#s28pink

Remember when Labour decided 5 more years of kids growing up under section 28 was worth it for a slightly easier ride from the Daily Mail?

It's not the story Labour-leaning groups are giving us on the tenth anniversary of the abolition of Section 28, but the infamous clause has at its inception and abolition two of the moments that kept me from being a member of the Labour party even at the height of Labour popularity in the mid to late 90s.

Section 28 made homosexuality a thought crime, a terrible but brilliant move that it would be nice to think was only possible off the back of HIV hysteria. A splendidly vague law that could be argued to prevent anything homophobes in positions of power wanted to stop happening, it was used to block information for schoolkids and bar newspapers appearing in libraries.  In those pre-interweb days, it helped isolate a generation of queers just as homophobic myth and hate was at a crescendo.

In the late 80s when the Conservatives unveiled Section 28, Labour's instinct was to tack with the popular mood and support its introduction.  In those early days of the bill, only the Lib Dems opposed it - at a time when the party was in such a mess it couldn't even agree on its own name. Much credit to those people inside the Labour party who managed to turn that around over time, but the kneejerk response of the reds went the wrong way. Popularity or all people equal before the law? Labour jumped one way, the SocialLiberalDemocraticExpialidocious party the other.

Come 1997, the country was in the mood for change and deep down we all knew this time the Tories were on their way out. The Lib Dem manifesto included repeal of Clause 28 among other equality commitments. Remember, back then you could be fired from your job or turned down for employment for being bi or gay. We had a discriminatory age of consent to keep gay men in their place and tell bi men that their mixed-sex relationships were more legitimate. Adoption, fostering, partnership recognition, so many things that are 'normal' now were a world away.

Labour didn't include repeal of Section 28 in their manifesto.  In the great tension of "what is right to do" versus "what will upset the Sun and the Daily Mail", they decided that keeping the tabloids on side was more important than the impact on isolated queers, including lots of LGBT and cishetero children growing up in schools that wouldn't give them the support they needed when they had questions about their sexual orientation or were being bullied because they were perceived as gay.

So when Blair got his landslide, Section 28 wasn't in the Labour manifesto. That meant repeal had to wait until the 2001-2005 parliament because the House of Lords, packed with prejudiced peers angry at their imminent removal from the House under Lords reform, unsurprisingly blocked repeal.

As Labour shadow ministers trumpet the great repeal of the Tories' Section 28 today, remember: their party actively chose to keep it in place for another parliamentary term, chose to keep it damaging schoolkids for another four or five years, for the sake of a couple of cheap headlines.

My crudest Anglo-Saxon lacks adequate words.

Same-sex marriage 'only serves assimilationists' is piffle

We've had an enormous amount of discussion of marriage in LGBT+ activism circles over the last couple of years. One of the semi-legitimate complaints is that the focus on this has passed over other issues affecting LGBT people (why I'm not persuaded of that is a tangent for another post). Another I've run into many times is that this change only serves the 'assimilationist gays'.

I'm not persuaded, and here's why.  My quick and dirty chart above considers the division of marriage up until legislative reform.  On the left of the black line, people who if they are to marry one person pick someone the law considers to be of the opposite sex; on the right, those who choose someone deemed of the same sex. (The law, at least in the countries I have lived in, remains a stickler for this binary thing).

But not everyone wants to marry. For whatever individual reason, all the people below the red line don't want to marry.

But we live in a culture of homophobia, and so people in the bottom left are pressured into marrying or else coming on the receiving end of homophobia through guilt-by-association: still not married, at your age? There must be something wrong and we all know what people who don't marry have wrong with them. Cue a variety of social ostracisation and for some financial penalties too.  Some will be assumed to be gay, others will marry for social acceptance.

Meanwhile on the right of the black line, at the top there are people who want to marry but are denied it, and at the bottom, people who don't want to marry (and may come to imagine a correlation between their distaste for marriage and their sexual preferences).

Now we redefine marriage as for any couple who want to marry.

This means the dividing line in marriage is not by sexual orientation but by choice.  No longer the black line but the red.

Those in the top right box are given the freedom over their own lives to choose to marry if they (and their prospective spouse) so wish.

Those in the bottom left box have the "it must be because you are secretly gay" assumption lifted. You could marry if you wanted; if you're not marrying it is because you choose not to, or the right person said no, or suchlike.

So I don't see same-sex marriage laws as 'just' liberation politics, and I don't see it as just for LGBT. It allows both those who wish to marry and those who do not to do the thing that feels right for them, without giving either the bully power to force their personal choice onto others.

Getting Bi in sound and vision

Lovely at the Manchester bisexuals meetup last night to have another new member say they'd got a lot from playing the audio/video version of Getting Bi before coming along to the group. 

It does seem to have added a lot compared to the print booklet for some people :)

 

lgBt and Europe

Another press release lands in my in-box from the European Parliament's LGBT Intergroup. This one's on tackling hate speech. It mentions homophobia and transphobia...


This is far from the only time they've left that yawning gap. The LGBT Intergroup defines itself as "LGBT" and yet so very often I find it only talks about homophobia and transphobia.

If the "B" is meant to be in there, why doesn't the Intergroup also talk about biphobia? Sometimes things are specific to homophobia or transphobia or both, specific to lesbians and gay men, specific to trans people.  I don't expect B to be in there on every occasion - though equally I do expect there to be times when an LGBT organisation will have things to say that are just about the B. Time and again the LGBT Intergroup publishes findings, calls to action, and suchlike that give the impression they think "LGBT" just has the B in there as a cheap substitute for an ampersand.



Try the results for these searches on their website:

http://www.lgbt-ep.eu/?s=biphobia&submit=Search
http://www.lgbt-ep.eu/?s=transphobia&submit=Search
http://www.lgbt-ep.eu/?s=homophobia&submit=Search


Two produce pages of results. One draws a blank.


And naturally, they had nothing to say about Bi Visibility Day last month.


I've dropped them a line and will report back on how that goes...

Homo Hero Lesson 3: Revealing Antonyms

Antonyms. Remember them in school? Synonyms and antonyms. Opposite-words.

One of the lessons of spending an evening at the Homo Heroes Awards was that cis remains a word too far, for far too many LGBT activist brains. With award winners, presenters and hosts representing a wide range of notionally LGBT or LGBT-community-engaged organisations, talking about their varied work with LGBT and non-LGBT alike, I don't think it passed the lips of a single person given a platform at the awards.

It wasn't a fluke. So many people in notionally-LGBT activism and volunteering still think 'heterosexual' is the antonym to 'LGBT'.  But when we talk of something as being the opposite to LGBT, or want a collective term for people who are non-LGBT, the word we need has to be more than just non-gay.  It's non-trans. Straight isn't the antonym, because loads and loads of trans people are straight.  People who aren't trans are cis, and you need to say that qualifier out loud too.

Strictly, it's not just trans fail.  While straight or heterosexual may work well as the antonym to gay and lesbian, either term is only the antonym to LGB in the sense that we are socially deemed heterosexual until found to be bisexual or gay.  There's a fair case to be made that the antonym to LGB is SA, for straight and asexual, but therein lie a series of nuances about biromantic, homoromantic and heteroromantic asexuals, so I'm prepared to take the "straight is the opposite of LGB" on the chin as being where our collective discourse on sexuality has got to.

This lack of thinking through and understanding is a reflection not just of my experience of Manchester's notoriously LGbt culture but of the level of wider LGBT debate outside of bi and trans circles. It reflects how sadly stuck in the 80s so much of 'LGBT' is wherever the B&T have not been able to break through and rise up the queer power pyramid in significant numbers.

When you hear comments like "everyone - LGBT or straight" you have to wonder if you're listening to someone who has 'got' the LG part of the equation, and merely trained themselves to tack some extra letters on when they speak. It's a bit like saying that there are disabled people and normal people, gay people and normal people, immigrants and normal people. 'Normal' believes it doesn't need a word to define itself: but as Derek Jarman pointed out so sharply twentysome years ago, there's a subtle difference between normal and common.

Homo Hero Lesson 2: Do we need a "challenging biphobia" award?

I have a longer blog about a wider issue around this coming shortly but a quick, more focused blog question first.

One of the awards at the Homo Heroes, the Alan Turing Memorial Award, was introduced as being co-sponsored by Manchester City Council and the Lesbian & Gay Foundation, given to "an individual or organisation that has worked to challenge homophobia in our city".

Media coverage of the award this year and in 2012 confirms this was not just a slip of the tongue by the presenter. It's definitely about fighting homophobia.

If you are, to come up with a few implausible real-life examples of people who might be put forward for their work challenging homophobia*, a councillor who leads on LGBT issues for your council group, and who when asked about bi people's needs shrugs it off with a dismissive claim that no-one really knows about bisexuals - you could still be winner of the Alan Turing Memorial Award. If you opine that bisexuality is "the grey area of the rainbow flag", it won't count against you in this one. Go on the record that bisexuals are "not part of LGBT" because they don't experience any discrimination? Heck, welcome to the shortlist, and don't worry, we won't ask what you think the B in that acronym stands for.

As I'm one of the BiBloggers, you can perhaps guess where this is going.  Do the Homo Heroes - as at least notionally LGB awards - need a parallel award for challenging biphobia?  Maybe they do.

Probably best if it is not co-sponsored by Manchester City Council though, an organisation whose record on bisexuality has made it (literally) a textbook example of how councils have failed on the bisexual strand of LGB / LGBT.




* that I couldn't possibly have encountered from reasonably prominent politicians locally in the past year. Ahem.

UK Government Minister backs Bi Visibility Day

It was all a bit too hectic here for me to blog about it at the time, but let's have a belated cheer for the Women & Equality Minister Jo Swinson MP (Lib Dem, East Dunbartonshire), who was the first government figure in the UK to give their support to Bi Visibility Day. 

In a statement last month on September 23rd she said,

“Absolutely no-one should face prejudice and discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“The UK is leading the way in LGB&T equality and we can be proud of the real progress that has been made in recent years. But we know there is more to do which is why this autumn we will launch a new Call for Evidence, to explore what the next steps need to be to improve the lives of LGB&T people.

“I welcome Bi Visibility Day which helps to raise awareness of the issues that bisexual people can face and provides an opportunity to celebrate diversity and focus on the B in LGB&T.”

We've been waiting a long time for that from a minister of any stripe.

On the same day, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport also gave a supporting tweet from its departmental account, linking to the international Bi Visibility Day listings website.

Homo Hero Lesson 1: Don't Eat At The Radisson Blu!

There are a few things to be said about the 2013 Homo Hero Awards ceremony, so I'll be scribbing a couple more blog posts over the next howeverlong.  But let us start with the easy one: the catering was awful. It would seem to be a problem with the venue rather than the organisers.

This year the awards were hosted at the Manchester Radisson Blu, the former Free Trade Hall building that is now a well-polished hotel.  Partway through the presentation of awards there was an intermission for a buffet, so we got to find out what their catering is like.

Rule one of running a decent buffet: label your food. This is x, it has y in it. These sandwiches have been ruined by mayonnaise. The amount of cocoa solids in this cake may trigger headaches. Labelling food is such a basic access issue that it drives me to despair how often I see it fail to happen. The pinnacle of fail at last night's event was a selection of sandwiches marked "various". Really. Yes, we can see they have an assortment of different fillings: perhaps you could sort them as you make them and label them so people who feel queasy after eating beef or get ill from eating cheese know which ones to dodge without having a plateful of sandwiches they have nibbled and abandoned?  I'm no posh-nosher nor one of those tastebudless "foodies", but even I know that in polite company, peeling open sarnies at the buffet to see what abomination a misanthropic chef has planted between two triangles of bread tends to be frowned on.

Rule two of running a decent buffet is that whatever your labelled or unlabelled food might be, make it a pleasure to eat.  The last mystery buffet I dined on did at least pull off being tasty grub, but the Radisson failed on that too.  If it had just been me I'd put it down to personal taste but around me were a smattering of disappointed faces shuddering at what had been made from sometimes-promising ingredients. All told, grim food in a darkened room that made you happy to have your plate collected.

As you might guess, I'll not be dining at the Radisson again any time soon. They can't cater for toffee.