Winner

Well there's a turnup for the books. We've had a string of bi nominees for the Homo Hero awards - myself, Natalya, Marcus, BCN magazine - but invariably walked away empty handed. This year they rebranded them to be bi & trans inclusive there were a plethora of trans winners including me.

This time I was up for the Volunteer category.  In fairness it may be my strong suit: an honest biography says I've been doing LGBT volunteering every month, usually every week, for the past twentysome years of my life.  Sometimes big-ticket stuff: running a BiCon, inventing the Bisexuality Report.  Often individual level change, being the first person someone can talk to about being bi, pressing an LGBT group about their failure to mention biphobia and the like.  Sometimes, like a couple of years ago, it's had to be mostly online work when long-term illness has struck or been particularly challenging.

The LGBT Foundation say the awards were decided by some 11,000 plus votes, which with three nominees in each category would suggest I picked up something like 4,000 votes to beat the other two (4,000+3,500+3,500 = 11,000).  That's more votes than the average Lib Dem candidate at the last General Election!

I'd written off any chances of winning to the point that I regarded it as a night out drinking with (oh dear) no worries about whether I would look presentable to collect a trophy.  As the host read out the winner in my category, I mouthed the name of the person I reckoned was going to walk this category.  My somewhat tipsy brain then did a couple of beats of "hang on, that one reading the name out got it wrong" followed by "wait, that's my name".  Those sat round my table were then treated to a gracious yelp of "Oh (rudeword), it's me!"

So a big thank you to an awful lot of people I've never met who seem to have voted for me. You all totally threw me there!


(It's not my first shiny trophy. In 2005 I took the Home Office "Volunteer of the Year" award for contribution to the bisexual community while in 2002 there was a Cake Award from BiCon for, er, well I presume for keeping BiPhoria afloat while most bi groups were imploding, and my BCNning, BiCon running, inventing BabyBiCon and the like.)

Homo Hero Lesson 3: Revealing Antonyms

Antonyms. Remember them in school? Synonyms and antonyms. Opposite-words.

One of the lessons of spending an evening at the Homo Heroes Awards was that cis remains a word too far, for far too many LGBT activist brains. With award winners, presenters and hosts representing a wide range of notionally LGBT or LGBT-community-engaged organisations, talking about their varied work with LGBT and non-LGBT alike, I don't think it passed the lips of a single person given a platform at the awards.

It wasn't a fluke. So many people in notionally-LGBT activism and volunteering still think 'heterosexual' is the antonym to 'LGBT'.  But when we talk of something as being the opposite to LGBT, or want a collective term for people who are non-LGBT, the word we need has to be more than just non-gay.  It's non-trans. Straight isn't the antonym, because loads and loads of trans people are straight.  People who aren't trans are cis, and you need to say that qualifier out loud too.

Strictly, it's not just trans fail.  While straight or heterosexual may work well as the antonym to gay and lesbian, either term is only the antonym to LGB in the sense that we are socially deemed heterosexual until found to be bisexual or gay.  There's a fair case to be made that the antonym to LGB is SA, for straight and asexual, but therein lie a series of nuances about biromantic, homoromantic and heteroromantic asexuals, so I'm prepared to take the "straight is the opposite of LGB" on the chin as being where our collective discourse on sexuality has got to.

This lack of thinking through and understanding is a reflection not just of my experience of Manchester's notoriously LGbt culture but of the level of wider LGBT debate outside of bi and trans circles. It reflects how sadly stuck in the 80s so much of 'LGBT' is wherever the B&T have not been able to break through and rise up the queer power pyramid in significant numbers.

When you hear comments like "everyone - LGBT or straight" you have to wonder if you're listening to someone who has 'got' the LG part of the equation, and merely trained themselves to tack some extra letters on when they speak. It's a bit like saying that there are disabled people and normal people, gay people and normal people, immigrants and normal people. 'Normal' believes it doesn't need a word to define itself: but as Derek Jarman pointed out so sharply twentysome years ago, there's a subtle difference between normal and common.

Homo Hero Lesson 2: Do we need a "challenging biphobia" award?

I have a longer blog about a wider issue around this coming shortly but a quick, more focused blog question first.

One of the awards at the Homo Heroes, the Alan Turing Memorial Award, was introduced as being co-sponsored by Manchester City Council and the Lesbian & Gay Foundation, given to "an individual or organisation that has worked to challenge homophobia in our city".

Media coverage of the award this year and in 2012 confirms this was not just a slip of the tongue by the presenter. It's definitely about fighting homophobia.

If you are, to come up with a few implausible real-life examples of people who might be put forward for their work challenging homophobia*, a councillor who leads on LGBT issues for your council group, and who when asked about bi people's needs shrugs it off with a dismissive claim that no-one really knows about bisexuals - you could still be winner of the Alan Turing Memorial Award. If you opine that bisexuality is "the grey area of the rainbow flag", it won't count against you in this one. Go on the record that bisexuals are "not part of LGBT" because they don't experience any discrimination? Heck, welcome to the shortlist, and don't worry, we won't ask what you think the B in that acronym stands for.

As I'm one of the BiBloggers, you can perhaps guess where this is going.  Do the Homo Heroes - as at least notionally LGB awards - need a parallel award for challenging biphobia?  Maybe they do.

Probably best if it is not co-sponsored by Manchester City Council though, an organisation whose record on bisexuality has made it (literally) a textbook example of how councils have failed on the bisexual strand of LGB / LGBT.




* that I couldn't possibly have encountered from reasonably prominent politicians locally in the past year. Ahem.

Homo Hero Lesson 1: Don't Eat At The Radisson Blu!

There are a few things to be said about the 2013 Homo Hero Awards ceremony, so I'll be scribbing a couple more blog posts over the next howeverlong.  But let us start with the easy one: the catering was awful. It would seem to be a problem with the venue rather than the organisers.

This year the awards were hosted at the Manchester Radisson Blu, the former Free Trade Hall building that is now a well-polished hotel.  Partway through the presentation of awards there was an intermission for a buffet, so we got to find out what their catering is like.

Rule one of running a decent buffet: label your food. This is x, it has y in it. These sandwiches have been ruined by mayonnaise. The amount of cocoa solids in this cake may trigger headaches. Labelling food is such a basic access issue that it drives me to despair how often I see it fail to happen. The pinnacle of fail at last night's event was a selection of sandwiches marked "various". Really. Yes, we can see they have an assortment of different fillings: perhaps you could sort them as you make them and label them so people who feel queasy after eating beef or get ill from eating cheese know which ones to dodge without having a plateful of sandwiches they have nibbled and abandoned?  I'm no posh-nosher nor one of those tastebudless "foodies", but even I know that in polite company, peeling open sarnies at the buffet to see what abomination a misanthropic chef has planted between two triangles of bread tends to be frowned on.

Rule two of running a decent buffet is that whatever your labelled or unlabelled food might be, make it a pleasure to eat.  The last mystery buffet I dined on did at least pull off being tasty grub, but the Radisson failed on that too.  If it had just been me I'd put it down to personal taste but around me were a smattering of disappointed faces shuddering at what had been made from sometimes-promising ingredients. All told, grim food in a darkened room that made you happy to have your plate collected.

As you might guess, I'll not be dining at the Radisson again any time soon. They can't cater for toffee.