A guest post from Bisexual London originally seen here.
I can’t help noticing that In the minds of a lot of people, bisexual means porn. Gay doesn’t, or at least not so much. We’ve come to understand that being gay is about a lot more than sex: it’s about who you can hold hands with in public, who you can invite to your family party, who you can marry and have kids with. It’s about all the things heterosexuality has always been about: relationships and society and family, and of course sex too.
But bisexuality? It’s threesomes, orgies, women pretending to fancy each other to turn men on. We can tell this because Google has recently treated the search term ‘bisexual’ as an adult term, as if the only reason you’d use is it to search for porn. Apparently my sexuality is not family-friendly.
Now, I’m not knocking porn, or orgies. But it’s important to make the point that like being gay or straight, bisexuality is not inherently X-rated. It’s just a sexuality. It’s still about who you hold hands with and who you invite to meet your parents, and who you can marry, and all of that. And when you search for it, you might be looking for local bi support groups, or forums to help to come out to your parents.
I’m not claiming bisexuality is ‘normal’, whatever that means. It can be a very subversive concept to reject the gay/straight binary. But it isn’t intrinsically edgy either. It’s not intrinsically anything much. It’s just being capable of fancying people of more than one gender, and that’s something anyone might feel no matter what their age, gender, class, race, state of health or level of perceived attractiveness.
Certainly some bi people are cool and trendy (or, er, whatever the more up-to-date words are for those concepts). Some go to underground sex clubs to do interesting naked things. Others sit at home knitting kitten-themed pyjamas. Some do both. Some do both at the same time, if they’re particularly good at multi-tasking.
Yet when you say bisexual, somehow crochet isn’t what comes first to people’s minds. So when I decided to organise a bisexual fete, the concept appealed to me specifically because it’s unsexy. Village fetes are a lot of things – for me they’re a cosy memory of my childhood as much as anything else – but they’re definitely not edgy. They’re somewhere you can go wearing fluffy jumpers, and buy crafty things and little cakes, and maybe win prizes for the size of your marrow. In this case, they’re also somewhere you can go displaying any gender and any sexuality – any type of diversity, in fact – and be welcomed.
In short, BiFete to me is a symbol of the fact that being bi can mean whatever you want it to mean, and right now what it means to me is jumble sales, raffles and a lucky dip. Come join me?
