Learning from Positive mistakes

Body Positive North West are organising a conference on older LGBT people's needs and experiences later this week. It's £75 a head and no doubt very swish. Attendees will get a "six hour CPD certificate" (me neither, but I guess it means something in the public sector or somesuch) and "an exclusive preview of the online training programme for LGBT friendly service delivery".

Hurrah for that. For a long time talk of such things was just about the LG, when there are I suspect a whole heap of unexplored questions about the experiences (not least healthwise) of older trans people.  And older bi people may face very specific challenges too.

So what does this conference offer us?

• A guest speaker on older trans people's experiences
• A guest speaker on older gay men's experiences
• A guest speaker on older lesbians' experiences

• And refreshments.

You can probably guess what I've noticed is missing.  Doubly so when one of the speakers has a strong track record of erasing bisexuality and marginalising bi voices that I and many other Manchester queer activists are only too familiar with.

So, I dropped the organisers a line.  Hello, shiny event, seems to be no "B" though, am I missing something or do you need help with that.

After a long gap and with little time left before the event they came back to me. If I'd like to bring along a table of resources about older bi people that'd be welcome. Now, as it happens, I do have some of exactly that kind of resources.  The exhibition is noted in the programme at 4pm, before the building closes at 4.30pm but after the final round of speakers at 3.  But... for a start, I've run lots of stalls at conferences like this. The ghost slot at the end of the day as the people who did not leave already work out how to get to a pub is not the greatest of opportunities for engagement.

Let's consider the hierarchy that Body Positive North West are telling me they have:

• L gets a guest speaker with (it's fair to assume) travel expenses and (quite possibly) a speaker fee in the budget. A chunk of the day in the main hall will be focused on the issues you need to raise about your strand.
• G gets a guest speaker with (again, I figure) travel expenses and (quite possibly) a speaker fee in the budget. A chunk of the day in the main hall will be focused on the issues you need to raise about your strand.
• T gets a guest speaker with (we can guess) travel expenses and (quite possibly) a speaker fee in the budget. A chunk of the day in the main hall will be focused on the issues you need to raise about your strand.
• B meanwhile - the offer is: give up a day's wages, pay for your own travel and sit quietly in the corner being grateful for the chance to be there while going unmentioned at the podium, and maybe get a couple of polite nods from attendees on their way out.

On balance, I think I'm washing my hair that day.

There is a thing to reflect on there as event organisers though in how we react to equivalent challenges. I'm not pretending I've always got it right.

To me - assuming there wasn't room in either time or budget to add to the agenda - the sensible thing to do would have been to have made that offer with a clause about how the budget (perhaps) didn't stretch to coping with additional speaker costs, and looked to find a way to include the missing element in a future event such as by inviting collaboration on forming a panel on bi inclusion for the next such event.

I'll be watching for their next big bash and wading in earlier next time... Though I'd rather a slightly older bi took the lead, I'm not quite yet their magic five-oh.

Shaming statistics for the 175

tw: suicide stats

I'm very - perhaps too - fond of asking why people so rarely look at their actions in the context of "what happens next?"  As Peter Cook might have asked, did A Question Of Sport die in vain?

Back when the same-sex marriage bill was wending its way through parliament, we heard many arguments for and against. Some were coherent. Some were respectable. There's a fun venn diagram to be drawn of which were one, neither or both.

Now, I've just been reading some research from the USA looking at the impacts of same-sex marriage legislation there, where change happened in bursts from state to state over several years.

No, not at the number of weddings and the impact on the sale of top hats and fabulous frocks. One of the other impacts same-sex marriage has had.

It's based on huge sample sizes and shows one of the effects of allowing same-sex marriage nationwide was about 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide each year.  Looking at numbers before and after, there's a 7 percent reduction in the proportion of all high-school students reporting a suicide attempt over the previous year, and a 14 percent drop among LGB students, when same-sex marriage becomes lawful where you live.

Often we talk about these kind of statistics but we rarely pause to turn them round. To consider the "what if", the "what happens next" of the path not taken.  The path we didn't take thanks to the passage of the two same-sex marriage bills in Wales & England and in Scotland.

US and UK culture are in very many ways similar. So with about a quarter of their population we might rule-of-thumb that the impact here is 134,000 divided by four - 33,500 fewer young people attempting to end their lives each year in the UK.  Each year.  Our 2013 vote is four years ago already: so the change is 33,500 upon 33,500 upon 33,500 upon...

What an amazing number. What a horrifying number. For the 400 MPs who voted to allow same-sex marriage, what a humbling number. Yes, you let some people get married, and that was beautiful. But "what happened next" was a huge positive impact on the mental health and even survival of young people. You let some people get married and, thanks to an unwritten clause in the Bill, you saw to it that thousands did not try to end their lives early.  An unknowable number of parents never came home to the horrible ultimate consequence of social, legal and institutional homophobia.

And for the 175 MPs (and indeed 148 Peers) who planted their colours against the tide of history, with numbers like these the nature of their actions and motives is laid bare. We can see what they were actively, consciously, premeditatedly complicit in, what they were voting for, because let's be frank: while we didn't have these figures, we and they knew the answer to the "what happens next" question all along.

A handful of the 175 have said they'd vote differently today. We have to conclude that the rest are proud of the future they were voting for, and take comfort that they didn't get what they wanted.

Privilege: less Street Fighter, more D&D

The 'privilege' model of understanding the different life experiences that people tend to have according to where in the world or the UK they live, their gender identity, sexual orientation, skin colour and the like has been bouncing about for quite some time. It has some merit.
One of the problems it runs into is the argument that "but not all [grouping] feel the benefit of this leg-up!"

A neat way of exploring that is the notion of it being like playing a game and having different difficulty settings - you can still win, but it's like fighting harder opponents. You need more skill, luck or judgement, if you don't get straight-white-cis-man* as your difficulty setting at the start of the game.

I like that 'game setting' analogy, though I find it works better I you think of it less as a "easy moderate or hard" option at the start of a videogame, more like a boardgame where you roll dice and some players get an extra die or two. So you could still roll all ones and someone else gets fewer dice but is good at rolling sixes.

Now I just have to work out whether coming out of the closet as e.g. bisexual gets you an extra die for not playing with one hand tied behind your metaphorical back, or loses you one for gaining the encounters with prejudice you were previously avoiding.

Possibly it gets you a die with different numbers on it - say a four sided die with sides marked 0,0,4,8 instead of 1,2,3,4. The only bit of the theory I'm certain of it gets you one that's purple instead of grey.

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.

Charles Dickens and the "queer acceptability curve"

December saw the final talk in a series Manchester's local LGBT community centre LGF have organised looking at LGBT history. This fifth talk was presented by academics Dr Holly Furneaux and Dr Kim Edwards Keates, exploring the works of Charles Dickens and queer representation in them and in associated fan fiction from the era in which he was writing to the present day.  For tl;dr readers, it was most excellent and stimulating even for those of us with next to no handle on Dickens' work.

And excellent it was. Where Paul Fairweather's talk earlier in the series rewrote identities and erased both bisexuality and large sections of queer history to fit a narrow predetermined narrative, this talk was expansive and exploratory.  It left the layqueer with an appetite to read some of the subject matter, albeit if possible with some kind of Study Guide To Sly Queer Allusion In The Victorian Era at your side.

Now like any sensible person the only bit of Dickens I really have a handle on is his excellent The Muppets Christmas Carol, which he had to rewrite extensively when his publisher pointed out that the Muppets had not been invented yet and it could all lead to a complex time-travel intellectual property trial.  A Christmas Carol is at the level of cultural icon in the UK and USA and perhaps some other places, such that even if you have never read it nor watched a film adaptation you've probably absorbed enough about it to have a fair idea of the characters and plot.

Dickens wrote lots of other things too though, some of it to the point and some excessively florid, verbose loquacious and wordy in the manner of a person who is being paid by the word (which as a writer for literary magazines, he often was). Like a modern TV writer he'd've been writing some excellent episodes and some that were filler to move the plot along as little as possible when a story worth five episodes was supposed to fill eight episodes.

The two main foci of the talks were A Christmas Carol (as it was the middle of December) and his unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The latter seems to have had a high profile in fanfic writing and reading circles even immediately after its publication, which was warming to hear about as someone who encountered a small amount of that sort of thing before the internet exploded it into a wider consciousness. The joy of the unfinished text for letting readers fill in the 'what happened next...'

Something touched on that had passed me by was a recent American 'gay retelling' of Christmas Carol, the film Scrooge & Marley, which rearranges some of the genders in the tale to make for a gay and lesbian variation on the story, including altering a closing line from that Bob Cratchitt is thereafter treated by Scrooge such that it is like having "three fathers" rather than "a second father".

Exploring queer readings and subtexts involved a lot of talk of homosexuality and gender transgression (though I don't think the latter phrase was ever used but this was extensively about that rather than sex and relationships) without giving specific voice to the situational and transitional bisexuality involved or suggested.  I quite understand not wanting to apply modern senses and experiences of sexuality to different historical social situations, but I did think more could be made of using the B and T words to reflect and clarify what we were talking about.

An interesting aspect was that where his work included more obviously gender transgressive characters - a woman who didn't 'keep to her place' or a man who failed to be appropriately 'manly', it was apparently often followed by a more normative story without such bold characters.

It struck me - and I threw in one of those questions from the floor that is really an observation rather than a question - that this tied in with a "Queer Acceptability Curve" of how far from accepted (cishetero) gender normative behaviour a writer then or filmmaker today can go and still have enough of a broad market appeal.
Dickens could allude for the informed reader to things that might suggest a character had an interest in sex with other men or with other women, but could only push so far and then roll it back a little for the next story to make sure he wasn't getting a dangerous reputation, like a Hollywood actor who feels the need to alternate 'credible' films with ones that prove their box office acceptability.

From the description of Scrooge & Marley, which I freely admit I've not seen so am going on the outline given, that too only pushes things so far within a queer acceptability space. Same-sex monogamous couples replace mixed-sex couples, there is a simple rather than gendercomplex trans character: nothing too challenging and all keeping within the binaries that keep same-sex desire unthreatening and similar to the notional normatives of married cishetero life.

It's grand that the curve has moved as far as it has compared to Dickens' day. It still has some way to go.

A Decade On: Bi Life in Manchester

The conference where the "Bisexual Life in Manchester" report was launched was held on 29th September 2003.  Ten years ago today.

This was the first bit of 'proper' research on bi needs that I did with BiPhoria, as part of a broader LGB&T project for the local Local Strategic Partnership. This was qualitative focus group interview palaver, with an enormous amount of transcribing (I'd never done that before) and only a loosely formatted Word document and a set of Powerpoint slides in time for the launch rather than the prettified edition that's on the BiPhoria website.

It planted some of the seeds of The Bisexuality Report, by breaking its findings on bi life and bi needs down into policy areas - youth provision, mental health, employment, housing and so on. Something I'd forgotten over the years was that, like The Bisexuality Report, it included a section of positives about bisexual experience to give some respite from the 'list of problems' style that research findings on LGBT life can become. As I recall, this was reinvented afresh when the team devised The Bisexuality Report.

The report had little immediate impact, though, as in line with Manchester City Council policy in 2003, the overarching Local Strategic Partnership ruled bisexuality to not exist: we in the LGBT LSP kept sending in documents marked "LGBT" and they kept coming back marked "LG". Though it's shifted a little in recent years, Manchester City Council worked damn hard to earn a reputation for biphobia.

Selling to bisexuals

The first (that I have seen) market research about the buying habits of bisexuals has been published in the USA. In the fine traditional comedic trope, I hereby present the next 12 months' bi news.


October.  With polls still close in the Presidential election, and polling showing bis split 12:1 in his favour, Barack Obama railroads the "Bis Vote Twice" bill through Congress.  The plan comes unstuck in November when bisexuals with a preference are nonetheless allowed to vote both ways.

November.  Prof Debunked of the Dodgy Research University publishes his latest findings about bisexuality.  He explains that subjects were shown gay and straight porn on different smartphones while sensors attached to their genitalia recorded whether that type of phone was doing it for them.

December.  The New York Times retracts its "iPhoneite, Androidite or lying" headline admitting the findings related more to how attractive the research assistant looked in a white lab coat.

January.  Apple announce their response to the findings that bisexuals are more likely to buy £100 android phones than functionally-similar £400 iPhones. "Clearly the problem is in our marketing feeling excluding to bi people," says a spokesPad, "and so we will be updating our rainbow striped apple logo to include a pink stripe next to the purple and blue ones."  The new biPhone will cost just £75 extra, and is available in five shades of purple.

February.  Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne slaps 20% VAT on valentines cards purchased by bisexuals, thus milking the Purple Pound for all it is worth.  "Woody Allen told me the bisexuals have twice the chance of a date on Friday night, and that means they must be buying twice as many valentines cards" he explains in an emergency budget statement. 

Stung by Apple's cornering of the bi market, Google releases a customised version of its phone operating system called pandroid.

March.  Not to be outdone by cheap pandroids, Apple launch the new biPhone2, with an extra button that speed-dials the complaints department at Stonewall. A new app for smartphones lets biphobic people automatically block calls from biPhones.

April.  After the quarterly economic figures reveal the valentines card ruse failed to raise a single extra penny, on account of the bis all being far too busy playing on their biPhones to remember to send one another cards, George Osborne goes on television to admit he's not the real Chancellor, just to be a schoolboy on a really long Jim'll Fix It.

May.  Apple takes Google to court over pandroid phones, claiming they are a blatant rip-off of the biPhone.  Google's lawyers defend the clear and vast difference between the two: "it is not just another word for the same thing. The pandroid phones are a touchscreen with a suffusion of purple, whereas biPhones are a suffusion of purple with a touchscreen".  The judge listens carefully and throws the case out of court on the grounds that everyone knows there is no such thing as a bisexual.

June.  Concerned that it is missing out on the purple pound and that the bi- and pan- prefixes have already been snapped up, Microsoft launches Windows Mobile Omnishambles.  Following the flop of a youtube 'viral' ad campaign where Gerald Ratner observes "people ask me how Microsoft can sell a phone this cheap, and I say: it's because it's total ...er, totally purple" it is reviewed as both completely unusable and the best implementation of Windows yet.

July.  At a star-studded television awards ceremony, the heads of Sky, BBC and Virgin make a joint statement on the findings that 73% of bi women and 44% of bi men regularly see biphobia in the mainstream media. They pledge to make the negative portrayal of bi men that bit more obvious to help the boys catch up.

August.  Despite the market research claims of a year earlier, sales figures of biPhone, pandroid and omnishambles handsets reveal the purple pound to be as yet a myth and the bisexual community resolves to go back to taking all research about itself with a pinch of salt.

September.  Market research work begins to find out what kind of salt bisexuals find most reassuring.

Canada setting a healthy standard

How deliciously awesome is this Canadian CAMH video seeking to draw in bisexual people to talk about their health needs?

All the bi* labels you can hope for, no fighting over them, just cutting to the chase: health services are failing us, the stats say.  They are failing us moreso than gay, straight and lesbian service users, we need to assemble data on our lives to build the pressure for health providers to take the time to 'get' us and get over their biphobia and hetero/homo normativity.

If you're reading in Canada and are bi, or any of those mishmash of "fancying more than one gender" labels in the purple arc, please follow through on the plea for input this video. For the rest of us it's just lovely viewing, and hopefully might inspire something over here some day   :o)

Northerners won't marry

Want to meet someone and get hitched? Head to the Midlands. 

That's the most interesting finding of a survey ComRes have conducted for the 'Catholic Voices' website into attitudes to same-sex marriage.

Their own presentation of the findings plucks out the anti-equality messages and spins them as best as it can against the tide of history - heavens! 26% of gays think civil partnerships are as good as marriage! we don't need to do anything then, and they just hope that no-one mentions the implied inverse figure of 74% having seen through 'separate and lesser is equal' in our stretched newsrooms. And only bisexual, lesbian and gay people are asked whether same-sex marriage is a good idea, perhaps for fear of finding that other people aren't that threatened by the issue after all.

But fair play to them, they include a reasonable amount of the analysis data. The most interesting bit for me is the page looking at bisexual, lesbian and gay people and asking - are you in a civil partnership, would you get married if it were an option?

This breaks down not by my first choice of sexuality identity but by geography. Would you get married?

South East 26%
Midlands 38%
Northern England 19%
South West & Wales 29%
Scotland 24%

I wonder if the numbers are big enough to have any statistical significance? Fun if they do - we've just found that Brummies are twice as likely to marry another woman or another man as Mancs and Scousers. It's queer up north, we're just not the marrying kind...

Read the stats here as a pdf. You're bound to find something interesting that I've missed :)

Bisexual men health stats from Gay & Bi Men's Health Report

Stonewall have a chunky new bi & gay men's health report newly out, which seems to be the counterpart to the pale-blue bi & lesbian women's report you may remember from about 4 years ago.

There's lots of good stuff in there, by which I mean lots of quite bad stuff but important data to have available for NHS planning and so forth.

Mostly it combines bi and gay data together, however two snippets:

"In the last year, 27 per cent of gay men thought about taking their own life even if they would not do it. This increases to 38 per cent for bisexual men" (p9)

 That's a bit of a jump - what, about a third higher?

"One in five (21 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 19 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. One in six (15 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 24 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. Seven per cent of men in general aged 16 to 24 have ever deliberately harmed themselves.

"Rates of self-harm are also higher among bisexual men; eleven per cent of bisexual men have self-harmed in the last year." (p11)

That one feels like one of those simultaneous equations lessons in  maths when I was at school - we don't know how many gay men they have or how many bisexual men but the scores are 7%, 11% and 15%, solve for x and y... but it makes for about 50% higher rates of self-harm among bi men than among the male population as a whole. A sobering thought.

www.stonewall.org.uk/documents/stonewall_gay_mens_health_final.pdf

Town Hall aftermath

Time to write up the 'what do bis want?' workshop from the Town Hall LGBT Day. I've run the session twice so this will be a blend of outcomes from both sessions, but that also means that half the contributions are unlinked from the Town Hall. 

Must find some way of wording a copyright statement or what have you at the end of the report to ensure that the council doesn't try to slurp up all the credit. After all, they didn't even cover my damn train fare to run the session for them*.




* I may just be carrying over some past grouching here from the annual LGBT Health Summit.