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!)

Pink, Purple, Blue vs Cyan, Magenta, Yellow

Two related thoughts about the pan flag:

First, should we take it that the colours chosen being 3 of the 4 used for most printing processes to acheive all colours is deliberate?  It would seem an unlikely combination to have by chance.

Second, if it is a flag based on CMYK, what should we think of the symbolism that it excludes black and other dark hues?

Bonus

OK, from now on some of my blog posts are going to be carried on my favourite left-wing blog aggregator as well as on the bi one.

Awesome :)

Harriet Harman has another dime bar moment

Onetime trans-bashing clueless-embarrassment-to-the-nation equality minister Harriet Harman now has a new role - as a clueless opposition MP.

On balance it's an improvement.  Her inability to grasp even pretty damn simple ideas while governing the country damaged our equality legislation and made life worse for people.  Now she just embarrasses herself and her party.  I'm a lot more comfortable with incompetents in opposition than in government.

So today she's getting herself in the headlines for condemning the left-right coalition's plans for individual voter registration to replace household-based registration.  She says it's a terrible thing to do: it will disenfranchise people who are young, black, or poor, and suchlike. It is the act of politicians who are seeking to rig elections.

And the BBC reports her as bewailing that "the Lib Dems - to their eternal shame - (are) colluding with the Tories in changing the law on the electoral register."

So, changing to individual voter registration bad. Apparently. What does Harriet want instead?

She wants ...individual voter registration. Only, rolled out in 2015 not 2014.

Now, maybe I'm just peculiar (it has been suggested) but it seems to me that either this is a terrible thing to do, it rigs elections, disenfranchises the black / poor / young etc... or it isn't.  Which year you change over to it isn't going to change that, not when your wiggle room is a matter of twelve months.

Get a grip, Harriet, you election-rigging, youth-hating, poor-bashing [etc!]

With an official opposition of this calibre no wonder the only effective opposition to the coalition is also on the government benches.

Highlighting the differences

The announcements today and tomorrow from the government will be fun.

In the past with one-party government, (or one-effective-party as in the Lab/Co-op coalition) you had all the exciting pronouncements in one go at the start of the relevant conference week.  Now with an openly talked about coalition, each side gets its hot topics to display separately.

So two weeks ago the ministers in the left side of the left-right coalition were the ones getting their special announcements out.  Rolling back of the blood ban, same-sex marriage, gender-free passports, to cite the ones that caught my LGBT-centric eye.  Now we get the ones the Tory ministers wanted held back til their conference for them to celebrate: so far we've got the extra money for going back to weekly bin collections. 

What else will there be to delight the blue-rinse conference audience?

Lost Girl's gorgeous cliche

Lost Girl is now up to episode four on SyFy.

If you liked Buffy and Angel, you'll probably like this.  It's got that vampires-are-real kind of world mythology, with the more 'adult' themes (aka people don't just fancy those of a different gender from themselves, and sex happens) that Angel and later seasons of Buffy had.

But where Buffy dodged the bi bullet with Willow's instant gay/straight flip, Lost Girl takes the bull by the horns. Our central hero, Bo, is a succubus, feasting on the sexual energy of whomever comes to hand without regard for gender; and when faced with a choice of joining the 'light' or 'dark' supernatural sides, she walks the line between them instead, not feeling herself to be either one thing or the other, and thus faces bewilderment and opprobrium from either camp.

You know, I think there might be the odd hint of the Big Book Of Bi Cliche there.

The first season finished showing months ago in the USA so as it starts showing here, I hear of it getting renewed for a second season. Our two lead characters are both women, and programme commissioners on the other side of the Atlantic don't seem to like their scifi to have too many strong women in it: see the cancelling of Caprica or Firefly. Hopefully they'll continue not to notice that our hero in this one is a woman for another couple of years.

Happy #bivisibility Day!

Happy Bi Visibility Day everyone!

As I was reflecting with someone earlier this week, there's a lot of mirroring between being a bisexual and being a Lib Dem:

• It's not either of the two big, popular choices that everyone's heard of.
• If you say you are, people will try to get you to admit you're not perfectly equidistant and are therefore one of the two popular choices really.
• There's a popular image that it's just a 'stopping off' point and not a real, coherent, long-term thing to be.
• It attracts nowhere near the financial and social support that the easier options get.
• And finally in this dubious list: after a few brief bursts of fashionability, it's starting to get a little bit more sustained and serious recognition in the public eye.

So hurrah for the growing number of (mostly female, but that's another blogpost) actors and popstars and other such celebs who are coming out and staying out as bi. Hurrah that they are doing so despite the idiot responses of people like Beth Ditto. And hurrah that for the first time, this year Stonewall have given a little nod towards Bi Visibility Day with their tweet linking to the September 23 website.

Happy bi day folks :)