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.

How to research bisexuality well

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!

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

Say what?

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.

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

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

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

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.

The BiReCon Files 6: American Institute of Bisexuality Projects

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)

The BiReCon Files 5: How Civil Partners Meet

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.

The BiReCon Files 4: Why We Need To Get Bi

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

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.

The BiReCon Files 2: Deconstructing Biphobia

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.

The BiReCon Files 1: What's Out There

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.

Nine come along at once

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'

Swell the ranks

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!