And now, in colour...

BCN is an amazing publication. Yes, I'm biased, but really, it's still here nearly fifteen years on and almost 100 issues notched up.

But it does have one major drawback in the modern media age. It's in black and white.

Now, I do not personally give a fig. My personal measure of how likely to be worth reading a comic is at first sight is whether it is in mono or colour - colour stuff tending to be bland mainstream pish whereas stuff in mono that is worth working hard to get out there despite that often being awesome - Hothead Paisan, Liliane, Sleaze Castle. And it's a nice bit of inverse snobbery to indulge in while ignoring that rule completely when reading, say, the Death comics.

But the masses they expect colour, and when you show them the most persistent high profile bit of your movement and it's a mono printed publication, some folks will turn their nose up. More fool them, wise readers will say, but to grow a bigger wider bi movement we need to look at how we can change some of those first impression perceptions.

This is one hell of a long preamble for the news that, fingers crossed, from issue 97 for one or two or three issues we will have a colour cover on the magazine.

Colour!

Woohoo!

It brings a new challenge though. Who or what the hell do we put on the front? Since I really got my feet under the table as editor rather than just continuing it as it had been done before we've had a long run of mono photo covers; we've had quite a range of faces from the community though too few boys amongst other matters. But colour... so much possibility, and so scary getting it right!

Suggested cover images and volunteer coverbis welcome...

Bad blogger

I am a bad blogger. I've just been too busy with bi activism, lefty activism, having a love-life, work and assorted lurgies to blog here. Which is a shame as there are some rather fun developments; I shall have to try and tell you all about them soon.

"We must engage with the bisexual community"

As I'm sure to have touched on before, the City Council here has a long and proud record when it comes to LGBT issues of engaging with and advocating for the lesbian and gay communities. They've had equal opportunities policies which specifically covered gay, lesbian and heterosexual people. They've had service monitoring and targets which looked at gay, lesbian and heterosexual as the available categories, and equal opps monitoring on job applications that asked if you were gay, lesbian or heterosexual with the other two possibilities ignored.

And this has been going on for years and years. Since the first half of the 90s at least from my own experience and from all I can glean, since they first started to engage with the idea that you might be straight.

So, having increased the pressure and visibility a little in recent times, we seem to be getting to some kind of a breakthrough. One of the leading bi-marginalisers in a position of power over the years went as far this week as saying, as speaker at a conference where I had been a speaker earlier in the day, that identity politics had moved on from the time of being all about lesbian and gay, and that "we need to engage with the bisexual community and we need to engage with the trans community".

Dangerous words. Much more of this and I might be able to take more time off from activism.

A rare fail for PinkNews

The pink media is all a-quiver about an upcoming Eastenders plotline in which an existing male Muslim character, who has a girlfriend, falls for an out gay man and wrestles issues of his sexuality and the rules set by of his choice of faith.

Naturally, it's all about "Eastenders to feaure gay Muslim story" (pinknews), "Eastenders reveal gay muslim storyline" (pinkpaper). Are they missing a blooming obvious word starting with "B" perchance? It's another great case of the power of cock (tm) - the way that a man may have as many mixed-sex relationships as you please but will immediately be considered gay in the mainstream press the moment he thinks about sex with another guy -- it's sexist, it's many layers of queer-phobic, it's stupid, and it probably reflects how much of the media is still controlled by people with willies.

b-IDAHO?

Someone on an email list for another country's activists makes a point that chimes over here.

Whether IDAHO or the bastardisation I've seen around this year "IDAHOT": where are the bis? Are we treating it like Prides and queer conferences, a chance to fly the flag and get publicity and visibility through press releases, events or joining in at wider LGBT events to mark the date? Or are we carrying on our fine tradition of being invisible whilst padding out the crowds, the organising teams, the banner-carriers and so forth?

For once I get to be smug about it: this year's IDAHO weekend I was leading the bi segment at an LGBT conference. But if I'm honest most years it hasn't been like that; and BiMedia.Org's front page would change a lot more often if it had stories of a dozen bi things going on to mark the 17th of May.

IDAHO

You know, I can't quite bring myself to join in the re-branding this year with IDAHO* becoming about homophobia & transphobia, making it IDAHOT, since the logical next inclusive step is IDAHOBBIT, and then the whole thing will sound silly.




* International Day Against HOmophobia, 17 May, the anniversary of homosexuality ceasing to be listed as a disease. Also I'm not sure blurring it works viz. whether trans is yet off the list...? (That's a genuine "dunno", here, not rhetoric)

I originally posted this as a comment over on Bi-Furious, but I wanted a copy of it over at my place too :)


I'm a little unwell right now so this won't flow as prettily as I might like it to but:

Binary things.

Black|White
Yes|No
Gay|Straight
Homo|Hetero

So screw the spelling of the word, "bisexual" inherently doesn't damn fit on a binary. It's the |Grey| or |Rainbow| mucking up the simplicity of black and white, the |Maybe|, the |Sometimes|, the |Either|And|. The most binary "bisexual" gets is to have this cover that might let it sneak in past binary thinkers' defences as a trojan horse to blow their whole simple one-dimensional world open.

The more I come across people trying to make out that my bisexuality undermines my genderqueerity, the less I damn believe it and the more sure of the exact opposite I get.

g3 doubts

Oh my, g3 magazine has roped me into something (the usual "can we have a bi comment on...") and the email thread has in no time flat reached a reply that reads as transphobic to me. It happened once g3 got a photo to go with the words, so I think this is "your face doesn't fit our demographic".

I don't have the energy to argue it all out, and it's very noticeable that my main correspondent at g3 HQ hasn't chipped in with a "gosh that sounded a bit off colour, I'll have a word".

So many times in the last year or two g3 people have had me churn out words for them, then either never used something that they needed 'right now urgent'. When they did run something they have never sent me a copy so I had to get lucky with finding things in Clone Zone or what have you. With my volunteering background you tend to take this sort of thing on the chin, but when it is happening repeatedly and from an organisation with paid staff and the underpinning resources that that implies, it slides from human error to a culture of disdain for the little people.

It's been annoying, but I think this is where I stop being actively helpful with their odd requests. There are people who are in this to give and those who are in this to get; g3 never seem to be helping the community, just profiting from it.