Stonewall 100 and Bisexuals At Work

Today Stonewall presents its annual list of the UK's top employers for LGBT staff.

The "Workplace Equality Index" is one of the organisations key programmes these days, after 25 years of campaigning for, and sometimes against, legal changes to establish either lesbian and gay or LGBT equality.

Bisexual exclusion in LGB or LGBT spaces is nothing new, though there is an encouraging trend to address it in workplace staff networks. At BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bisexual organisation, we've been working with employers and voluntary organisations on bisexual inclusion since the late 1990s, when the more switched-on groups started to address this.

Research over the past decade on workplace experience for bi people tells us two key things. First, that simply having an LGBT network in place made a big difference to how comfortable gay and lesbian people were about being out at work; but no difference to bisexual staff. Second, that while around 50% of gay staff feel they can safely be out at work, bi women are half as likely to feel they can be out at work as are lesbians or gay men - and bi men only half as likely again. When seven out of eight bisexual men feel they need to mask their sexual orientation to get by at work, we've still got a lot to do.

To me, that reflects the wider 'gay scene' where in the 80s and 90s there was widespread prejudice towards and exclusion of bi people. Back then Unison's lesbian & gay network expelled bi members, the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard would not let bi volunteers work on its phonelines, and bars on Manchester's Canal Street had "no bisexuals" door policies.

There has been a tendency when moving from "LG" to "LGB" or "LGBT" organising to welcome the "gay side" of bisexual people - which of course we don't have, any more than an English person is just a Welsh side and a Scottish side put together. We're entirely bisexual.

But if your LGBT group is having a women's night out and your lesbian colleagues can bring their girlfriends, do you feel you can bring your husband, or do you feel a bit less welcome?

If your posters and policies in the workplace talk about homophobia and transphobia, are you challenging biphobia - including biphobia from gay and lesbian staff?

What can employee networks do?

- Understand that you don't start with a clean slate: for example Unison's LGBT group spent several years getting from the initial change from LG to LGBT to having a thriving bi network, because they had to undo the effects of past bi exclusion.
- Collaborate with local bi organisations around the country like BiPhoria. There's a list of them on the Bi Community News website.
- Put Bi Visibility Day (September 23rd) squarely on your activity plan for the year alongside events like Trans Day Of Remembrance.
- Be conscious about language; it's easy to slip from "LGBT" into "gay", yet it sends a message about which parts of the LGBT communities are welcome and the centre of your attention.
- Assume some of your staff are bisexual. Including some of the people who you've read as being gay or straight.
- Outreach work such as advertising in bi press like Bi Community News, sponsoring or otherwise supporting events like BiCon and BiReCon.

Bi Volunteering Diary

This post may seem a bit self-indulgent or congratulatory, but every so often people badger me to get this or that done on queer activism and seem to find it hard to imagine why I don't deal with that particular thing. So an incomplete diary of last week's bi activist shenanigans: it wasn't an especially busy week, I just decided to make some notes as I went along. Done around having a low-paid day job that is nothing to do with lgBt, partners, important radio listening, slouching on a sofa and so forth. So, if I didn't do the thing you were hoping for, I was probably taking care of stuff like this instead...


Monday. From midnight to 2am, try to work out why a PDF isn't generating properly of the otherwise finished artwork for the new issue of BCN. Get to bed when it finally does what it should do. Over breakfast, upload the PDF to the print house's servers. And go off to the day-job for a rather taxing day.

Monday evening, book a last-minute stall at small local Pride festival a few miles away. I wasn't going to do this, but the stall we did recently at a Pride some 50 miles away reached a lot of people who were clearly really happy to find something specific for bis at last, so I'm on a bit of a high. I suspect this weekend's event won't have such a sunny day and such luxurious icecream, but I'm on a high from last time so let's give up another Saturday eh?

Jot down a few ideas for a piece for a book on bi life someone's writing. I usually get these at the wrong time, like when I'm in the bath or on a bus somewhere and my thoughts will have flown by the time I get anything onto paper.

--

Tuesday. After work, spin up the database to generate mailing labels and get the envelopes stickered up for a magazine mailing. Over the years I have developed very fine labelling skills for getting envelopes labelled up in the most efficient way possible! Talk with Katie who is our finance person about when we can arrange for me to get back a load of expenses owed. Some tweeting and facebooking about Pride London and about Tameside Pride. A researcher who we helped last year gets back in touch, so I thank them for being one of the rare breed of researchers who are conscientious about feeding back to the community after - a practice I try hard to encourage! Jot down first thoughts about what's going in the August edition of BCN. Line up a story on BiMedia about same-sex partnership recognition on the Isle of Man.

--

Wednesday. Early in the morning BCN arrives from the print house; this means it's time for a BCN stuffing party! Call in enough pairs of hands and ensure tea and cake to keep up the stuffing momentum. Lug the first two bags to the post office and get them out into the post.

Around all this, find out that the organisers of the bi entry for Pride London have realised the banner they were going to use has gone awol. Contact people nearby who I think are going to London this weekend to see if anyone can take our banners down - no joy. Run up some designs for banners, get feedback from some people in London, run up some further designs, get more feedback and do more artwork tweakery. Find a print company and order the pair of them to be made as a rush job and off it all goes. Not used this print house before, fingers tightly crossed that they will do a good job.

Post this week's edition of my "what I'm doing at the moment" bi activism blog, which is not on blogspot.

--

Thursday. Before work, line up some news items about today's announcements re Civil Partnership and Marriage reform in Wales & England. Bill in the post goes onto the BCN "stuff to sort out" pile for the next time we have a finance meeting. Notice a news release about the TUC's LGBT conference which has decided it is against homophobia, with nary a mention of transphobia & biphobia, which I could blog about...

Instead go for dinner with one of my partners. Generally, take an evening "off the grid". Someone else can grump at the TUC for us, I'm sure.

--

Friday. Run round a quick circular about Tameside Pride on email lists. Talk to people in the USA about some problems they've picked up on. Tweet a bit about Bi Visibility Day and try to engage some other organisations in thinking about what they are doing in three months' time, so we get information in before September rather than all in a rush in the final week.

Find a soundcloud podcast of a meeting recently hosted by the council - feel glad I didn't attend as the whole thing is achingly LGbT and I'd only have been disenchanted. The good thing about podcasts is you can do the housework while they play...

--

Saturday. Get up early, take three trains and a bus ride to run the bi stall at a small local Pride. Awesomely [thanks to the power of the internet on my phone] get to see photos of the new bi banners being unveiled at Pride London 200 miles away. Run stall for four or five hours, chatter with a wide range of stall visitors, give out different leaflets and resources according to their needs. It's a small event but there are a couple of stall visitors for whom I think us being there has been really important. Feel loved as a stallholder when the event organisers bring us fruit and cake.

Public transport wends me slowly home and there I find an email waiting. Someone wants to reference a particular item in an old issue of BCN but it is not yet on the website. Get it up on the web for them as a rush job and settle down for dinner before catching up with two of my partners and generally going floomp on a sofa.

--

Sunday. Fried breakfast, shopping, an afternoon of watching episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s, and a game of Civ.  Eager volunteers need time away from activism too :)

Manchester Council takes another step in recognising bisexuality

Until not so long ago Manchester City Council had the non-existence of bisexuals as a matter of policy. No, really: in service use monitoring, equal opportunities policies and suchlike, the official line was "at those times a bisexual is lesbian or gay they are covered by those policies and at those times they are heterosexual..."

Things are improving.

They've just published the annual Communities Of Interest report, which is a kind of "here is the evidence base" document on diversity concerns for the council and for voluntary and private sector organisations they work with. This has been published for many years now, and each time has a section on LG(B)(T).

This is the first time there's been a bi section. Previously we were a subset of lesbians, which, hmmm.

Full report here. Flick past the first 64 pages and you come to:

9.3 Bisexual community

Recent research carried out by BiPhoria in Manchester has suggested that being visible, being included and being acknowledged are some of the main issues for Manchester’s bisexual community. Bisexual people can often experience discrimination from both the gay and heterosexual communities, and at an LGBT Discussion Day event, hosted by the Council in 2011, BiPhoria found that people wanted bisexuality to be referenced explicitly in literature and wanted services to engage more with the bisexual community. This has been a key action for the group since 2011. Bisexual ‘invisibility’, along with bi-erasure and biphobia are recognised as the most common challenges for bisexual people.

Biphobia may be characterised as taking four key forms:

––Similar to homophobia
––Similar to heterophobia
––Structural or institutional biphobia
––Internalised biphobia absorbed from a culture of the first three.

Manchester has one of the highest profile bisexual communities in the UK and is home to BiPhoria, and the bisexual magazine Bi Community News. As with any other group that experiences oppression, bisexual people may also encounter additional prejudice due to intersectional marginalised identities, for example bi women, black bisexuals, or bisexual genderqueer people.

Stonewall’s 2009 report ‘Bisexual People In The Workplace’ reflected that the positive impact of LGBT Staff Networks on lesbian and gay employees does not extend to bisexual staff. Research published by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency in 2013 showed that bisexual staff are significantly less likely to feel they can be ‘out’ in the workplace than lesbians or gay men:

The Bisexuality Report (Open University, 2012) reflected that these challenges for many bisexual people also extend into areas such as crime and policing, where homophobic hate crime monitoring may fail to address and recognise bisexuals’ experience of biphobia and homophobia.

It's fun to see my "four flavours of biphobia" model, albeit in very condensed form, in a council document.  It's also a bit scary to think that I wrote it about twenty years ago, citing certain Manchester City Council services as examples of institutional and structural biphobia.

Though it is frustrating that there are no specific actions for the council and its partner organisations to take up, I hope this sets a good marker down illustrating some of the key issues for bis and the evidence base underpinning those on which to build in future years.

What do you want to read in BCN next year?

Should Bi Community News borrow from the style of other magazines and have themed issues in 2013?

And if it should, what should the themes be?

Chez Dave

"BCN magazine editor Jen Yockney was among the guests at last night’s LGBT garden party hosted by David Cameron at 10 Downing Street." reported BiMedia last week.

Yes, dear reader, it's true. After about five years of Prime Ministerial Downing Street LGB&T receptions, at last someone finally got invited on behalf of one of the projects that focus on the "B" thread.

I've no idea quite how I got on the guest list, but the invite dropped into my BCN email account so I have to conclude it was for my work on Bi Community News as editor for a decade and more of the main UK bi news source and journal of what the bi movement's been up to and talking about. 

It could have been someone from one of many other projects who got picked though: for example BiPhoria is 18 this year, the UK's longest running bi group these days. They might have picked a veteran of the London Bi Group which ran for longer but closed down a few years ago. Bisexual Index and BiUK are doing fabulous work. And BiCon is I think the longest-running LGBT festival / pride / whatever in the UK, with 28 years of track record and never a year skipped or new organisation formed following a tricky financial implosion.

Whichever of us were to be picked though, it was high time the bis were invited to the LGBT party. And the White House's LGBT receptions have shown that one person the first year can grow to be a sizeable bi caucus over time...

But to Number 10.  It was so damn exciting to be there: I grew up watching Yes Minister and listening to Week Ending and here I was walking through the black door into the epicentre of power, among so many people who have done great things for the LGBT communities – and in blazing sunshine after weeks of rain it was a lucky date to have picked. I'm told last year it bucketed with rain and the attendees were crammed inside. Garden drinks in warm late-midsummer sun much better.

Cameron spoke for a few minutes about how the anti-equal-marriage wing of the faith groups is making the same mistake of pushing away their natural friends just as the Conservatives did in the 80s and 90s (and 00s) with their homophobia and biphobia. He kept referring to 'gay marriage' but in a politician who just seven years ago was campaigning to get elected by attacking his opponents for the scrapping of Section 28 that's a very healthy amount of travel. I want more, but I'll settle for that much progress. What matters is not the Prime Minister getting the nuances of LGB&T identity and debate, but that the 'gay marriage' legislation that ends up coming forward reflects how the current partnership law particularly makes life peculiar for bi, trans and intersex people. You did include those things in your submission to the equal marriage consultation, didn't you? Good. Me too.

Outside in the twitterverse a few people errupted in the "oh my, how can LGBT people go there?" type remarks. Because the way round that the lustre of shiny importance travels when a big ole lefty genderqueer bi activist like me goes to 10 Downing Street is that it improves Cameron's image... riiiiight. Pish. It says that the kind of policymaking people who have spent years and years ignoring bis are starting to change their tune, starting to acknowledge our work, our existence and particular needs - which is what we as bi activists were working for all those years and what work like The Bisexuality Report has been building the focus towards more sharply of late.

That aspect of it was a bit frightening though - being the first one through the door means you have a tiny sense of carrying the future of better bi representation here on your own shoulders.

So? It was a pleasant gathering of a bit over a hundred key people in LGB&T community work: from groups like Pride Sports, Manchester Pride, Albert Kennedy Trust, TREC, GIRES and so forth, grassroots and policywranglers alike, alongside various clergy on the side of the angels, and only a very small smattering of politicians. Like many LGBT conferences I've been to down the years, it was a chance to swap news and ideas, to find out what we're all up to, only this time with fewer workshops and speakers between those conversations.

And it's going to be a long slow grind towards equal marriage legislation, but I think Call-Me-Dave is as committed to it as the rest of us there. Which is going to be an important part of the battle.

BCN Summer Special

The BCN Summer Special has gone to the print shop. 

It's not very summery, but even so this one will be a little bit special... fingers crossed and all will be revealed in a week's time.

Hopefully as we have gone to a different printers from where we got the last summer special done, it won't be trucking round the country all summer when people should be flicking through a copy at the bar at BiCon! You have no idea how frustrated I was to open a boxful of Jimi Hendrix zines the day before BiCon as the delivery truck pulled out of sight down the road.

The best bit about BCN going to press is that I can then stop, breathe, catch up on emails and even start to worry what to wear to the Ball.

New Year's Promises

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

Inky goodness

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!)

Seen through other people's eyes

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.

Manchester Pride

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.

106

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.

What do bis want?

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.

BCN banner

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='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwhBNuE8xT1gkL1YGnqtR9IuvwRuIjH-WJsZIKPp73SbMCSELCpuplzVOIHTJcfPEOyzPBZqP2xwrELkMJtMKVAnFp1I1Qh4jeNXwU8dBsy1tbu91GUp2u9QxYp0i1JEw3fyAEGai7I3MR/s214/bcn-subnow.png' width='214'/>
a>

Sharing

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.

BCN editing week

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!

Issue 103

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

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.

Interviews

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...

Rhif Cant

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...

And now in colour

So here is the big thing that I've been working towards for several months. I didn't tell many people - I think! - so it will have come as a pleasant surprise to a lot of magazine subscribers. But the mag is landing on doormats across the country, so the cat's out of the bag.

We've got our first full-colour cover. This should be the pattern for future editions, at least for as long as subs levels remain at the kind of numbers they are now.

It means BCN has moved still further from the 'cheaply photocopied black-and-white rag' look, after last year's shift from 80gsm white paper and regular laser printing, to 130gsm gloss paper with full bleed.

I think this makes us unique among English language bi magazines. Bi Women and The Fence are entirely black-and-white printing, and Journal of Bisexuality is a bit peculiar being closer to a book than a magazine. It's a bit up my own ego perhaps, but I don't think there's been anything this 'pro' looking since Anything That Moves folded in 2002.

I'd like us to have full-colour inside pages too, but for that you all need to get your friends subscribing to BCN too so we can