I got chatting to someone the other afternoon about bisexuals and
allies. In part it was prompted by being at Sparkle and seeing some
publications offering tip for allies on how to be supportive to your
trans friends, family, workmates and partners.
There have been similar things for lesbians and gay men and from within
the diversity and equality campaigner bubble it feels like cishet allies
more or less know what they should do and what they should look out
for.
Is it different for bis? After all we were historically thought of in
LGBT community discourse as kind of "gay lite", with therefore just a
smaller level of the same support as you might give to gay friends and
family members needed.
Except in recent years it has turned out that no: bisexual experience
is, as the bisexuals were saying unheeded all along, qualititavely
different from gay life. And it has turned out that, in the statistics,
bi experience is not "gay lite" but a kind of "homophobia plus".
Up til now it has been hard for allies to help tackle biphobia because
of our own invisibility and because of the lack of differentiation
between gay and bi life experience in research and anecdote, and so
willing allies simply didn't know enough about our challenges: about
what biphobia looks like and what it does. It feels like we are in a
time where that changes. At last!
