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  • BiBloggers Admin 9:34 pm on February 6, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Guest Post: “We Need To Stop Ignoring Biphobia” 

    This originally appeared on dancadamorte’s blog The Reliquary, here.

     

    We Need To Stop Ignoring Biphobia

    I’ve been considering writing a blog about biphobia for a long time, but with starting my internship I had yet to get round to it. Last night, sitting in Wetherspoons, I decided I was finally going to do it. Mainly due to the fact that some of the people I worked with asked me if I was bisexual and I didn’t even want to tell them the truth. My sexuality isn’t something I like to talk about much and something I don’t often admit to anyone I don’t fully trust or know. Why is it that I find it so hard to talk about it outside my main close knit friendship group? Mainly because I am scared of how people will react. I think a lot of gay people out there think that bisexual people have it easy. We can just go around acting like “straight people” a lot of the time, and avoiding the homophobia than openly gay people have to put up with. In fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.Of course the guys and girls I work with are lovely and had no problem with it at all, so why should I let the actions of a few people in the past affect how I feel about myself? The truth is a lot of bisexual people feel the same.

    “Greedy”, “confused”, and “desperate” are some of the words I have heard used to describe bisexual people. Along with “following a trend” and “trying to be cool.” The truth is more and more people have been coming out as bisexual in recent years and this is often “blamed” on the existence of scene kids and hipsters. They think it’s cool to be bisexual right? Or maybe it’s that there have always been high levels of individuals attracted to members of both genders and it is the accepting liberal sub-cultures that allow them to feel comfortable enough to admit to it. The sad thing about biphobia is that it comes not just from straight people, but also from within the LGBT community itself. Hell, I’ve even heard bisexual people make horrible comments about how there are so many “fake” bisexuals out there…

    The first instances of biphobia I encountered were in year 11 when I was around 15. People used to ask certain friends of mine why they were friends with me because “she might fancy you!”. I don’t even need to explain why this is such a stupid, ignorant, bigoted thing to say. Straight people don’t fancy every single member of the opposite sex, so why would I fancy every women I meet? A girl in my geography class asked my best friend if I fancied her. The girl was as ugly on the inside and she was on the outside, so no, I certainly did not fancy her. This is the type of crap bi and homosexual people have to put up with. I’ve even heard friends of mine insist that gay men go around trying to turn straight men gay. No they don’t. In fact I know certain straight men who have seduced gay ones, not the other way round…

    It isn’t just straight people who are biphobic though. In fact I have heard with my own ears gay people refer to bisexuals as “greedy”. I’m sure it was meant as a joke, but when people out there genuinely believe that, it’s really not funny. Of course I will stress that it is only the minority of gay people (and straight people) who are biphobic. But it is still a significant amount considering the fact that there is a B in LGBT. There are some lesbians out there who will not date a bisexual women, believing that they are indecisive, less loyal, or going to “turn straight” five minutes later. Last time I went onto the g3 website (a while ago) there was a poll asking whether readers would date a bi girl or not. Why should sexuality even be an issue? My ex girlfriend was absolutely paranoid I would leave her for a man. I adored her, and would never have considered it. There are probably more men out there I’m attracted to than women, but that’s because I get on better with men in general. If I’m going out with someone I am 100% committed to them and wouldn’t even look at anyone else. Promiscuity is another trait constantly linked with bisexual people. Some may be, and if that is how they want to be then fair enough. It is certainly not the case for all of them, no more so than it is with heterosexuals and homosexuals. A few days ago somebody messaged me over the internet saying “Hey I really appreciate the confidence and self awareness required to realise you need both men and women in your life. That’s really cool. When did you know for sure that you were bisexual?”. I found this rediculously patronising. Firstly bisexuals do not “need both men and women in their life”.  Most of us date one person at a time thanks very much, and often don’t “need” anyone. Secondly it doesn’t take “confidence and self awareness” it’s just something you know about yourself. Does it  take confidence and self–awareness to admit you’re straight? I don’t think so.

    The way past boyfriends have reacted to my bisexuality has also not always been positive and free from ignorance. One guy who liked me told me that if I wanted to sleep with women whilst I was with him that was okay. Of course my reaction was to turn around and ask him if it was okay for me to sleep with men too, predictably he said “no”. Apparently it’s okay for me to cheat on him so long as it’s with a women. Again the ridiculous assumption that bisexual people “need both men and women”, are polyamorous, and promiscuous rears it’s head. May I stress that I have no problem at all with people who are any of these things, but to make it a stereotype of bisexual people is absolutely ignorant. Needless to say I never did end up going out with that guy, thank god. Another of my exs asked me if I was into threesomes. Here we go again…

    Possibly the most insulting thing I have ever heard about bisexuals was a comment one of the girls I worked with in the Student’s Union made. Apparently there were a lot of bisexual girls in  her school and the reason for this was that “they were too ugly to get guys so went for girls instead.” Unfortunately my dislike for confrontation meant I said absolutely nothing. I still kick myself for that. For the most part she was a really lovely girl, who had no idea about my sexuality and probably would have been mortified if she had ever found out how much it had upset me. However it still remains probably the worst thing I have ever heard that has offended me personally. (I was never bullied at school so people haven’t hurt my feelings often, but that hit me to the core.) The fact that everyone else there just laughed  despite knowing full well about me just made the whole situation worse. I don’t consider myself an attractive girl at all, but I’ve never had too much problem getting male attention. I don’t like women out of desperation. I like them because I see beauty in them the same way as I see beauty in men.

    The worse thing is, people don’t even seem to see anything wrong with comments like the ones I mentioned above. There is so much emphasis on gay pride, and rightly so, but often bisexual people get missed out. You know what, we aren’t desperate, or confused, or indecisive. We aren’t all promiscuous. Some of us haven’t even slept with someone of the same sex.  Many of us are real human beings who are secure in our sexuality. To anybody out there who thinks bisexuality isn’t real (another ridiculous biphobic comment that often crops up): I know for a fact it does, because I know exactly how I feel and who I am attracted to. You can’t say a feeling doesn’t exist just because you have never felt it. I am not going to be ashamed of admitting my sexuality anymore, just because of the reactions of a minority. It’s time to make that minority even smaller. We are all human, and accepting bisexual people is part of accepting LGBT people in general. We need to stop ignoring biphobia.

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 12:26 pm on January 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    We’ve gained another new blogger.

    Welcome to the roster, BiVisible also known as ssica3003. BiVisible is taken from the blog from the Bristol Bi group of the same name, but a lot of what they post has relevance above and beyond “see you in the pub at half seven” so we’re glad to be sharing it with a wider audience.

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 12:59 pm on January 2, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    We have a new twitter feed at @bibloggers

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 12:09 am on December 31, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Joining the BiBloggers… 

    Do you blog about being bisexual, bisexuality, bi issues or bi representation?

    Set up following a workshop at the 2010 BiCon, this site seeks to create a common forum (or “aggregator”) for UK-based bloggers writing about bi issues. We’re specifically focusing on the UK to help foster a community culture: there’s undoubtedly room for an international aggregator site too, but that’s not what we are trying to do here.

    While BiBloggers has a growing team of contributors already, we’d love to find more, so if you’re interested, and are writing about bi life in the UK, get in touch by commenting over here with a link to your blog.

    Finally: most blogging sites also let you take feeds based on post tags – so if most of your blog is about other things but there are bi posts that you tag as such, don’t feel you can’t join in too.

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 11:41 am on September 23, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Guest post: Why does bisexuality need celebrating? 

    From the blog of biUK, the UK national organisation for bisexual research & activism. The original post is here.

     

    23rd September every year is worldwide ‘celebrate bisexuality day‘. Why, you might ask, does bisexuality require a day for people to take notice of it? In this post I will attempt to provide some answers to this question.

    The first reason for celebrating bisexuality relates to the notion of pride more broadly. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) pride events happen every year in many of the world’s major cities. These often involve LGBT people, and their supporters, marching through town in a parade of different sections of the LGBT community, each with decorated floats and banner.

    The thinking behind LGBT pride is that, for much of recent history, being LGBT has been associated with shame. Only in the 1970s was ‘homosexuality’ removed from the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) (which is used to assess ‘mental disorders’ in many countries), and it remained in the World Health Organisation International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as a ‘disorder’ until the early 1990s. Being LGB or T has been criminalised in many countries in the past, and remains so in 80 member states of the United Nations, still being punishable by death in some. The statistics on hate crimes remain frightening for LGBT people, and trans people in particular are attacked, stigmatised and ridiculed, even in the mainstream media. The pride movement is about raising awareness of LGBT people and about fighting for right to equality.

    Obviously bisexuality is included as the ‘B’ in LGBT, so you might ask why it needs its own day in addition to more general LGBT pride events, LGBT history month and the various other celebrations of LGBT lives and identities which take place.

    The reason for this is what is known as bisexual invisibility. This refers to the fact that bisexuality is often excluded or neglected in all kinds of ways, both in the world in general and within many LGBT communities.

    A big part of the reason for bisexual invisibility is that human sexuality is often assumed to be dichotomous: that is people are seen as either attracted to people of the ‘same gender’ or of a ‘different gender’. Bisexual people are attracted to more than one gender (the ‘bi’ in ‘bisexual’ refers to them being attracted to both people of the ‘same gender’ and of a ‘different gender’), so they do not fit into this dichotomy.

    Bisexuality draws attention to the problem with this dichotomous view of sexuality because bisexual people do not fit it. Also, some bisexual people say that they are attracted to people ‘regardless of gender‘, meaning that other things are more important to their attraction than gender is. That is challenging to those who think that sexuality is all about the gender of people we are attracted to, and not about other things such as the various aspects of people’s appearance or personality which we find attractive, the sensations we enjoy experiencing, the sexual roles we like to take, the scenarios we find exciting, the fantasies we find pleasurable, and so on.

    So how does bisexual invisibility manifest? Here are some common forms which you may well have come across:

    • Doubt being raised over the very existence of bisexuality, for example research studies which claim that certain forms of bisexuality (often bisexual men) don’t exist, textbooks which only cover ‘heterosexuality and homosexuality’, and journalism. This is despite the clear existence of bisexual communities, and statistics on the extent of bisexuality.
    • Bisexuality being seen as ‘just a phase’, or a time of ‘confusion’ on the way to a heterosexual, or lesbian/gay identity. Of course some people do identify as bisexual, or have relationships with more than one gender, before coming to identify as lesbian, gay or heterosexual. However, longitudinal research suggests that bisexuality is more often a stable identity than one which is relinquished for a different one over time.
    • Figures in history who had relationships with people more than one gender being interpreted as lesbian or gay, and their other-gender relationships or sexual encounters being ignored, leaving bisexual people with a lack of available role models. Also, historical LGBT activism being reinterpreted as LG struggles despite key involvement of bisexual and trans people.
    • LGBT organisations, or equality and diversity initiatives, dropping the ‘B’ so that bisexuality is included in the title but the rest of their materials default to ‘lesbian and gay’ or even just ‘gay’ and refer to ‘homophobia’ rather than ‘homophobia and biphobia‘ (bisexual people are often discriminated specifically for being bisexual, for example in the double discrimination they can experience from heterosexual and LG communities).

    Bisexual invisibility is common in the mass media where bisexual people are very rarely represented. When a soap opera character is attracted to more than one gender they are nearly always shown as going from being straight to being lesbian/gay (like Syed Masood in Eastenders), or vice versa (as in Bob and Rose). The film Brokeback Mountain was described as a gay Western despite the characters also having close and/or sexual relationships with their wives. Newspaper articles about married male politicians who have been found to have male lovers almost invariably describe them as ‘really gay’, whereas celebrity women who have lovers of more than one gender are often presented as ‘really straight’ and having female lovers for the titillation of men.

    Common everyday forms of bisexual invisibility include bisexual people being told to ‘make their mind up’, being assumed to be ‘really’ lesbian/gay or straight (perhaps on the basis of the gender of their partner), or being questioned about their experiences in order to ‘prove’ their bisexuality.

    ‘Celebrate bisexuality day’ is one means of increasing the visibility of bisexuality as a sexuality, and of developing awareness of bisexual invisibility and biphobia. Hopefully this will help in addressing biphobic hate crime, biphobic bullying in schools, and the distress experienced by many bisexual people due to discrimination and lack of acknowledgement of their identities.

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 3:02 pm on June 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear 

    Apologies to readers that an incompatibility between the software we run the main bit of the website on, and the plugin that grabs stories from outside, has caused things to go a little haywire in the last day or three.  We think we’ve cracked it, but will have to see.

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 8:24 pm on March 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Guest Blog: 20th Century Bi 

    A guest blogpost, taken from rememberingmyhat‘s blog here and reporting on London’s LGBT History Month bi event.


    On Saturday I went to a seminar at Conway Hall in London as part of LGBT History Month. It was about the history of bisexuality in the 20th century (clue’s in the name).

    (cc) LGBT History Month UK

    What follows is, as ever, in no sense a representative account of what was said, just some of the things that interested me.

    First off, Sue George talked about bisexuality before the 1960s, nicely overviewing the familiar terrain of androgyny, the impact of the Well of Loneliness, the bohemian freedoms for a few in the 20s and 30s and in the Second World War, followed by the social clamp down of the late 40s and 50s. One thing she said that I hadn’t thought about before was that the fashions of the 20s were actually remarkable androgynous, at least from the waist up. Did the fallout from the Well of Loneliness contribute to the more gender-marked fashions of the 1930s?

    She also suggested that in the 1930s and beyond there was less discursive space for women to be bisexual (or ‘ambisextrous’ as one contemporary apparently, possibly jokingly, termed it), since a woman who had sex with women became seen as a lesbian.

    I also liked a quote from Tallulah Bankhead:

    “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.”

    The next speaker was Christian Klesse on the connections between bisexuality and polyamory. This talk was, to my mind, the odd-one-out of the seminar, being both much more academic and less historical than the others, but it was still interesting. I was most interested in some of the things his interviewees had said about poly. One apparently said something along the lines of ‘poly is about love, non-monogamy is about sex’. I understand the rhetorical point they were presumably making, but I don’t think I use the terms like that – I think of non-monogamy as the umbrella term and poly as a particular type of non-monogamy, alongside practices like swinging and open relationships. (My own favourite definition is still a friend’s: ‘adultery by committee’.)

    (cc) tworm

    He also cited someone talking about the invention of the word ‘polyamory’ (in the early 1990s) and saying that although it mixes greek and latin, the alternative ‘polyphilia’ sounded like paedophilia (it just makes me imagine a fetish for decorator’s filler). Christian pointed out the way this suggests that, even from its inception, being poly was a defensive position, highly attuned to the wider context of sexual politics.

    The next speaker was supposed to be Lindsay River but unfortunately she was ill, so Sue George stood in, speaking about bi in the 1970s, mainly autobiographically, which I always like.

    She talked about the way that for her David Bowie connected bisexuality with creativity, androgyny and glam rock. She said that in the early and mid 70s polymorphous perversion was cool, but by the late 70s sexual politics had become much more polarised into lesbian, gay and straight. She said that when she first went to university in 1978 it was unremarkable and fine in her friendship circles to be bi, but that by the time she left in 1981 it was pretty much impossible to have a girlfriend without being a lesbian. That reminded me of my own experiences of sexual politics at university in the late 80s and early 90s.

    The final speaker was Ian Watters who gave what I’m sure he won’t mind me describing as a bitchy, partial and highly amusing account of the history of bi involvement in London Pride. He also had photographs, which I’d have loved to have been able to see better, for the fun of people-spotting.

    Then there was a general discussion session, where some of the familiar topics were hashed out again. Do people need organised bi communities anymore, if sexuality has become so fluid and variable and permissive, and you can meet people and get information on the internet? Is it only middle-aged dinosaurs and politicos (I count myself as both) who still do identity politics?

    Sue George said that she had noticed a change from people saying ‘I have (or want to have) poly relationships’ to making an identity statement ‘I am poly (even if currently single)’. So poly becoming something that pertains to the person rather than to a particular relationship.

    Then the seminar finished and most people went to a pub with a fabulous Victorian interior (the Princess Louise) which made me feel like a character in a Sarah Waters novel.

    Many thanks to Lisa Colledge and Sue George for organising the seminar.

    Please comment here at the original post

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 8:10 pm on October 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    We’ve got a dozen uk bi bloggers sharing their thoughts on BiBloggers now. Care to join us? See http://bimedia.org/blogs/join

     

    • Grant Denkinson 12:11 pm on October 29, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Excellent! Could I have the link to mine be my full name rather than “skibbley” please?

      • BiBloggers Admin 11:21 am on November 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Sorted :)

  • BiBloggers Admin 7:03 pm on September 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    We’ve grown again. Welcome to the blogroll Katie, Miss-s-b, and Marcus Morgan.

    Tomorrow’s Bi Visibility Day – perhaps that may bring an influx of new writers as well as probably a fresh wave of blogposts!

     

  • BiBloggers Admin 6:42 pm on September 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    OK, so we’ve formally launched in that BiMedia has run a story linking to us!

    Our initial blogger roll is: aimee, Bisexual Wombat, diffrentcolours, shinydan, Sue George and Jen Yockney. We’ve already had one new volunteer in Bi Now Bi Later: if you’d like to join the bi bloggers blogroll – just drop us a line.

     

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