As fellow BiBloggers resident EsmeT reminds us in her recent post, it's about to be February and in the UK that's LGBT History Month.
Each year a host of events around the UK and in the media teach or remind us about our queer history, sometimes with overarching themes that have been deliberately chosen, sometimes with themes that just seem to emerge at a grassroots level. The second year of LGBT HM being marked, if I remember right, there was a groundswell of trans history events in response to the first year being rather L&G. Last year it was all about sport, on account of the Olympics, which is why this year's theme is a bit peculiar in being the 101st anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. 100 years is more usual, but apparently the Olympics just wouldn't take "next year" for an answer.
Some years LGBT HM events with a bi focus happen around the UK during the month: BiPhoria hosted a "3,000 Years Of Bisexuality" history talk about four years ago, I did a "25 Years of Bisexual Manchester" type talk in 2011, and London has had a couple of events of varying shapes.
Beyond those, though, the pickings to date are lean.
It depends on a few factors: either one or more bi folk deciding to make something happen, whether as a one-off or as a specially themed evening at an existing bi meetup group, or a more broadly focused organisation that makes contact with one of many bi projects around the UK which can help with guest speakers (Bi Community News, Bisexual Index, Bothways, BiPhoria, Bi Cymru and suchlike).
Beside EsmeT's talk with her Church group, which I may be misreading but it sounds more like it's directed at the existing congregation rather than a 'public' audience, so far I haven't heard of any LGBT History Month events going on this year with a bi focus or substantial bi angle.
So: is there a B in LGBT History Month this year? If so please tell me, as I'd love to know about it!
Friday, 18 January 2013
Friday, 28 December 2012
What do you want to read in BCN next year?
Should Bi Community News borrow from the style of other magazines and have themed issues in 2013?
And if it should, what should the themes be?
And if it should, what should the themes be?
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
It's in the post...
The latest issue of BCN is back from the printers, stuffed into envelopes (thanks to the BCN stuffing possee!) stamped, labelled and off into the post.
Overseas ones will have to wait til I'm well enough to make it to a post office though. I do wish overseas mail was easier.
This issue has two major chunks of wordyness: one, the report back from decision making at BiCon 2012; the other, two articles talking about bisexuality and language. These relate to the Bristol bi club "Greedy" whose name flared up into controversy among a few ill-informed defenders of Teh Queer, and the wider question of sloganeering: what can you stick on a banner or flyer that bisexuals will unite around?
Overseas ones will have to wait til I'm well enough to make it to a post office though. I do wish overseas mail was easier.
This issue has two major chunks of wordyness: one, the report back from decision making at BiCon 2012; the other, two articles talking about bisexuality and language. These relate to the Bristol bi club "Greedy" whose name flared up into controversy among a few ill-informed defenders of Teh Queer, and the wider question of sloganeering: what can you stick on a banner or flyer that bisexuals will unite around?
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Getting Bi On Film
One of the "I'll get around to it" things on my to-do list this year was to take Getting Bi In A Gay/Straight World and make it into an mp3, so people who find sound easier than vision could get the benefit of its distilled bisexual wisdom.
But mp3 hosting is even more of a mystery to me than video hosting, so with the aid of Holly aka Bisexual Wombat, here is a video version, with the images from the booklet and an audio track.
Getting Bi in a Gay / Straight World from Bi Community News on Vimeo.
But mp3 hosting is even more of a mystery to me than video hosting, so with the aid of Holly aka Bisexual Wombat, here is a video version, with the images from the booklet and an audio track.
Getting Bi in a Gay / Straight World from Bi Community News on Vimeo.
Thursday, 22 November 2012
Even the BNP have learned to be classier than this
Sometimes it's hard not to look at the national student movement and despair.
The National Union of Students' vice president has called for Conservatives and Lib Dems to be burnt to death. That would of course include thousands and thousands - at least - of her own union's members.
In an email Vicki Baars encouraged students to shout "Build a bonfire, put the Tories on the top, put the Lib Dems in the middle and burn the f***ng lot!", at a nationally-organised day of protest against the new student finance settlements - which have improved the financial support for mature students and charge poor students less and wealthy students more.
While she has been pressed to issue a public apology, the neo-fascist ideological values of the clique at the top of NUS means that calling for the killing of thousands of its members will probably not lead to anything as dramatic as being expected to no longer be national vice president. A quick "sorry for mentioning that I wish thousands of my members would die in a terrifying and brutal fashion" tweet will probably be deemed enough.
To put it as mildly and calmly as I can: what an embarassment.
The National Union of Students' vice president has called for Conservatives and Lib Dems to be burnt to death. That would of course include thousands and thousands - at least - of her own union's members.
In an email Vicki Baars encouraged students to shout "Build a bonfire, put the Tories on the top, put the Lib Dems in the middle and burn the f***ng lot!", at a nationally-organised day of protest against the new student finance settlements - which have improved the financial support for mature students and charge poor students less and wealthy students more.
While she has been pressed to issue a public apology, the neo-fascist ideological values of the clique at the top of NUS means that calling for the killing of thousands of its members will probably not lead to anything as dramatic as being expected to no longer be national vice president. A quick "sorry for mentioning that I wish thousands of my members would die in a terrifying and brutal fashion" tweet will probably be deemed enough.
To put it as mildly and calmly as I can: what an embarassment.
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Brighton's Bi Celebrations on film
Back in September I was along (and a fleetingly brief speaker) at Brighton Bothways' event to mark Bi Visibility Day. This was a lavish affair at the city's main library, with lots of food and speakers.
They also showed a fistful of short films from YouTube about bisexuality, which were (I think) all from the USA due to the lack of good bi short films from the UK suitable for such an event. Partly to help start changing that, and partly to document the Brighton event itself, I filmed several of the speakers on the night and have since had to learn a few tricks to get the best out of the footage.
Four of those people have now given their permission for us to use the videos I made so here are four short clips of people talking about being bi in Brighton and the UK. I do hope you enjoy them.
Klara talks about growing up bisexual:
Arwen reads a poem she wrote about being bi:
Andi from the local council's LGBT workers forum:
Jak talks about growing up bi:
They also showed a fistful of short films from YouTube about bisexuality, which were (I think) all from the USA due to the lack of good bi short films from the UK suitable for such an event. Partly to help start changing that, and partly to document the Brighton event itself, I filmed several of the speakers on the night and have since had to learn a few tricks to get the best out of the footage.
Four of those people have now given their permission for us to use the videos I made so here are four short clips of people talking about being bi in Brighton and the UK. I do hope you enjoy them.
Klara talks about growing up bisexual:
Arwen reads a poem she wrote about being bi:
Andi from the local council's LGBT workers forum:
Jak talks about growing up bi:
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Creatively wrong
I've come across lots of interesting redefinitions of bi and definition pairs of bi and pan before. However - and I can't give you the link as it's one of the million web pages I've read this weekend - this weekend I came across a genius new one. I paraphrase mildly as I read it a short while ago...
Bi is if you have sexual relationships with any gender, pan is if they are romantic relationship
Wow. How brilliantly creative is that? There are these two words, right, and we know that 'bi' is the untrendy one that means you're not in with the cool crowd, but they seem to mean the same damn thing... it must be possible to come up with some kind of definition that splits them apart!
These kind of "bi is not the same" definitions always seem to involve pan being somehow morally superior. I think that might be the tell that gives away an attempt to make yourself more acceptable, the sad old theme of putting another group or identity down in order to raise yourself up in the social rankings.
Bi is if you have sexual relationships with any gender, pan is if they are romantic relationship
Wow. How brilliantly creative is that? There are these two words, right, and we know that 'bi' is the untrendy one that means you're not in with the cool crowd, but they seem to mean the same damn thing... it must be possible to come up with some kind of definition that splits them apart!
These kind of "bi is not the same" definitions always seem to involve pan being somehow morally superior. I think that might be the tell that gives away an attempt to make yourself more acceptable, the sad old theme of putting another group or identity down in order to raise yourself up in the social rankings.
Bye bye Pink Paper
The Pink Paper has closed down.
The Pink meant a lot to me: when I first came out onto the LGBT scene, there it was: a tabloid sized newspaper, free and available in big piles in bars, in the foyer of the students union, on a display rack in the library ten miles away when I needed a lifeline to the real world in university holidays. It started publishing a few years before I came out, at what became a crucial time in queer politics when shortly after its launch the Conservatives unveiled 'Section 28', the Labour-endorsed law which sought to wipe out homosexuality by making the mention of its existence illegal.
So a campaigning national weekly free newspaper must have been a shot in the arm for the mobilising queer campaigners (all the talk of the era is that it was 'lesbians and gays' but I am sure there would have been a good fistful of bis and transfolk and allies in the campaign too).
Bankrolled, as I understand it, largely by its more advertiser-friendly sister paper Boyz, the Pink was worthy, communityish and newsy.
It wasn't always the friend of the bi reader. From its aversion to admitting to the b word in editorial (one that stuck with me was a caption that said "[name] who described herself as bisexual, [at some do or other]", a contortion of words that would never have been used about a gay person) to its personal ads pages with a plethora of lonely hearts wanting a GSOH but "no bisexuals". Looking back, 'no bisexuals' was one of the few requirements in lonely hearts ads in the Pink Paper that never got turned into an abbreviation: you wouldn't want one to slip through the net saying they thought NB meant Nice Bum. But until you got deep enough into the community to find out about BiFrost or BCN, it was the queer press you could find - and it was every week, not every month or three.
I'm told it highlighted the commitments of each party to lesbian and gay (yes...) rights at one general election with a front page quoting the three manifestos' commitments to the gay community. Each got equal space: a third of the page was full of text from the Liberal manifesto; one third was blank bar a paragraph for Labour; the third column had nothing to spoil its emptiness.
Some time in the 90s, presumably as income from 08x premium rate chatline ads waned, there was a brief relaunch as a paid-for A4 magazine. They knew they had oodles of readers who read the paper every week, surely as a nicer-looking magazine it would fly off the shelves? It was an enormous flop, and the publishers beat a hasty retreat with a re-relaunch as a free A4 magazine soon afterwards.
The Pink had annual readers awards, in a growing list of categories (think "best redheaded barmaid in a lesbian bar in East Anglia goes to...") and a few times I took it upon myself to try and rock the vote to get the bisexual community noticed in the Pink. When it worked, that got BiCon listed as one of the five best queer events of the year two years running - once coming third ahead of Glastonbury and London Pride. Manchester's BiPhoria took fifth place in best LGBT community group too.
As the web appeared in every home and every pocket, the Pink Paper's time as a print title came to an end. I still have half-a-dozen or more old issues knocking about my home, and when I pull them down from the shelf they are fond reminders of a harder time, charting the progress of LGBT rights as the news becomes less sharply political as the locus of political debate became less sharply hostile, bringing memories of long-lost friends and dancing til dawn, of who I was dating or of aching for that first lover to come into my life. It's a sensual thing: you won't ever get that with browsing an old web page.
The Pink Paper was at times frustrating, on good days it gave a warm nod to bisexuality on page 17 and on bad days it erased us out of all existence; but then we would all run things a little differently if it was our own choice. In its time it was a force for good, and among all the "no bisexuals" notes in the personal ads there were a host of TLAs that taught me a lot about the dos and donts of dating. Bye bye Pink. Thank you for having been there.
The Pink meant a lot to me: when I first came out onto the LGBT scene, there it was: a tabloid sized newspaper, free and available in big piles in bars, in the foyer of the students union, on a display rack in the library ten miles away when I needed a lifeline to the real world in university holidays. It started publishing a few years before I came out, at what became a crucial time in queer politics when shortly after its launch the Conservatives unveiled 'Section 28', the Labour-endorsed law which sought to wipe out homosexuality by making the mention of its existence illegal.
So a campaigning national weekly free newspaper must have been a shot in the arm for the mobilising queer campaigners (all the talk of the era is that it was 'lesbians and gays' but I am sure there would have been a good fistful of bis and transfolk and allies in the campaign too).
Bankrolled, as I understand it, largely by its more advertiser-friendly sister paper Boyz, the Pink was worthy, communityish and newsy.
It wasn't always the friend of the bi reader. From its aversion to admitting to the b word in editorial (one that stuck with me was a caption that said "[name] who described herself as bisexual, [at some do or other]", a contortion of words that would never have been used about a gay person) to its personal ads pages with a plethora of lonely hearts wanting a GSOH but "no bisexuals". Looking back, 'no bisexuals' was one of the few requirements in lonely hearts ads in the Pink Paper that never got turned into an abbreviation: you wouldn't want one to slip through the net saying they thought NB meant Nice Bum. But until you got deep enough into the community to find out about BiFrost or BCN, it was the queer press you could find - and it was every week, not every month or three.
I'm told it highlighted the commitments of each party to lesbian and gay (yes...) rights at one general election with a front page quoting the three manifestos' commitments to the gay community. Each got equal space: a third of the page was full of text from the Liberal manifesto; one third was blank bar a paragraph for Labour; the third column had nothing to spoil its emptiness.
Some time in the 90s, presumably as income from 08x premium rate chatline ads waned, there was a brief relaunch as a paid-for A4 magazine. They knew they had oodles of readers who read the paper every week, surely as a nicer-looking magazine it would fly off the shelves? It was an enormous flop, and the publishers beat a hasty retreat with a re-relaunch as a free A4 magazine soon afterwards.
The Pink had annual readers awards, in a growing list of categories (think "best redheaded barmaid in a lesbian bar in East Anglia goes to...") and a few times I took it upon myself to try and rock the vote to get the bisexual community noticed in the Pink. When it worked, that got BiCon listed as one of the five best queer events of the year two years running - once coming third ahead of Glastonbury and London Pride. Manchester's BiPhoria took fifth place in best LGBT community group too.
As the web appeared in every home and every pocket, the Pink Paper's time as a print title came to an end. I still have half-a-dozen or more old issues knocking about my home, and when I pull them down from the shelf they are fond reminders of a harder time, charting the progress of LGBT rights as the news becomes less sharply political as the locus of political debate became less sharply hostile, bringing memories of long-lost friends and dancing til dawn, of who I was dating or of aching for that first lover to come into my life. It's a sensual thing: you won't ever get that with browsing an old web page.
The Pink Paper was at times frustrating, on good days it gave a warm nod to bisexuality on page 17 and on bad days it erased us out of all existence; but then we would all run things a little differently if it was our own choice. In its time it was a force for good, and among all the "no bisexuals" notes in the personal ads there were a host of TLAs that taught me a lot about the dos and donts of dating. Bye bye Pink. Thank you for having been there.
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