And now, in colour...

BCN is an amazing publication. Yes, I'm biased, but really, it's still here nearly fifteen years on and almost 100 issues notched up.

But it does have one major drawback in the modern media age. It's in black and white.

Now, I do not personally give a fig. My personal measure of how likely to be worth reading a comic is at first sight is whether it is in mono or colour - colour stuff tending to be bland mainstream pish whereas stuff in mono that is worth working hard to get out there despite that often being awesome - Hothead Paisan, Liliane, Sleaze Castle. And it's a nice bit of inverse snobbery to indulge in while ignoring that rule completely when reading, say, the Death comics.

But the masses they expect colour, and when you show them the most persistent high profile bit of your movement and it's a mono printed publication, some folks will turn their nose up. More fool them, wise readers will say, but to grow a bigger wider bi movement we need to look at how we can change some of those first impression perceptions.

This is one hell of a long preamble for the news that, fingers crossed, from issue 97 for one or two or three issues we will have a colour cover on the magazine.

Colour!

Woohoo!

It brings a new challenge though. Who or what the hell do we put on the front? Since I really got my feet under the table as editor rather than just continuing it as it had been done before we've had a long run of mono photo covers; we've had quite a range of faces from the community though too few boys amongst other matters. But colour... so much possibility, and so scary getting it right!

Suggested cover images and volunteer coverbis welcome...

Bad blogger

I am a bad blogger. I've just been too busy with bi activism, lefty activism, having a love-life, work and assorted lurgies to blog here. Which is a shame as there are some rather fun developments; I shall have to try and tell you all about them soon.

"We must engage with the bisexual community"

As I'm sure to have touched on before, the City Council here has a long and proud record when it comes to LGBT issues of engaging with and advocating for the lesbian and gay communities. They've had equal opportunities policies which specifically covered gay, lesbian and heterosexual people. They've had service monitoring and targets which looked at gay, lesbian and heterosexual as the available categories, and equal opps monitoring on job applications that asked if you were gay, lesbian or heterosexual with the other two possibilities ignored.

And this has been going on for years and years. Since the first half of the 90s at least from my own experience and from all I can glean, since they first started to engage with the idea that you might be straight.

So, having increased the pressure and visibility a little in recent times, we seem to be getting to some kind of a breakthrough. One of the leading bi-marginalisers in a position of power over the years went as far this week as saying, as speaker at a conference where I had been a speaker earlier in the day, that identity politics had moved on from the time of being all about lesbian and gay, and that "we need to engage with the bisexual community and we need to engage with the trans community".

Dangerous words. Much more of this and I might be able to take more time off from activism.