BCN Summer Special

The BCN Summer Special has gone to the print shop. 

It's not very summery, but even so this one will be a little bit special... fingers crossed and all will be revealed in a week's time.

Hopefully as we have gone to a different printers from where we got the last summer special done, it won't be trucking round the country all summer when people should be flicking through a copy at the bar at BiCon! You have no idea how frustrated I was to open a boxful of Jimi Hendrix zines the day before BiCon as the delivery truck pulled out of sight down the road.

The best bit about BCN going to press is that I can then stop, breathe, catch up on emails and even start to worry what to wear to the Ball.

Canada setting a healthy standard

How deliciously awesome is this Canadian CAMH video seeking to draw in bisexual people to talk about their health needs?

All the bi* labels you can hope for, no fighting over them, just cutting to the chase: health services are failing us, the stats say.  They are failing us moreso than gay, straight and lesbian service users, we need to assemble data on our lives to build the pressure for health providers to take the time to 'get' us and get over their biphobia and hetero/homo normativity.

If you're reading in Canada and are bi, or any of those mishmash of "fancying more than one gender" labels in the purple arc, please follow through on the plea for input this video. For the rest of us it's just lovely viewing, and hopefully might inspire something over here some day   :o)

Northerners won't marry

Want to meet someone and get hitched? Head to the Midlands. 

That's the most interesting finding of a survey ComRes have conducted for the 'Catholic Voices' website into attitudes to same-sex marriage.

Their own presentation of the findings plucks out the anti-equality messages and spins them as best as it can against the tide of history - heavens! 26% of gays think civil partnerships are as good as marriage! we don't need to do anything then, and they just hope that no-one mentions the implied inverse figure of 74% having seen through 'separate and lesser is equal' in our stretched newsrooms. And only bisexual, lesbian and gay people are asked whether same-sex marriage is a good idea, perhaps for fear of finding that other people aren't that threatened by the issue after all.

But fair play to them, they include a reasonable amount of the analysis data. The most interesting bit for me is the page looking at bisexual, lesbian and gay people and asking - are you in a civil partnership, would you get married if it were an option?

This breaks down not by my first choice of sexuality identity but by geography. Would you get married?

South East 26%
Midlands 38%
Northern England 19%
South West & Wales 29%
Scotland 24%

I wonder if the numbers are big enough to have any statistical significance? Fun if they do - we've just found that Brummies are twice as likely to marry another woman or another man as Mancs and Scousers. It's queer up north, we're just not the marrying kind...

Read the stats here as a pdf. You're bound to find something interesting that I've missed :)

Bis at Pride 2012 - Looking Ahead

BiPhoria's pub meet last night in Manchester included a dollop of discussion about upcoming Prides.

The group has quite a selection of banners already: I should probably take and post a series of photos of all our different designs, but they go, in sequence...

1995 banner: for the first Manchester Pride after the group was formed, this one is a simple blue spray paint / old white sheet affair reading "BIPHORIA!" on one side and "Manchester Bisexuals" on the other. Signed by the original banner makers and dated (aww). Where are they now?
1999 banner: a brilliant idea with one small flaw. This is about 10' by 6' of hand-stitched bi flag and infinite bisexuality logo, took ages to make and looks amazing. The only thing is, it doesn't anywhere on it actually say what it means or who we are, so it works better as a backdrop on a stall. As a banner, you have to hand out flyers to the crowd explaining who the heck you are.
2006 banner: "Bisexual Recruitment Army". For our pride theme that year and tied in to the making of the B*R*A website.
2007 banner: "Manchester Bisexuals biphoria.org.uk". Basically a version of the 1995 banner for the intermaweb age. Hand sewn letters on a meshy sort of white fabric.
2008 banner: "Some People Are Bi, Get Over It". The most political banner, both a challenge to mainstream and gay society about their biphobia, and highlighting Stonewall's deliberate bi-erasure.
2010 banner: "Bisexuals Everywhere, Out & Proud". The only professionally printed one, as part of the national Bis@Prides project

However, I think we should make one that is mostly just good for this summer. BiPhoria is 18 this year, and a celebratory banner along the lines of "Challenging 'it's a phase' theory since 1994" would tie in with Manchester Pride's sciencey theme. With a URL, since the internet still hasn't gone away.

There's only three months left to make it in. That slogan needs honing :)

Words can have several meanings, get over it

I've grumbled this particular angle about the "it must mean either one thing or the other" nonsense for years but finally cracked and made a tumblr-esque version of that blogpost! Honestly, so many words you just look at the context and you get it or you ask for any nuance you might actually need...

Bisexual men health stats from Gay & Bi Men's Health Report

Stonewall have a chunky new bi & gay men's health report newly out, which seems to be the counterpart to the pale-blue bi & lesbian women's report you may remember from about 4 years ago.

There's lots of good stuff in there, by which I mean lots of quite bad stuff but important data to have available for NHS planning and so forth.

Mostly it combines bi and gay data together, however two snippets:

"In the last year, 27 per cent of gay men thought about taking their own life even if they would not do it. This increases to 38 per cent for bisexual men" (p9)

 That's a bit of a jump - what, about a third higher?

"One in five (21 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 19 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. One in six (15 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 24 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. Seven per cent of men in general aged 16 to 24 have ever deliberately harmed themselves.

"Rates of self-harm are also higher among bisexual men; eleven per cent of bisexual men have self-harmed in the last year." (p11)

That one feels like one of those simultaneous equations lessons in  maths when I was at school - we don't know how many gay men they have or how many bisexual men but the scores are 7%, 11% and 15%, solve for x and y... but it makes for about 50% higher rates of self-harm among bi men than among the male population as a whole. A sobering thought.

www.stonewall.org.uk/documents/stonewall_gay_mens_health_final.pdf

Quentin Letts: Zombie or Vampire?

Quentin Letts. Moderately high-profile "journalist".

I've just stumbled across his description of a woman in the public eye as "aged 60 (and counting)". Now, one of the things I tend to just take for granted about anyone's age, indeed most time-related things, is that it is "(and counting)". My age is hem-ha-hem years old (and counting). The amount of time since the Labour party was one of the three most influential parties in British politics is 711 days (and counting). And so on.

The only time when we stop counting with someone's age is when they are dead. At that point, your age becomes a fixed thing; no longer is it "(and counting)".

So if Letts thinks it's something worth noting in others that they are still alive... that suggests a baseline view of the world in which being alive marks you out as different.

Keen minds raised on Buffy will naturally want to know: is he a vampire or a zombie? Zombies have an endless hunger for the brains they lack. So that's quite a promising possibility there. On the other hand, vampires suck the life out of others and have nothing to offer the living.

Vampire or zombie? Too close to call.

London