Friday 12 June 2009

"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.

No comments:

Post a Comment