It's Real!

Eight months in the making, The Bisexuality Report is finally here.

Pictured above, 6 of the 7 authors at the launch in London at the Open University: the launch also heard from the Metro Centre, Stonewall and the Government Equalities Office about their takes on the report and why they were variously pleased to receive or endorse it.

Proper writeup soon... honest!  

Meanwhile you can read about it in a series of stories at bimedia.org/bireport

Having our cake and eating it

It's good to see as a new wave of Lib Dem subgroups present themselves to the world that Lib Dem Friends Of Cake has now reached 76 supporters. 

The other ginger groups may say they have cookies, but we have cake. Mmmmm, cake... ginger cake. Definitely winner of the Best New Lib Dem Faction Award at the 2012 LDV Bloggies.

LGBT History Month 2012

As a foolish thing to do for the BiMedia bisexual news website, I'm trying to mark LGBT History Month this year by giving a little dash of visibility to a different bit of bi history each day of February. 

Like a lot of LGBT work, History Month resources and events in my experience tend to be good on the LG bits and frequently good on the T strand but often the B is weak. But there has been plenty of bi history:albeit sometimes things we need to (re)claim. I have an assortment of ideas of things to highlight, and at one event a day that's just 26 more to go...

All that said, I could use your help, dear intermaweb people. I don't really want a calendar that is just about the things that seem important to me. For all the obvious reasons I remember less about bi men's projects or BME stuff. I never watched This Life or Queer As Folk. So a calendar all of my own would be skewed toward lefty things, Northern things, Radio 4 and suchlike.

So please do suggest – whether a person or event – a little bit of bi history you think a bi history timeline should include. It might just be a name or an event, it might be you could add a paragraph or two about what it was and why it mattered (or who…) – and whether you want to be named yourself or keep it an anonymous submission.

Hopefully by the end of the month we may have quite a Bi History timeline getting going, which can then be built on as a resource for bi visibility in LGBT History Month in years to come. Drop us an email on historymonth@bimedia.org

Maler (not Paler)

I see Diana Wallis has just stepped down as Lib Dem MEP for Yorkshire. In a "time to move on" way, before anyone thinks this is a defection or what have you.

This follows fairly close on from Liz Lynne's move in West Midlands recently, halfway through the parliamentary term giving her successor a fair amount of time to build a profile in the region.  As in Liz's case I suspect this means we get the number 2 from the Yorkshire 2009 list and so gain a male MEP in Diana's place?

In 2009 we saw 6 of 11 Lib Dem MEPs were women. That's now down to 4 of 12.

Can I get a lolcat of "becoming less 'male and pale': u r doin it wrong"?

(Seriously: that's zipping for you!)

How much of the "elected in 1999" team does that mean we still have in place?

Back in the army

A few years ago - gosh, it must be about five years now - local bi group BiPhoria dressed up in bad camo print and waved a banner for the Bisexual Recruitment Army as our Manchester LGBT Pride presence.

It was all in good fun and we filled a website with bad punnery - like how we were challenging bisexual invisibility through the use of bad camouflage, capable of marching both ways on the parade ground at the same time, and had a regimental motto of all we need is a few good men, and a few good women, and a place that sells really sturdy beds.

Well, the website stayed up for a while but in the end it wasn't going anywhere fast and so we let the domain lapse, and so while the B*R*A Facebook group is still there, there was no more sign of the B*R*A.

Until now.  Back up as a subsection of the BiPhoria website, I give you: The Bisexual Recruitment Army. Hope it gives you a good giggle.

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

How LGBT is your LGBT Pride?

About ten to fifteen years ago, there was a trend of "lesbian and gay" organisations and events in the UK shuffling over to  calling themselves LGBT, or "lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender".

London L&G Pride and the L&G wing of the Lib Dems were the first I noticed make this change, around 1996. Slowly other Prides and LG(B)(T) organisations around the country followed suit. We've advanced to the point that now, fifteen years on, it looks a little peculiar when you see something that is, at least on the label, LG rather than LGB or LGBT.

But changing the label on the tin is one thing, how far have we changed what's in the tin?

This came back into my mind as I was bumbling around the Manchester Pride website this week. I'd never noticed their Pride Surveys before, but here were some remarkable results.

At the 2008 and 2010 Manchester LGBT Prides, they conducted some kind of survey of attendees.  Each time the best part of 1000 people were interviewed, so you would imagine there was some degree of statistical validity to the findings.

I'm going to put trans/cis matters to one side for a moment and ask: what did they show on sexuality?

Lesbians and gay men form the lion's share - 80%+ - of those attending. The next largest sexuality grouping is heterosexual people. Bisexuals only make up about 7% of those attending - a tenth of the attendance by gay and lesbian people.

A remarkable statistic, that hugely underlines the need for bi work and bi visibility at that event, given every study of sexuality worth reading finds more bisexuals - especially when it comes to women - than gay and lesbian people.  It is on a par with the stats from Kairos' London LGBT Almanac, which suggested that of all LGBT service users in London, only about 6% were bi. 

It would seem we have a long way to go yet before the label "LGBT" really means it.

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!)