It gets better

Suburban Bi (who frustratingly isn't on the blog aggregator at the moment due to feed compatability issues) found a UKanian voice and one mentioning bisexuality in the videos for "It Gets Better".

Here:



I love all the personal stories in this project, even though some of them are heart-wrenching and some have had to be made by friends for people who they've lost. And it's wonderful how it's grown like topsy since it started: I know that the person who started it in the USA is better linked to the media and so forth than me, but if I'd started it and you'd told me it would end up with the President of the USA making a video for the series, I'd have pointed at you and laughed. In a non-judgemental, caring kind of way :D

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.

Community linkage

As one of the million bi activist tasks on the to-do list that can be taken care of while waiting in at home for a delivery, I've been making BiBloggers a little bit more readable with a more purpley blue aspect and a bit less grey-on-white.

I think we need some graphics for people who are on the BiBloggers syndicator to be able to link to BiBloggers from their journals / sidebars / whatever.

I'm not having a brilliant lot of ideas for that but have made this for my one:



If anyone can come up with something better I'd be really happy to upgrade! :)

Passed over again...

Stonewall, the - how should I put this - sometimes controversial LGB equality campaign group, have unveiled their shortlists for their annual awards.

A host of categories exist, and frustratingly they don't seem to publish a complete set of nominations: Community Group of the Year could for all I know have a shortlist of BiScotland, BiPhoria, Bothways and BiVisBristol. But without that set of nominees being public, what catches my eye first is the shortlist for Publication of the Year: Attitude magazine, Midlands Zone, The Lawyer, The Times and the Radio Times. BCN cruelly passed over once again there: perhaps if we added TV listings then the glitterati might love us?

And I see that: Ben Summerskill, Stonewall Chief Executive, said: ‘This year’s Stonewall Awards nominees include openly-gay sport stars, flagship soap operas, mainstream lesbian, gay and straight entertainers, tabloid and quality broadsheet journalists and politicians from all three main parties.

Now, you don't need a big purple neon sign to guess what I think's missing there.

I fear we need some bisexual nominees to badger Ben with over the next twelve months so he can't say the same again next time...

What did you make of BiCon?

Another video, this time quite different, a few people talking about their experience of being at the biggest event of the UK bi calendar, BiCon, this summer. I think we need more of this to help bring new people in to bi space, as well as more, glossy, colourful magazines and suchlike.



I did get filmed by someone for another similar project - I wonder if I can chase down the footage and add it to the online selection?

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'

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.