We agreed, no leaders!

When I first got talking to people about the bi scene beyond my home city, I kept coming up against a quote from the film Time Bandits:

We agreed: No leader!

For a long time I didn't realise this was a quote and - as you do when you find yourself around people who've been doing something longer than you have - assumed it was the distilled wisdom of bisexual activists who had gone before.  We shall have no leaders, no-one shall be a spokesperson or able to claim to be giving a bisexual voice.

Well, it turned out the full quote is

Randall: do you want to be leader of this gang?
Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader!
Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say.

Which is more of an amusing analysis of how formal and informal power structures work.

Til I found that out, the turn of phrase troubled me as I thought it was a recipe for floundering and getting nowhere fast.  Leaders of any social strata community are by definition a bit mis-representatitive, but when one compares how far gay and lesbian liberation / equality / visibility / callitwhatyouwant has gone in the last twenty years with the leaders they've had, and compare it to bi progress in our ostentatiously leaderless (un)structures... well, leadership sometimes looks like it might have been a clever plan. There's lots we might find ourselves at odds with in how LG things have shaped up, and lots of things that I might argue the bi movement has done better thanks to the way our projects and groups have worked, but on balance, and at the risk of deviating from the party line our non-existent leaders don't issue: we had better parties but the other lot got further along toward an arbitrary set of goals.

Leaders are divisive, sure. Anyone having an opinion and holding it up in public is divisive, mind. So long as you have several voices, there's room for additional or replacement voices, and the people involved disagree reasonably on a reasonable amount of turf, leaders are probably a good tactic. Since Bisexual Index formed, for instance, you'll find Bisexual Index voices get quoted in bits of the press and even invited on TV and radio to put a bi viewpoint.  To a lesser degree, the same thing has happened with BiPhoria (the longest-running bi group we have now) and Bi Community News.

Having high profile figures connected to the community gives people outside the bisexual community whirl someone to connect to, a way "in" or a voice to draw into their own conversations.  A person to invite as a speaker.  A person to call for a quote.  A person to ask when you need signposting.

I think that's a good thing.  Not that I'll always agree with whoever that person is on whatever they're talking about - damn boring life would be if I did, even if I am mellowing into pragmatism in my middle age - but then one hell of a lot of gay people have disagreen with Angela Mason, Ben Summerskill and Peter Tatchell down the years.  The fact that a Ben or an Angela or a Peter was there was still mostly a good thing, even if I might have liked to swap someone else into that role.

Which takes me back to the original point of this posting this blog post, which has been a little bit meandery.  You know I was talking about this Health Summit the other day?  On the same weekend, also in Cardiff as part of an entwined conference series, there is one on LGBT Leadership.  A networkingy trainingy event to skill up, empower, develop and all those kind of shiny words, lesbian, gay, bi and trans leaders in activist circles, business circles, political circles, etc.

And on the weekend when the UK's most committed bi political and community activists - bi being probably in this country the least vocally represented of the four strands - are all tied up elsewhere.

Grrrr!

Sigh.  Maybe it'll happen again next year.

Let's not be healthy then

As BiMedia reports, this year's LGBT Health Summit has been announced for the first two days in September. It'll be in Cardiff, having previously gone to places like Newcastle, Manchester and Bristol: I think this is the first time it's been in Wales.

Chances are, dear reader, that you've never been to these conferences, so I shall observe that these are quite useful events with a lot of interesting research shared and best practice (and bad practice) highlighted.  From an individual queer activist perspective it's a brilliant opportunity to meet people doing all kinds of work and to learn about what's going on out there, bringing so many strands together in one place.  I've gone to quite a lot of LGBT 'sector' things and the Health Summit is toward the top of the usefulness puddle.


However, the first two days in September are also when BiCon falls this year. For the small strand of the LGBT communities who are engaged in bi activism or want to connect to bi issues and community, that's a damn hard clash. For a lot of us, it's a decision that will naturally fall down on the side of being in a properly bi-welcoming space for the few days of the year when that's an option.

It's not the first time these two have been up against each other: when the summit came to Manchester in 2007, it overlapped with BiCon that year too. That conference was one of my Activist Regrets: at the very end of the conference, I was scheduled to talk.  I went with the speech I'd prepared rather than do what my instincts told me which was to do one more off-the-cuff about what I had seen in the part of the Health Summit I had been able to attend. I really should have gone with the impromptu one about the things that weren't being talked about, primarily bisexuality but also genderqueer matters. That year at least - I've not been able to go since - it was remarkably centred on lesbian and gay experience and the small-c conservative end of transgender. By the time I and the keynote speaker on trans matters were lined up to talk, most attendees had already left. 

There are many many queer events every summer and a lot of them have to overlap. It's blooming frustrating though, especially when from what I can make out the Health Summit has been inching toward being more bi positive / inclusive.  If you're just not cut out for BiCon and make it along to the Summit, I'd love to know how it goes.

Preferably not

This icon hits the buffers then, and needs to drop off the set of images in my blog's right hand column, since it's all over now and in the referendum on changing the voting system last week the Yes campaign died on its arse.

I think the voters went the wrong way on it, and that it was lost for a number of reasons most of which I'll not rehearse here. But the public have spoken, or at least that slice of the public that cared to express an opinion, and fear has triumphed over hope again.  At a guess it'll be thirty years before we get another chance at reform of the Lower House.

So: maybe next time :o)



(Such politicking is why I've been quiet here for the last two months. Normal service shall soon be resumed)

What do bis want?

A bold and overly ambitious title, so I'll reduce my scope in two big steps right away by asking making it "what do people who visit the Bi Community News website want" and then basing my answer on what sections of the website they browse, which is an answer limited to the things that are there for them to look for. If most visitors actually want slash fiction, they won't be showing up here, cos it ain't there.

In the past month - since BCN went over to the new website - the most popular bits of the website according to the analytics data are:

1) The home page.
2) The local groups listings
3) Resources info
4) Subscribe (if only they all did!)
5) Bi Sex & The City, our relationships advice column
6) Both Directions (the guide to the bi scene)
7) Diary of a Crap Lesbian, more relationships and dating stuff
8) Back issues
9) BiCrushing, again relationships stuff, from a different angle
10) Latest stories

What does this tell us?

First, that whatever's linked prominently off the front page attracts people. No shocks there. Second, that people are looking for advice about love and dating, in total in similar numbers to those looking for real-life meetings and advice. And third, that the "subscribe now" page needs to be more hard-hitting to convert all those visitors into subscribers!

I think one of my next tasks with that website might be varying the front page material to see how that affects where people navigate to.

Say what?

And now with subtitles... A while ago I looked at the very shiny videos that came out of BiReCon 2010 and thought, these could do with a bit more work. I've already variously posted transcripts of them (with, on more recent listening, the odd word awry - sorry!); I suggested that subtitled versions of the videos would be good thinking someone else might have the skills and a little time and take the idea up.

Well, no-one else did that, so now I've started work on putting subtitles on each film so that people who are deaf, h-o-h or whose main languages are not English have a better experience of the videos. It takes a bit of voom and my life's quite busy in places so they are happening on a one-or-two-a-week basis, but getting there.

Here are the first few:
* Robyn Ochs: Why we need to 'get bi' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_1gfjWBZVo
* Anna Einarsdottir: Civil partnerships http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9np9ChMfZs
* Miguel Obradors: biphobia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thWLNFJgtsA

It's been very interesting starting to play with video software and quietly inspiring some thoughts on other work I want to do with youtubey material.

It's not that easy being purple

I thought I'd share a (very debateable!) bit of thinky theory I was having a while ago with the wider world.

One of the reliable old debates to set gay and bi teeth on edge is the "who has it easier?" one about the LG and the BBB ends of LGB. I shall try to render it here: try to imagine the voice of The Book in Hitch Hiker's guide for this bit, and some line art graphics of people arguing, example images and all that.

"Lesbians and gay men have it easier" say bis. "They have gay bars, special dress codes and haircuts so they can recognise one another, a sense of community fostered by a more similar experience of sexuality. They are better represented in the media and their sexuality is - after a lot of hard fighting that we helped with - taken seriously and respected in a way that ours is still not".

"Ah no," say the gays, "bisexuals are the ones who have it easier, they have the chance of being in a relationship that gives them heterosexual privelige, they blend into mainstream society. They don't have such a strong political profile because they never had it so tough".

"Urk." The bis pause then retort with, "but look at these stats on things like mental health, they show that we have a rougher deal than you do. And there is so much more work done that is targeting lesbians and especially gay men on things like sexual health, whereas it's assumed we will pick up the straight leaflet and the gay leaflet and work out how to interpose everything neatly together for ourselves."

Both sides of the argument are quite sure they're right.

So, I wonder if what is going on is like this: first, that the conversation above is a kind of class-based analysis, in other words, it leads to sweeping statements that are a pile of steaming piffle when it comes to actual lives. All gay men do not have the same experience of oppression, ditto all bi women, etc. Everyone's experience of oppression is complex and varies through their life and indeed the course of each day.

So it might go a bit more like this diagram here. Pink line for gay/lesbian, purple line for bis. If bi folk tend toward one end of the range of experience or the other, and gay to the centre, then both observations would hold. Because of the options of mixed-sex relationships, more bis would have a low-stress experience of how their sexual orientation affected their lives than would be the case for lesbians and gay men. At the other end of the range of experience, because there is more of an infrastructure of support for gay people, those bis who needed more support would find it lacking and so be pushed further to the right hand end of the graph - even moreso than for lesbians and gay men who might be more likely to be able to find the help and support they needed.

This might also explain why there is more support for lesbians and gay men than for bis: if you are up at the right hand end of the graph, it's probably harder to give support to others since your own needs are quite pressing. Whereas the bulge in the middle of the gay curve causes more people to think that there needs to be something and that they can find the time and energy to make it happen.

I stress, this is just a thinky exercise. I've got no research data, just a bit of a thought that came to me a while ago!

New shiny bi booklet

It's taken a good bit of work, but I'm delighted to be showing off about Getting Bi in a Gay / Straight World, a new bookletty publication that I've led on putting together, with the aid of a posse of people from inside and outside BiPhoria. 

It's glossy, it's pretty, it's colourful.  It is chatty and uses simple words where it can.  It does, I think, a pretty good job on including genderqueer well within a publication that is about B not T, sexuality not gender.

And - this is the biggy - it's free and we've made more than 10,000 copies to give away thanks to some very good grant application writing.  Once I've got some sturdy enough hosting to cope with people grabbing the PDF, there'll be an online PDF version too.  Bear with me, just now I have a lot of work I'm juggling along with a day job and a real life!

Many years ago - 1996 I reckon without looking it up - the then Bi Community News team produced an 8 page info sheet The BCN Starter Pack.  It was like a cut-down version of (the then very newslettery) BCN, focused on coming out and what bi resources were out there.  What mostly stuck with me at the time was the information about queer zines, but I know there was mythbusting and recommended books and films and so on. It underwent a few updates over the years including being rebranded as Everything you always wanted to know about bisexuality in the UK but didn't know who to ask, a title which at least would stand out in a booklist.

A few years later, around 2005, a gaggle of bi activists got together following one of the Bi Activist Weekends to write Both Directions, a remake from scratch of the Starter Pack.  This time about 16 pages long, but on smaller pages - A5 not A4 - with information about things that hadn't been so relevant in the mid 90s like email lists and websites.  It was, I'd have to admit, very wordy and lacking in pictures to break up the page: we were going for the cheapest possible print options and those can mangle photos into disasters.  Both Directions has needed a decent makeover for a while, but sometimes it's easier to start with a blank sheet of paper.

And so the new guidebook. 28 pages, though that's about as much paper as was in the other two as it's now A6 - the right size for many pockets and postcard or flyer racks.  And with 1000s of copies already making their way into display racks across the county.  Hats off to CFGM for funding the printing, and many thanks to everyone who helped proof-read, scribe, tweak or otherwise generally encourage this one into life: I'm really proud of it!

lgBt History Month in the North

As a part of the events for LGBT History Month, I spoke at a BiPhoria event in Manchester earlier this week.

There was about a half-hour of me talking about the evolution of the bi scene in Manchester over the last 30 years and exploring what I've found so far in looking at stuff from before I was around, in the 1981 - 1993 era. Then there was a kind of Q & A / share your memories discussion for about an hour which was brilliant and I hope some of the people who brought things up there will carry on talking to me about the stuff I don't yet know!

It's been quite a fascinating bit of research, reflecting how far we've come in some ways and how stuck we still are in others: in particular a council with one of the best reputations on LGBT in the country yet with a gulf between their delivery on LG and the rest, and a particularly sharply defined sense of 1980s gay and socialist-feminist politics. And I know I'm just past scratching the surface, with various sources now in mind for where to explore next. Damn but it's addictive!

I've learned things I never knew about the evolution of the bi spaces the city has had, and discovered there's way more than you can fit into a half-hour so started picking particular narratives to explore in the story. And I promise to write it up properly over the coming year to record our history rather than just let it sit in my head.