisexuals in 1999 and 2009".

What does this increased visibility of bisexuality mean for people who identify as bisexual? What kind of contradictions do bisexuals meet when tackling with everyday life? And what kind of meanings does the concept of bisexuality get in their lives?

I will illustrate these questions by telling some of the stories of my informants.

I have three stories to tell and the first of them Ella's story reflects the changes in Finnish legislation regarding sexual minorities.

I will skip the first slide and come back a bit later.

And the first story is an ordinary story. Ten years ago I made a joint interview with Ella who was born in 1975 and Taro was born in 1978. A young female couple who both defined themselves as bisexual. They described themselves as a lesbian couple that consists of two bisexual women - the word lesbian in their use referred to the form of their monogamous relationship, a relationship with another woman.

Ella also says that they have a lesbian lifestyle - according to her, having a bisexual lifestyle would be possible only for singles or people who have multiple relationships, so lesbian lifestyle means means that well, two women and no extra persons in addition . Most of Ella's and Taro's close friends were lesbian and many of them even contested the term bisexual with which they defined their sexual identity.

And then, in 1999 Taro said, "but I could not be with a man only even if I loved him. I would need to be involved with women too. But when I am with a woman I can very well be without seeing any men at all."

So according to Ella they were leaning on lesbianism even if they described themselves as bisexual.

In December 2009 only Ella answers to my request to make a new interview. And her experiences reflect during the last ten years refect the changes in the legislation.

And Ella says that her story is an ordinary story among her reference group, and she herself uses the term reference group referring to lesbians with children so Ella's reference group is lesbians with children.

She says: first everybody married in a hurry when it became possible, and then everybody started having kids while it still was possible and the result is the wave of divorces that is happening now, it is totally terrible.

And now let's get back to those changes. And there is a list of changes. [slide]

And Ella's life reflects these changes perfectly. Ella and Taro registered their partnership right after that, right after it became possible, and then Taro gave birth to two children.

And the artificial insemination became judicially available for female couples in 2007 but Taro gave birth to her kids before that. The lovers became mothers and Ella says sarcastically
that anything else all but being a good mother became superfluous

Ella and Taro were active members in the community of rainbow families - well I don't know if the term [audience murmurs] at least most of the people seem to recognise it - families with children, sexual minority families with children, something like that.

However after the second child Taro became depressed and started abusing prescribed drugs. So it was quite startling to hear that bisexuals seem to have more mental health problems like Meg told during the first session - I was, my mouth ajar gave when I heard that because it I am not a health researcher but my interviews seemed to reflect the same thing.

Anyway, Ella tried to hold the family together but after a couple of years Taro took the children and left her because of another woman.

They divorced and Ella started to fight to attain the rights to be a judicial parent to her children. Currently she is in a process to adopt her children since adoption became an option only in 2009. And these changes had had a profound effect in Ella's and Taro's life.

Taro became pregnant twice within two years, through artificial insemination partly because Ella and Taro feared that the new legislation would deny the treatment from same-sex couples. So the law passed and artificial insemination is possible for same sex couples or female couples but before that it was a real fear that only married heterosexual couples would get artificial insemination so Taro had to get pregnant as soon as possible for fear of not getting to have any children at all.

BCN editing week

2010-11-05T14:52:00.000Z

Being a busy / overworked queer activist means that there are weeks in my year marked out for putting together this or that publication. The rest of the time I may choose to pay less attention to that project so I can chug ahead with another plan - this past week for instance has mostly been about considering events to hold in early 2011 rather than about either of the queer magazines I work on or the project to renew BCN's website.

Next week is one of the weeks where I'm putting on the editrix hat to bring together a new edition of BCN. If you're thinking of submitting something, either for next week or another future issue, now's a good time to let me know!

The BiReCon Files 2: Deconstructing Biphobia

2010-11-04T13:59:00.000Z

Miguel Obradors talk on "Deconstructing Biphobia" is the next video I've chosen to transcribe from the BiReCon talks. Again, this is only a small slice of the presentation, and again here is the video on YouTube before I get down to the words:

Why should we talk about biphobia at BiReCon?

Because here here, we have come here to empower ourselves, to get positive energy to come back to our own countries and to share the knowledge learned. So this biphobia is always negative. I think that it's important to talk about biphobia because biphobia is intense in bisexuality in the way we understand ourselves, in the way we relate to other people.
And the problem with bisexuality, with biphobia and so on - those terms have been defined, this discourse, by straight people according to the heteronorm. So many bisexuals don't feel identified with bisexuality or don't understand what biphobia really entails because biphobia was biphobia was created by analogy from homophobia but they are very different concepts and very different discourses.

So what I'm talking about today is not biphobia in itself, it is the structural oppression that bisexual people experience
in our every day lives. And this structural oppression
is biphobia, is homophobia and is heterophobia as well.

So about this system of structural oppression - when understanding biphobia, homophobia and heterophobia, you need to take into account that these forces have an effect on bisexual people in a conscious and unconscious way. You can be aware that we are being oppressed maybe we are not of the fact that we are being oppressed. This oppression can also be indirect, direct, or symbolic through different aspects. Also it can be interpersonal as well. So there are many different factors that overlap each other and can have an influence in this way.

Also as I define myself at the beginning, to say that most of the bisexual people I know they are also polyamourous, or kink, or transgender or genderqueer and so on. When you don't want to be in a box, you don't want to be in other boxes either. So I'm saying that because bisexual people experience oppression for being bisexual but also for other lifestyles they have, because of their sexual orientation, because of their subjectivity, and we need to analysse all of this in a holistic way.

It gets better

2010-11-02T11:52:00.002Z

Suburban Bi (who frustratingly isn't on the blog aggregator at the moment due to feed compatability issues) found a UKanian voice and one mentioning bisexuality in the videos for "It Gets Better".

Here:

I love all the personal stories in this project, even though some of them are heart-wrenching and some have had to be made by friends for people who they've lost. And it's wonderful how it's grown like topsy since it started: I know that the person who started it in the USA is better linked to the media and so forth than me, but if I'd started it and you'd told me it would end up with the President of the USA making a video for the series, I'd have pointed at you and laughed. In a non-judgemental, caring kind of way :D

The BiReCon Files 1: What's Out There

2010-11-01T12:45:00.000Z

I thought it might be useful to type up the words from the BiReCon videos. Maybe then if I or someone with better video skills than me has time, they can be turned into alternative versions of the videos, with subtitles on. Or someone with translation skills could produce versions with subtitles in other languages.

So starting at the start with Meg Barker's introduction to the day and the overview of some research work by BiUK.

This is going to be not so new to anyone I'm sure but bisexuality is pretty invisibile in the media. [audience laughter] People tend to be presented as going from straight to gay or gay to straight and bisexuality is very rarely considered. So our most recent one is this guy from Eastenders, which I don't watch but I believe he is called Syed Masood? If anyone does watch Eastenders - but was marrying his girlfriend and was also having a relationship with a guy, and he's apparently presented as "really gay" - you know, so he's really gay but he's marrying this woman. And we had similar representations on Coronation Street and The Bill and various other of our soap operas. So UK soap operas tend to be, you're either gay or you're straight.

Similarly in our - oops, my sash is falling off, this is my organiser's sash. When politicians are mentioned in the newspapers you get the similar story. If they are married politicians and it's found out they are having a relationship with a man with another man, a woman with another woman, it tends to be that they are gay now or they were really gay all along - you know, it's not considered.

We looked a bit in this paper at the difference between bi women's representations and bi men, and here is Rebecca Loos who had an affair with David Beckham or there were rumours that she had. So she is presented as this sexy bi-curious, but that whole kind of is she doing it just for titillation of men kind of thing. Um. Whereas for bi men we did get quite a lot of that kind of research you get in the New York Times piece about 'gay, straight or lying' - this, the idea that bi men don't really exist, that permeated as well into the UK media. So for bi men there's a more like, scepticism about whether they are really bisexual.

And I just looked, to kind of update you all, at the Stonewall reports. There's been two really useful Stonewall reports. Tuned Out about the BBC British Broadcasting Corporation, you know, how do they represent LGB people, and then Unseen On Screen was about youth TV, and they did focus groups and they looked at lots of TV programming. And again, bi invisibility within LGB invisibility, so there wasn't much representation of LGB people and what there was, wasn't good, and then within that representations of bis were one per cent I think in the Unseen On Screen and all of the one per cent of all LGB representation was B, and all of it was negative. And people in the focus groups said things like all of the bi people are cheating, and they're greedy.

I end on an optimistic note, we've got Captain Jack from the [audience cheers] from Doctor Who and Torchwood. Now, seen as quite a much more positive bi character. Doesn't use the word 'bisexual' in the show, but the actor has used the word about the character, and it's quite clear that he's attracted not just to more than one gender but to more than one species, so... [audience laughter] still a bit of the promiscuity kind of stereotype going on there.

Helen's going to talk in a moment about her other research but before she did that, she did some research about the bi activism and she looked at the books on bi activism in the UK and found a real shift from an identity politics agenda, you know, we're bisexuals and we want the same rights as LG people and heterosexuals, to a more queer activism, so there has been a gradual shift towards more, a more kind of a queer perspective rather than an identity politics perspective and she might say a bit more about that in a mo.

And Surya Monro who is also on our team and colleagues they did this report very recently 2010 which was looking at local authorities initiatives about sexuality and trans and found that most of those sort of LGB or trans initiatives didn't make specific reference to bi people in those initiatives. So again, it's sort of an invisibility issue - and we know that the B tends to get dropped off a lot of organisations that are LGB or LGBT will drop off the B, there are similar problems with the T of course.

Community linkage

2010-11-01T11:52:00.001Z

As one of the million bi activist tasks on the to-do list that can be taken care of while waiting in at home for a delivery, I've been making BiBloggers a little bit more readable with a more purpley blue aspect and a bit less grey-on-white.

I think we need some graphics for people who are on the BiBloggers syndicator to be able to link to BiBloggers from their journals / sidebars / whatever.

I'm not having a brilliant lot of ideas for that but have made this for my one:

If anyone can come up with something better I'd be really happy to upgrade! :)

Passed over again...

2010-10-13T11:25:00.005+01:00

Stonewall, the - how should I put this - sometimes controversial LGB equality campaign group, have unveiled their shortlists for their annual awards.

A host of categories exist, and frustratingly they don't seem to publish a complete set of nominations: Community Group of the Year could for all I know have a shortlist of BiScotland, BiPhoria, Bothways and BiVisBristol. But without that set of nominees being public, what catches my eye first is the shortlist for Publication of the Year: Attitude magazine, Midlands Zone, The Lawyer, The Times and the Radio Times. BCN cruelly passed over once again there: perhaps if we added TV listings then the glitterati might love us?

And I see that: Ben Summerskill, Stonewall Chief Executive, said: ‘This year’s Stonewall Awards nominees include openly-gay sport stars, flagship soap operas, mainstream lesbian, gay and straight entertainers, tabloid and quality broadsheet journalists and politicians from all three main parties.

Now, you don't need a big purple neon sign to guess what I think's missing there.

I fear we need some bisexual nominees to badger Ben with over the next twelve months so he can't say the same again next time...

What did you make of BiCon?

2010-10-12T20:07:00.000+01:00

Another video, this time quite different, a few people talking about their experience of being at the biggest event of the UK bi calendar, BiCon, this summer. I think we need more of this to help bring new people in to bi space, as well as more, glossy, colourful magazines and suchlike.

I did get filmed by someone for another similar project - I wonder if I can chase down the footage and add it to the online selection?

Nine come along at once

2010-10-12T20:02:00.001+01:00

Regulars at my local bi group will know I've been muttering for a few months now along the lines of 'we need multimedia stuff for the web' and 'we need to do more documenting of the community'.

Well, fortunately it's not just me, and so now we have a string of videos from the 2010 BiReCon research conference, giving a taste of some of the presentations people gave there.

As someone who suffers from a bad case of "in one ear out the other", you have no idea how excited I am at being able to see these over again! I'm sure I'll come back to blog more about specific videos from the set in the near future.

Meg Barker - Introduction to bi research in the UK

John Sylla from the American Institute of Bisexuality:

Serena Anderlini D'Onofrio - Bisexuality as Portal to More Sustainable Use of Resources of Love

Eric Anderson -- Heterosexual men, bisexual behaviour

Christian Klesse - Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

Anna Einarsdottir - How Civil Partners meet

Miguel Obradors -- Deconstructing Biphobia

Jenny Kangasvuo - Comparing the Experiences of Finnish Bisexuals in 1999 and 2009

Robyn Ochs -- Why we need to 'Get Bi'

Issue 103

2010-10-07T20:00:00.001+01:00

It's back from the print shop... and again a pretty, shiny magazine.

Going in the post shortly to anyone who is a subscriber. Subscribe or renew now.

New BCN

2010-10-05T17:36:00.001+01:00

Today, the gas man cometh.

So does the delivery of the new issue of BCN, ready for mailing... oh the anticipation! The last couple of magazines I've been really pleased with, and things are already in-hand for some of issue 104, which is As Things Should Be.

One in two hundred?

2010-09-25T21:31:00.000+01:00

So, are there really one hundred and ninety seven straight people for every bisexual, lesbian and gay man?

BiMedia reports:

Figures published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate one in two hundred of the UK’s population to be bisexual. The claim comes from examining the latest “Integrated Household Survey” which includes responses from nearly 450,000 people.
0.5% of those interviewed identified as bisexual. A further one per cent described themselves as gay or lesbian.

However, if you knocked on most people's doors and asked their sexual orientation, when their families or partners may be there, I reckon you won't get an honest figure. And interestingly another four per cent or so refuse to answer or picked another label than gay, straight or bi - now just consider the number of people who are LGB from a behavioural or attraction viewpoint whose identity is other or consciously unlabelled, but whose lives are made much easier by LGB equality and liberation activists' work.

The figure for homosexuality is double that for bisexuality; given how much more social acceptance, recognition and visibility the one has over the other that is easy to understand.

Still, crucially, this is a strong, authoritative figure to work with as a baseline for identity. Though 1 in 200 would mean just 2,300 bisexual people in the whole of Manchester - with some 800 or so people having been through its doors, you'd have to say that with BiPhoria is doing an amazing job of reaching such a large proportion of Manchester's bis if that is true!

Bi with preferences

2010-09-25T19:31:00.001+01:00

As a bisexual with definite preferences, it's good to see the new Labour leader elected on preference voting (albeit without the principle of one voter, one vote, one value) - and the winner coming from behind in the final round of preference transfers.

It'll be hard for Milliband to lead his centre-right party to campaign for FPTP and against AV next May after getting the leadership in a result like this!

Pure Message

2010-09-23T19:00:00.002+01:00

One of the dangers of pre-recorded radio is that you forget to listen when it's broadcast. So thank heavens for podcast downloads, as I did a short piece for Stockport local radio station Pure FM about Bi Visibility Day and BiPhoria's 16th birthday for their show last week, and then found myself busy emptying the bi resource cupboard when it was on, ahead of the LGF's move to a new venue over on the other side of Manchester's gay village.

I wasn't particularly good, but it gets the word out, and perhaps when something bi-pertinent happens in the news they might get in touch for a quote or what have you... at least that first link has been made.

Happy Bi Day!

2010-09-23T07:54:00.002+01:00

Happy Bi Visibility Day everyone - whether you call it that or the older name of International Celebrate Bisexuality Day.

Later today I expect I'll be at BiPhoria's pub quiz night in Taurus. Hope to see lots of you there.

Make it ten!

2010-09-22T19:27:00.001+01:00

Sorry folks, I've been away from the internets for a week. In the meanwhile I see the number of events for Bi Visibility Day in the UK has for the first time ever broken into double figures - two events in London this year and also eight other cities hosting bi-themed get togethers for anything from quizzes to erotica, serious liberation discussions to knitting.

I think that's rather brilliant.

And then there were eight...

2010-09-17T21:00:00.001+01:00

Up to last year I think the most there was going on in the UK to mark 23/9, International Celebrate Bisexuality Day, was two events in any given year.

Last year was an amazing breakthrough with six events.And I think the rebranding as Bi Visibility Day is a good thing, for all that the abbreviation BVD sounds more like something you'd pop to the clinic about than ICBD does.

Well, last year's six events tally has already been beaten: so far I know about:

• Brighton
• Bristol
• Cardiff
• Edinburgh
• London
• Manchester
• Sheffield
• Winchester

I daresay more things might fall into place between here and next Thursday. Isn't it brilliant!?

Marriage and Civil Partnerships and then...?

2010-09-14T19:28:00.005+01:00

Bear with me, this is all leading up to a question.

At the party's conference in Liverpool next week, the Liberals will debate changes to the systems of marriage and civil partnerships that would open either up to any couple. It seems fairly likely that the policy will be passed: it has been put forward by the party's LGBT equality group, and I don't think the main conference of the party has ever defeated a motion put down by them in its twentyone (or fortysix or whatever) years.

Party leader Nick Clegg has already expressed his support for same-sex marriage. His counterpart in the other party in Britain's left-right coalition government, David Cameron, has made similar noises - albeit perhaps facing a harder struggle to bring his parliamentary party with him in a vote on the matter. And I think all five candidates for the leadership of the centre-right Labour party have signed up to the idea when quizzed during the current leadership contest.

Seven MPs agreeing doesn't make a new law, mind. Parliamentary time has to be found, and the Coalition Agreement includes various commitments on LGBT equality issues but not marriage. However, there might well be an amendment to some bill or other along the way, and with the kind of cross-party support that voting with one's leader could allow, it might yet happen. If not, it's hard to imagine it not being in one or two manifestos come the 2015 election, if not all three.

There's a bit of talk now about how Civil Partnerships constituted some kind of sell-out. Now, it's true they aren't good enough to constitute equality: as I'm fond of saying, ten years ago as a bisexual person some of my relationships were treated differently in law from others, whereas ten years on everything has changed and it's exactly the same. But in the context of the time that law was drafted, when as a society we were closer to the introduction of Section 28 than we were to 2010, it was a bold but perhaps-deliverable goal.

But now the world has moved on: we may not get equal marriage (and access to civil partnerships for mixed-sex couples who prefer to keep their distance from the historic connotations of marriage) right away, but I'm sure it has to happen some time this decade.

After that, and given our propensity to want to formalise and recognise our longer-term relationships, I suppose the debate moves to poly partnership recognition: but surely that's hell to legislate. With civil partnerships there was a clear model being worked towards: "similar to marriage, similar to divorce, but without the wacky consummation clause".

So here comes the noodly bit I need to google properly some day: does the poly community have a moderately-agreed model of how it might work? I know every time I think about it my brain goes runny from the possibilities, especially of part-of-a-polycule divorce law. Linkys welcome!

Race Revolt

2010-09-12T17:14:00.000+01:00

Writing In Shadows highlights that there's a new issue of Race Revolt out. Excellent.

It's sometimes tricksy reading because it makes you think hard, and it's sometimes tricksy reading because in being a collaborative effort from many wide-ranging perspectives some of it needs my brain to spend a while translating to a less right-wing/monoculture model of the world to follow it, but it's always a good investment in time and moneys.

Student time of year

2010-09-10T09:57:00.000+01:00

The leaves haven't quite yet started falling but soon I'll be walking through them, swooshing through them and remembering being 18 and a new student, with My October Symphony cued up on my walkman for the leaf-strewn walk to college in the mornings.

While I might not be worrying about getting registered for a course this year, other people are, and with that comes the question of whether your uni LGBT will be B inclusive and friendly. I just wrote in another place to someone wondering whether to go along to their LGBT group and whether it would feel like a safe space:

One of the trickiest things in answering this one is - personal experiences of any given uni will be completely misleading. Whereas most LGBT groups have a broadly similar set of people in charge over many years, uni groups tend to have a much faster rate of "churn", as this year's leaders are next year's finals students and the year after's "does anyone remember" names.

So the place that was red-hot at bi inclusion two years ago could be dire today, and vice versa.

And depending how confident the group runners are at challenging biphobic remarks, one or two people can make the whole space seem unaccepting even if most people are.

The best answer is to proverbially "suck it and see". And try not to let just one person's biphobia put you off - cos wherever you go in life there'll be one plonker.

Most UK unis have a freshers week society fair with stalls from the various societies on show, it might be worth turning up at the LGBT stall with a small bundle of bi leaflets as a "hello, I'd like to join, and I thought these might be useful to add to your stall" donation, and see how they respond. If they take them it'd send out a good signal for other people thinking of joining; if they are hostile you know to wear your sturdiest battle helmet when going along to the meetings!

But then, I'm probably thinking that cos of the stash of bi leaflets in my front room that are looking for a place to go

The main thing to take out of that is: I have bi leaflets that I want shot of, please let me know if you can use them locally! (Oh, and they really are very UK specific, for any Rest Of The World readers)

Three weeks to Bi Day!

2010-09-05T14:28:00.000+01:00

http://september23.bi.org/ hosts information about Bi Visibility Day events in the UK. We already have two things lined up in Manchester!

Please do add your local events (by emailing the BCN people).

Talking to one another

2010-09-03T09:55:00.000+01:00

One of the crazy things I promised to do at this BiCon was to build a blog aggregator site for bloggers who write about bisexuality (if you follow me in other places, sorry to be repeating myself!)

I did talk about doing it 2 years ago, but just didn't have the tech-savvy to make it work. But nowadays there is a lot more stuff off-the-shelf you can use, so a little work and I have the first mockup of the site running. Yay open source things that plug into one another and just damn work.

It remains to be seen if I can get enough bloggers to make it feel like a conversation space, but I'd like it to be. There's one for left/centreleft bloggers that works really well for me. There is the question of how much bandwidth it eats up but let's cross that bridge when we get there.

Over to you bi-blogging kids... nominate a blog or two?

invisi-bi-lity

2010-08-18T01:05:00.001+01:00

Activism is such a chore. Let's have another facebook page instead ;)

Very nearly 102

2010-08-15T17:31:00.000+01:00

Gosh. Issue 102 of BCN has gone for proof-reading. I'm doing several magazines with tight deadlines this month so it feels fab to have this one nearly put to bed!

B is not for invisi-BI-lity, and London is not the World

2010-08-01T16:47:00.000+01:00

This week's lefty weekly newspaper has a nice half-page piece about London LGBT Pride. Delga have it reproduced on their website already here, which is helpful.

See, mostly it's all good stuff: just two things make me go "Ah, but".

It makes that common mistake of making London-upon-Thames Pride sound like it's the national thing. Which I really don't think it is any more: in the 90s it was, back then it was so much bigger than the others and there was a real sense of momentum towards it, of spotting other queers on the road down south. But since then the other Prides have grown: I've not been there the last two years but by 07 and 08 it had nothing like that sense of build as you arrived in the city. We're not quite at the point equivalent to the Tony Wilson "wake up America, you're dead" line, but it is far more like that now. There are fifty or more Prides around the UK. If Pride was a corporation, London is no longer the majority shareholder. When evoking lefties to raise the stripey banner high, encourage them to do it everywhere, not just down in the bottom right-hand corner of the island.

But more than that, there's a difficult line in reference to "gay" marriage: "next year will be the 41st year of the London Pride marches - I hope that we might be marching with some married LGBT couples". There are already lots of married LGBT couples. Most LGBT people are not lesbian or gay. Even most LGB people are not lesbian or gay.

Internal politics

2010-07-29T22:13:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I came up with this as an illustration of how the lgbt communities are not homogenous. There are more role models, more bars, more social acceptability, more support spaces, hell more money even, the higher up the pyramid you get to be.Which was very useful exploring the idea that Canal Street is not the be-all and end-all of outreach to LGBT at a conference the LGF hosted a couple of years ago.

It probably (subconsciously) derived from a one-dimensional power triangle by Dianne DiMassa in My Gender Workbook, applying the same idea but adding another dimension because of the ways that other factors than gender and sexuality, your wider normativity, slide you up or down the scale of voice, acceptance, representation and respect.

Though I'd have to rummage through my old papers to work out whether I was actually drawing things like this before Gender Workbook came out, I'm really not sure.

The things I've chosen for the slider side here are somewhat arbitrary and I'm sure readers will be able to suggest other things.

Hard to illustrate is that the bottom row there is more of a wriggling writhing mass of competition. When I was first coming out some twenty odd years ago I'd have layered things with B above T and Q, but they are at least level now.

Anyway, I thought I'd run it up as a computer graphic and share the image. It might be a good argument-starter 8)

Oh, YouGov...

2010-07-18T18:29:00.000+01:00

YouGov should know better than to trot out heteronormativity like this...

Sigh!

Interviews

2010-07-09T22:33:00.002+01:00

I'm far from alone in having two times for doing things: now, or someday.

Hence when the interesting email comes in about this or that publication wanting a quote or answers to half-a-dozen questions, I try to do it at the time if I can. Otherwise it joins the long list of queued Get Round To It things that radio 7, Warcraft or hot dates ensures never quite happens.

So this week I'm full of being on the receiving end of the Get Round To It queue, as two interview shaped items that will be awesome in BCN when we get them are nearly here, yet might take six months to arrive, like a Manchester "be with you in ten minutes" taxi. Grrr!

Otherwise BCN issue 101 is coming together nicely. And waiting for BCN stuff to come in means BiMedia gets more stories fed to it...

A little bi of trans politics

2010-07-05T20:02:00.000+01:00

So mostly here I stick to the bi stuff. But however many years ago I started agitating on trans and genderqueer things (before we had the latter word to work with, and boy does having a word for it help!) could I have really thought I'd see a mainstream parliamentarian saying things like:

"I believe it is legitimate to extend the interpretation of EU law so that it protects not only (as it does) people who have undergone gender reassignment but also those whose gender identity is complex or who identify with no gender. We also need to promote a greater public awareness of transgender and gender neutrality issues."

People of London who re-elected Sarah Ludford MEP last summer, we salute you!

What do we want shot of?

2010-07-01T19:07:00.000+01:00

Last week was the budget, with the right wing of the government in the ascendant. But the left wing of the government gets its turn in the spotlight this week, with the web launch of the consultation on the Great Repeal Act / Freedom Bill which Clegg has been advocating for quite some time.

Naturally most of the suggestions don't have much to do with (bi)sexuality. But in amongst half-baked drug propaganda and proposals to make it easier to use a dog to threaten, kill and maim, or to deny people like me the freedom to breathe in public places, there is stuff on marriage equality and repealing the "extreme" porn laws - you remember the ones that made it illegal to take photos of things it's entirely legal to do - and a one on the crazy Labour law that made a swathe of cartoons illegal.

What laws do you want repealed? And don't just tell me, tell them!

Swell the ranks

2010-06-28T09:32:00.000+01:00

The programme for BiReCon has been published and includes a session on bi blogging from Sue George. Sue's blog isn't quite as frequently updated as mine but has more substantial pieces whereas mine tends to be a passing thought or question. Looking forward to it - and to there being more bi bloggers as a result!

Changing culture

2010-06-27T12:27:00.001+01:00

Warning: political activism ahead!

Yesterday was the summer conference for us LGBT lefties. Now, most of what went on doesn't really belong here, but what really struck me was that after a couple of years of the Bisexual Democrats project, it has started to take a more serious hold, with both the immediate recognition of the pink, purple and blue stuff, and requests from new members of where they could get teeshirts, badges, or where to download logos to use on their own work.

I suspect the number of out-bis is a mixture of the targeted recruitment and of a wider visibility thing. But having the bi materials produced is helping to reveal the 'hidden bis' - I look forward to citing it as good practice!

Town Hall aftermath

2010-06-25T17:53:00.000+01:00

Time to write up the 'what do bis want?' workshop from the Town Hall LGBT Day. I've run the session twice so this will be a blend of outcomes from both sessions, but that also means that half the contributions are unlinked from the Town Hall.

Must find some way of wording a copyright statement or what have you at the end of the report to ensure that the council doesn't try to slurp up all the credit. After all, they didn't even cover my damn train fare to run the session for them*.

* I may just be carrying over some past grouching here from the annual LGBT Health Summit.

Rhif Cant

2010-06-24T22:49:00.003+01:00

I've a very low grade tabloid writer's grasp of cheesy headlines, so I want to title anything about BCN issue 100 along the lines of "100 not out", which of course is the wrong message at every step of the way. It is out, we are out, and this isn't actually the 100th edition. You just can't trust these bisexuals, eh?

Not the 100th? Afraid so: there have been various others including the Manchester-only editions for Prides and suchlike, and the annual Summer Specials given away at BiCon. And because ~~it has always been run by geeks~~ we didn't have a title at first, our first edition was issue zero. But it wasn't called BCN yet which puts it in a fuzzy state as to whether it is an edition of BCN. So it's probably nearer the 110th edition of the magazine.

It is, however, the one with the number "100" on the front, so it is the best place to pause and claim to have reached a hundred issues. I joined up back around issue 32 and have been editor since some time around number 50.

Between number 50 and the mid 90s not much changed except moving to photo covers rather than wordy covers. However, if I do say so myself, the last year has seen a big step forward for the magazine. We were laser-printing onto ordinary 80g paper, now we're properly printed on glossy paper, with colour covers and (perhaps only me caring about this bit) with full bleed. BCN now feels like a magazine, not like a society newsletter.

One of the things I care about with BCN, and which I've argued about with other bi activists, is that it continues to be a paper publication. This works in three directions:

1 - having a print magazine, albeit on a lower circulation than our rivals, puts a potential bi voice at the table alongside Gay Times et al. When discussing how to reach out and be visibily inclusive of bis, "but there is no bi press for us to also advertise in" has a neat rebuttal.
2 - as a paper trail of debate and events, it provides a 'journal of record' for academics and historians. More letters on the letters page might make it an even more useful one cough
3 - and this is the biggy: it makes the community 'real' in a way that a website doesn't: there are enough of us and bisexuality is sufficiently not "just a phase" for this long-running magazine that you can hold in your hands to exist. When I was finding a sense of myself as bi in a very gay/straight culture, BCN's predecessor mag was something I looked forward to landing on the doormat. And I had the benefit of living in a city with a strong bi scene, how much more it would have meant living in the sticks.

An online only magazine would be easier, would involve fewer nights of stuffing envelopes and less time staring at a screen willing the words to fit on the page. But it becomes so much easier to not produce new content over time that way: every two months, whereas the pages of BCN start out each issue all blank and demanding.

Volunteers to help fill them are always welcome, by the by. Articles, photos, cartoons, what have you...

How to hit harder?

2010-06-17T09:09:00.000+01:00

BiMedia asks whether of 200 odd people at the Downing Street "LGBT" reception:

will there be anyone representing for the B in LGBT

Requesting information from Downing Street press people has so far drawn a complete blank, while the photos that have hit such authoritative sources as the Daily Mail don't have faces you'd recognise from doing bi work.

Now, it's too late to change the bi-excluding nature of last night's guest list, and (to get the party politics balance in) of the previous such event under Labour. And it's possible this is the last such 'do'. But if it weren't, gosh how grouchy I will be if it happens three times in a row.

Aside from starting a fresh "write to Dave and Nick" postcard or write-a-letter lobbying campaign to highlight the B in LGBT is not for invisiBility, how else could we change this? Indeed, aside from the general slight of not being invited to the ball, should we want to?

Sleep and Cheesy

2010-06-10T18:51:00.003+01:00

I've got a lovely new "sleep and cheesy" teeshirt from the pobbleshop. Other fans of atrocious punnage may want one too, so there's a little link :)

Perfectly formed

2010-06-10T18:39:00.000+01:00

Today was the annual LGBT consultation day at the Town Hall once again. Last year's bi workshop was the groundbreaking first time they put the B on the agenda at the event, and was better attended than this time around.

However, this was - with all respect to last year's participants - a case of quality over quantity, with participants this time around including an interested city councillor wanting to improve the council's engagement with the LGBT communities, and representatives from the local NHS and Police. I'd really like there to be a chance for services like that to engage better with the bi community so these were really welcome links to draw in.

And between the outcomes of today's session and running the same session at BiPhoria a short while ago we have quite an interesting agenda of what bis in the city want.

military coup imminent: leadership required

2010-06-07T21:16:00.000+01:00

Wanted: someone with a little bit of money and web savvy to take Bisexual Recruitment Army over. It's a lovely little idea, and putting the site together was awesome fun, creating bad punnage and taking silly photos and so forth. But I've had no time or energy to do anything fresh with it, and it is really just sitting there to be honest.

Someone with webspace and an interest in taking it over would be good to find. My web hosting can only take three websites at a time, and I'd like to shuffle B*R*A off so I can put something else in its place.

Naturally like any protective website-mother I don't just want to give it to anyone so I might be picksy.

David Laws

2010-05-29T12:08:00.000+01:00

David Laws MP, chief secretary to the Treasury, has got in a spot of bother about expenses and in the process of running a story about that the Telegraph has outed him as in a same-sex relationship.

Spinning their version of event beyond parody, the Telegraph claim that he was the one who chose to come out, they didn't out him, but that is absolute piffle: were they really going to run a story that never referred to the name or gender of the person he is living with and do they honestly think their allies in the hate press would have done the same? And that a page full of playing the pronoun game wouldn't constitute a big flashing neon sign?

So yes, let's be frank about this one: they outed him, and it's clear the motivations are nothing to do with sexuality or expenses.

I'm no expert on the MP expenses arrangements so all I shall observe on the rights or wrongs of the case is that people who do know more about it say that if he had been publicly in a relationship then he could have claimed the whole mortgage costs, so leaving things as they were was saving the taxpayer a big wad of cash. Way to go Telegraph, an investigation with a natural conclusion of costing taxpayers more, just as every other move from the Telegraph on expenses has wound up costing us more. Can we have a special Act to close the paper down on the grounds that its bosses are premeditatedly wrecking the economy?

But what I can make some informed comment on is the sexuality stuff.

As someone who runs a social-support group for people from within the LGBT communities, there are still a steady stream of new people who come along who are not 'out' to anyone around them about their sexuality or sex life: family, friends, workmates, even openly gay, bi or trans colleagues. David is a very long way from alone.

It's something that we see less of as the world moves on but the idea that passing the civil partnerships law and scrapping clause 28 magically undid a century of social homophobia is dotty. Yes, there are MPs around him who are out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. I know people who go hang-gliding, that doesn't take away any of my own vertigo and mean I suddenly feel fine at the top of a stepladder.

To mangle a slogan: some MPs aren't straight, get over it. And some people's relationships don't have cookie-cutter neatness, get over it.

Five years, five pledges

2010-05-21T08:11:00.010+01:00

The new left-right coalition's Programme for Government document has been published today, including a number of pledges on queer issues. The document sets out the agreed programme for the five-year coalition government so they have until 2015 to get it all done.

Those on-the-ball Delga folk say it includes the following:

The Government believes that there are many barriers to social mobility and equal opportunities in Britain today, with too many children held back because of their social background, and too many people of all ages held back because of their gender, race, religion or sexuality. We need concerted government action to tear down these barriers and help to build a fairer society.

• We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution.
• We will use our relationships with other countries to push for unequivocal support for gay rights and for UK civil partnerships to be recognised internationally.
• We will change the law so that historical convictions for consensual gay sex with over-16s will be treated as spent and will not show up on criminal records checks.
• We will promote better recording of hate crimes against disabled, homosexual and transgender people, which are frequently not centrally recorded.
• We will help schools tackle bullying in schools, especially homophobic bullying.

The first thing that strikes me is that as the world has moved on, central legislation on LGBT issues increasingly looks beyond the UK to issues of equality worldwide. Which is great, and timely: we needed to put our own house in order first. Ten years ago Labour and Tory legislators had seen to it we had plenty to do here, and pressing for change overseas invited reasonable charges of hypocrisy.

The second is that awful line "hate crimes against disabled, homosexual and transgender people" - a copy and paste job from a mangled line in the Lib Dem manifesto. As a bi activist, I have railed about it before: I trust that when it comes to the legislative stage it will be turned from what they say into what they mean.

The third is that the trans and genderqueer stuff out of the Lib Dem manifesto didn't make it through. This is a damn shame, for all that the abolition of ID cards and the identity register removes two of the pressing issues around non-binary gendered identities.

But after those Labour governments which kept LGBT stuff out of the manifesto for fear of scaring the horses, and then deployed a string of delaying tactics over acting on equality, what a refreshing thing it is to have a clear idea of what is on the government's mind to implement in the years ahead.

We have to make sure they deliver on it, and press them to do the other stuff, too. Write to your MP, and write often, folks!

Downtime

2010-05-19T13:48:00.017+01:00

I made a bit of a booboo and broke BiMedia for 48 hours. Doh. I think it's the same mistake a friend made with her Wordpress blog a year or so back.

Must. Make. More. Backups.

However, it's back in action, nearly finished, and I think (...or I flatter myself...) that it looks a tiny bit slicker after the rebuild. But nonetheless, I'd welcome people who had problems with it loading in the past giving it the once-over in case those problems have returned.

In the process I have finally worked out how to send news stories direct to twitter, which is For The Win :) - decided to feed them to the BCN twitter feed rather than a separate one for bimedia, as much the same people would want to follow each.

More out MPs than ever

2010-05-09T12:21:00.009+01:00

That's the election over - well, nearly over, barring the pending bit of the election in Thirsk. We have a new swathe of gay and lesbian MPs, with an influx of new out MPs on the Liberal Democrat and Conservative benches and quite a few out Labour MPs holding their seats.

About 20 out MPs out of 650 seats is, er, three per cent or so. Halfway to the government statistic of 6% being gay or lesbian; they never tried counting the bis properly.

But still - unless someone knows better - on the green benches at Westminster we have just the one out bisexual. There are more of us than there are lesbians and gay men put together, but we have a twentieth of the open representation in government that they do.

Idle wossnames

2010-04-24T15:02:00.004+01:00

I've been looking at the upcoming NUS LGBT conference. As ever, NUS is a source of despair if you're an activist interested in getting things done rather than furthering a career in centre-right politics.

So we have an order paper for the weekend of the various weighty motions to be debated. Given the B in LGBT is the least well supported strand in mainstream LGBT work, what do they have to say about it? What proposals, opinions, and tasks for their executive and huge membership in the coming year?

Erm... not a lot. The 'b' word does crop up, but the only place where it is meaningfully used is in a motion that sucks up to biphobia, redefining the remits of the bi space at conference, and it would seem to be doing so in capitulation to the biphobic "bi=binary" myth.

Conference resolves: The Bisexual Representative may may define as bisexual, or otherwise define as being romantically/sexually interested across the gender spectrum.

Now, that's changing the definition of the bisexual rep so that - unlike the other specific positions NUS sets aside - the holder need not identify as bisexual, and is an amendment that is entirely in response to biphobic nonsense.

Will it make a difference though? NUS LGBT doesn't have a great track record on having bi reps who ever seem to do anything related to their remit. The bi place seems to be treated more as a way onto the national exec and a springboard to other positions rather than a position from which to enable work, communication and change targeted at and for bi students or bis in general. There have been exceptions to that rule but in ten years of watching, they seem to happen about once in five years...

That's not what you mean

2010-04-14T22:00:00.028+01:00

The Lib Dem manifesto has been launched. All good lefty stuff, the only coherent programme on the table, and may they win a swathe of seats not least as the only party consistently on side with LGBT issues, etc.

The Lib Dems do have one weakness on their manifestos, and it's the B word. Now it's peculiar that the 'third option' party should have such a persistent blind spot on the 'third option' sexuality but there it is.

The manifesto includes:

Liberal Democrats will continue to encourage more openly gay and transgender people to stand for Parliament

How many times do I have to spell this one out? I'm not gay. I'm no more gay than I am straight. Saying bis are a type of gay because they're not straight is like saying Germans are a kind of Egyptian because they're not Spanish. You can reasonably shrink gay and lesbian down to just gay; you can't do that with the B strand of LGBT.

The manifesto also says a Lib Dem government would

Require better recording of hate crimes against disabled, homosexual and transgender people, which are frequently not centrally recorded.

Now, you can see how they got there. Someone sub-editing things down sees a reference to hate crimes against disabled people, and a reference to homophobic and transphobic hate crime. "How can I put these together?" they think. "What's the -phobic word for disability? Erm. OK I'll do it the other way... homophobic hate crimes happen to homosexuals, and transphobic ones to transgender people".

Except of course they don't. Or rather, they don't just. The venn diagram has a big overlap between, say, being gay and being a victime of homophobic attacks. But these things happen to bi people, to straight people, to cis people, too.

I think it's pretty clear what they mean. It's not quite what they said, and if they get in, or even if they don't and are advocating these things from the opposition benches, we need to make sure they get it right in the legislative print.

Just a slip o the keyboard miss, honest

2010-04-10T11:28:00.006+01:00

Stonewall say that not including bisexuals in half their questions on LGB equality for MPs was an unintended mistake. You know, in the best part of two decades of reading stuff from them, I've never noticed a publication where they unintendedly and mistakenly missed out the word 'gay' but remembered the 'b' word.

Stonewall and NUS

2010-04-07T21:19:00.002+01:00

They haven't replied to last week's email yet, but their "questions for parliamentary candidates" page has been changed - it no longer just talks about "lesbians and gay men".

Result ~:o)

In other news, ahead of this year's Town Hall LGBT Day, I've dropped the local uni bi rep a note asking for any input from the student population. Would be good to get that alternative take on it...

Stonewall General Election blooper

2010-03-31T21:06:00.015+01:00

Stonewall have published their list of questions for candidates at the general election:

Schools

If you're elected at the next election, what will you do to ensure
homophobic bullying is tackled in our local schools?

Hate Crime
Homophobic hate crimes are on the increase across the country. What will
you do to ensure lesbian and gay people can feel safe in their local area?

Equality Act
Will you - and your party  - commit to ensuring full implementation of
important measures in the forthcoming Equality Act, which would benefit
lesbian and gay people?

Public Services
All too often, gay men and women face second class treatment by the public
services their taxes help to fund. What do you propose to do to address
this?

Asylum
What steps will your party take to ensure that those seeking asylum on the
grounds of their sexual orientation are assessed fairly and compassionately?

International
Will your party ensure that the UK continues to promote LGB equality
internationally through British embassies and High Commissions?

Civil Partnership Recognition
Will your party take steps to ensure recognition of UK civil partnerships
by other European states?

Blood donation
Do you support the current life ban which bars all men who have ever had
sex with another man from donating blood?

That's quite a lot of "lesbian and gay" without any reference to bisexuals in the first few questions, so I've dropped them a note to enquire about the whys and wherefores.

A bid for a second out bi MP

2010-03-19T12:47:00.014Z

It's not often I quote the Daily Mail as an authoritative source, as I find it best not to trust them even just for checking what day of the week it is, but let's have a quote from them:

The first woman in Britain to direct adult films revealed yesterday, however, that her political colours are of a different hue. Anna Arrowsmith, hailed in some quarters as a champion of 'female-friendly porn', has been chosen as a Liberal Democrat candidate in the General Election.

Gosh, an out-bisexual woman who admits to liking sex standing for Parliament, what is the world coming to? Well, not the terrible state the Daily Mail's hate-mongering staffers would like to think as a strong showing of positive comments below the article reveals. And as well as wanting to see more bis elected, I rather like the idea of there at last being someone legislating on porn who might admit to watching it in anything other than horror.

Total Politics does a little interview with her here, and there's a wikipedia page about her here

Up and down like a cheap euphemism

2010-03-15T21:37:00.000Z

BiMedia.org has been offline for most of the last three days and still isn't quite right. Sorry about that. It's a hosting problem on the servers of the company I get my webspace from, rather than me trying to be clever! I think the server is now fairly stable but the decision by the hosts to change the version of the PHP software underlying it all is causing technical wrinkles.

Following on

2010-03-14T17:33:00.040Z

Blimey. There was a diversities fringe meeting at Liberal Democrat party conference this weekend, and they wanted speakers for the various diversity strands like trans, disability and so forth, to reflect on what has happened in recent years and our hopes for the coming parliament. Jen, can you...? OK. Then I find out that I've been picked as the first diversity strand speaker, right after a speech by Vince Cable, who for overseas readers is the Shadow Chancellor and probably the most popular figure from the party both within the Liberals and outside. Follow on from his speech - no pressure, eh!

But it all went well, people laughed in the right places rather than the wrong ones, there was very warm applause and I didn't fluff my lines. The sheer panic kicked in about 20 minutes before I was due to speak and so I have absolutely no idea what Vince said, but it's great to have done it - now I can tell people about it without it being in my future and getting me worried about how it will go.