invisi-bi-lity

Activism is such a chore. Let's have another facebook page instead ;)

Very nearly 102

Gosh.  Issue 102 of BCN has gone for proof-reading.  I'm doing several magazines with tight deadlines this month so it feels fab to have this one nearly put to bed!

B is not for invisi-BI-lity, and London is not the World

This week's lefty weekly newspaper has a nice half-page piece about London LGBT Pride. Delga have it reproduced on their website already here, which is helpful.

See, mostly it's all good stuff: just two things make me go "Ah, but".

It makes that common mistake of making London-upon-Thames Pride sound like it's the national thing. Which I really don't think it is any more: in the 90s it was, back then it was so much bigger than the others and there was a real sense of momentum towards it, of spotting other queers on the road down south. But since then the other Prides have grown: I've not been there the last two years but by 07 and 08 it had nothing like that sense of build as you arrived in the city. We're not quite at the point equivalent to the Tony Wilson "wake up America, you're dead" line, but it is far more like that now. There are fifty or more Prides around the UK. If Pride was a corporation, London is no longer the majority shareholder. When evoking lefties to raise the stripey banner high, encourage them to do it everywhere, not just down in the bottom right-hand corner of the island.

But more than that, there's a difficult line in reference to "gay" marriage: "next year will be the 41st year of the London Pride marches - I hope that we might be marching with some married LGBT couples".  There are already lots of married LGBT couples. Most LGBT people are not lesbian or gay.  Even most LGB people are not lesbian or gay.

Internal politics

A few years ago I came up with this as an illustration of how the lgbt communities are not homogenous. There are more role models, more bars, more social acceptability, more support spaces, hell more money even, the higher up the pyramid you get to be.Which was very useful exploring the idea that Canal Street is not the be-all and end-all of outreach to LGBT at a conference the LGF hosted a couple of years ago.

It probably (subconsciously) derived from a one-dimensional power triangle by Dianne DiMassa in My Gender Workbook, applying the same idea but adding another dimension because of the ways that other factors than gender and sexuality, your wider normativity, slide you up or down the scale of voice, acceptance, representation and respect.

Though I'd have to rummage through my old papers to work out whether I was actually drawing things like this before Gender Workbook came out, I'm really not sure.

The things I've chosen for the slider side here are somewhat arbitrary and I'm sure readers will be able to suggest other things. 

Hard to illustrate is that the bottom row there is more of a wriggling writhing mass of competition.  When I was first coming out some twenty odd years ago I'd have layered things with B above T and Q, but they are at least level now.

Anyway, I thought I'd run it up as a computer graphic and share the image. It might be a good argument-starter 8)

Oh, YouGov...

YouGov should know better than to trot out heteronormativity like this...

Sigh!

Interviews

I'm far from alone in having two times for doing things: now, or someday.

Hence when the interesting email comes in about this or that publication wanting a quote or answers to half-a-dozen questions, I try to do it at the time if I can.  Otherwise it joins the long list of queued Get Round To It things that radio 7, Warcraft or hot dates ensures never quite happens.

So this week I'm full of being on the receiving end of the Get Round To It queue, as two interview shaped items that will be awesome in BCN when we get them are nearly here, yet might take six months to arrive, like a Manchester "be with you in ten minutes" taxi. Grrr!

Otherwise BCN issue 101 is coming together nicely. And waiting for BCN stuff to come in means BiMedia gets more stories fed to it...

A little bi of trans politics

So mostly here I stick to the bi stuff. But however many years ago I started agitating on trans and genderqueer things (before we had the latter word to work with, and boy does having a word for it help!) could I have really thought I'd see a mainstream parliamentarian saying things like:

"I believe it is legitimate to extend the interpretation of EU law so that it protects not only (as it does) people who have undergone gender reassignment but also those whose gender identity is complex or who identify with no gender. We also need to promote a greater public awareness of transgender and gender neutrality issues."

 People of London who re-elected Sarah Ludford MEP last summer, we salute you!

What do we want shot of?

Last week was the budget, with the right wing of the government in the ascendant. But the left wing of the government gets its turn in the spotlight this week, with the web launch of the consultation on the Great Repeal Act / Freedom Bill which Clegg has been advocating for quite some time.

Naturally most of the suggestions don't have much to do with (bi)sexuality. But in amongst half-baked drug propaganda and proposals to make it easier to use a dog to threaten, kill and maim, or to deny people like me the freedom to breathe in public places, there is stuff on marriage equality and repealing the "extreme" porn laws - you remember the ones that made it illegal to take photos of things it's entirely legal to do - and a one on the crazy Labour law that made a swathe of cartoons illegal.

What laws do you want repealed? And don't just tell me, tell them!