Alan Cumming gives star power to bi-visibility

Alan Cumming gives star power to bi-visibility

  Alan Cumming, OBE is a Scottish actor, singer, writer and director, starring most recently in The Good Wife. Cumming, who is one of the few out bisexual men in Hollywood, married to commercial illustrator Grant Shaffer, is also a long-time acti...
Driving Down Memory Lane
Posted ingetting old life ponderings work

Driving Down Memory Lane

I'm typing this from the De Vere Venues Horsley Park, where I'm staying for two nights on work expenses. It's not quite as great as the website makes it look - at least, not when I'm not getting to mosey around the grounds before it gets dark. I'm here...
Driving Down Memory Lane
Posted ingetting old life ponderings work

Driving Down Memory Lane

I'm typing this from the De Vere Venues Horsley Park, where I'm staying for two nights on work expenses. It's not quite as great as the website makes it look - at least, not when I'm not getting to mosey around the grounds before it gets dark. I'm here...
Driving Down Memory Lane
Posted ingetting old life ponderings work

Driving Down Memory Lane

I'm typing this from the De Vere Venues Horsley Park, where I'm staying for two nights on work expenses. It's not quite as great as the website makes it look - at least, not when I'm not getting to mosey around the grounds before it gets dark. I'm here...
National Coming Out Day
Posted inbisexuality sexuality

National Coming Out Day

Happy National Coming Out Day everyone! For those who don't know what it is, here's the Human Rights Campaign page.As I said in my last post, I'm bisexual. Even if I wasn't though, LGBT equality is still so so important, as no one should feel in fear o...
National Coming Out Day
Posted inbisexuality sexuality

National Coming Out Day

Happy National Coming Out Day everyone! For those who don't know what it is, here's the Human Rights Campaign page.As I said in my last post, I'm bisexual. Even if I wasn't though, LGBT equality is still so so important, as no one should feel in fear o...
‘We need a bisexual haircut!’ : bi activist Amy André’s bitter-sweet take on walking down the street with her spouse

‘We need a bisexual haircut!’ : bi activist Amy André’s bitter-sweet take on walking down the street with her spouse

 

photo-by-Marlo-GayleAmy André is a bi woman married to a lesbian. When walking together one day, near their home in San Francisco, a man in a pick-up truck shouted at them as he drove by: “Lesbians!”

“I’ll take it!” was André‘s reply. “Because even though I'm not a lesbian, it's certainly no insult to be mistaken for one, especially if the mistake is based on my awesome hair style!”

André is the co-author of Bisexual Health, published by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and is an in-demand speaker on bisexual and overall LGBT issues. She holds a masters in Sexuality Studies and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

And she has short hair. Was that the marker then for this truck driver? Short hair marks a woman as lesbian? André and her spouse, Dr. Kami Chisholm, ponder this, both seriously and humorously, as they walk on: “Considering the fact that studies show that twice as many women identify as bisexual than identify as lesbian (yes, bi women outnumber lesbians two to one), the odds were just higher anyway that, if he thinks I'm not straight, then I'm probably bi. So, what could it be that made him assume we were both lesbians?”

What Does a Bisexual Look Like? by Amy Andre, filed at the Bilerico Project, 27.Sep.11.

 

Amy André is also the author of Married, Like as in Married Married for LGBT | POV.

Photo credit: Marlo Gayle

‘We need a bisexual haircut!’ : bi activist Amy André’s bitter-sweet take on walking down the street with her spouse

‘We need a bisexual haircut!’ : bi activist Amy André’s bitter-sweet take on walking down the street with her spouse

 

photo-by-Marlo-GayleAmy André is a bi woman married to a lesbian. When walking together one day, near their home in San Francisco, a man in a pick-up truck shouted at them as he drove by: “Lesbians!”

“I’ll take it!” was André‘s reply. “Because even though I'm not a lesbian, it's certainly no insult to be mistaken for one, especially if the mistake is based on my awesome hair style!”

André is the co-author of Bisexual Health, published by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and is an in-demand speaker on bisexual and overall LGBT issues. She holds a masters in Sexuality Studies and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

And she has short hair. Was that the marker then for this truck driver? Short hair marks a woman as lesbian? André and her spouse, Dr. Kami Chisholm, ponder this, both seriously and humorously, as they walk on: “Considering the fact that studies show that twice as many women identify as bisexual than identify as lesbian (yes, bi women outnumber lesbians two to one), the odds were just higher anyway that, if he thinks I'm not straight, then I'm probably bi. So, what could it be that made him assume we were both lesbians?”

What Does a Bisexual Look Like? by Amy Andre, filed at the Bilerico Project, 27.Sep.11.

 

Amy André is also the author of Married, Like as in Married Married for LGBT | POV.

Photo credit: Marlo Gayle

Coming to terms with my sexuality – twice
Posted inBig Brother (UK) bisexuality Bones buffy the vampire slayer Glee sexuality Warehouse 13

Coming to terms with my sexuality – twice

This post was inspired by a conversation I had last night with a Twitter friend who I started speaking to about Pretty Little Liars and Glee.

For those who don't know me, I'm an out bisexual woman. At least I am now. When I was 14 I knew I was interested in girls because I had the hugest crush on one of my best friends from secondary school. There was also Anna Nolan in the first series of Big Brother who was an inspiration.

I just didn't know if I liked exclusively women. Because there was also Xander in Buffy and Brad Pitt. I inched out of the closet after telling 3 of my friends I thought I was bi.



When I was 16 two things were going in my life:
  1. I ever so slightly illegally started going clubbing in my local gay scene.
  2. I started going to Alpha because quite a few of the members of my family had died recently so I sought out meaning in life.
In the gay scene I came across some quite derogatory remarks about bisexuals: they were greedy, they were confused, they couldn't be faithful or that they were just "in a phase". Suffice to say I didn't want to be seen as any of these things. However, I still had a massive crush on Brad Pitt which I couldn't just shrug off as me clinging to normality. Ironically it was at Alpha that in a conversation with one of my best friends at the time that I decided I was a lesbian with just one exception.

As it happened, the college's Christian Union invited speakers to the cafeteria one day. One question and answer stands out in my mind to this day:
Q: What does Christianity say about gay people?
A: There's only one cure to homosexuality and that's through Jesus Christ.
From this moment I knew I couldn't be a part of a religion who thought that homosexuality was something to be "cured". I was so proud of the fact that whereas most people going through Alpha seem to go from being agnostics to Christians I went from being agnostic to being an atheist. That's not my attitude about religion any more, as I've realised that although there are some stick-in-the-muds, the people who practice it can be as open and welcoming to gay people as atheists can. I am also back to being an agnostic (but that's a whole other story).

So, I started coming out to all my friends and my mother as a lesbian and it all went pretty well for about a year. I then kinda accidentally started making out with guys every now and then. When one of these guys was a friend of mine I ended up terribly confused again about my sexuality for the first time in two years. I really *liked* him but he was man shaped so, er, why would that be true. At that point I could have taken one of two paths, go for it with my friend (who was being terribly understanding considering) or swear off men completely. I chose the latter option. I was a lesbian, I'd decided that when I was 16 and anything else was just unacceptable.

A few months later I went to uni. I made out with a few girls in my first year but was never anything serious. I was quite active within the uni's LGB association [as it was at the time]. I was out as a lesbian but I still didn't make a secret of my attraction to Brad Pitt.

Despite my insistence to both myself and everyone around me that I was a lesbian this didn't stop crushes on a few guys from uni getting through.

Thanks to the relative [in comparison to my home town] acceptance of bisexuals within the LGB I slowly came to accept that it was OK to like both. Over the year, I went to the cinema with my uni friends a lot. One of these films was Troy. All my friends joked beforehand about how I'd stop them talking when Brad Pitt was on the screen (normally I'd be commenting with the rest of them). However, at the end, it wasn't Brad Pitt I was talking about, it was Eric Bana. One of my more observant friends noticed that this was a man who wasn't Brad. It was in May that I finally decided to tell people that I liked the men too. At first it was just my uni friends, who were all very supportive; I couldn't handle my mother getting all excited that I might bear her grandchildren after all. At the age of 19 I'd finally come to terms with my true sexuality.

I know it may seem silly that it was liking men that I seemed to have so much trouble accepting, but the fact was there weren't any positive bisexual role models in media to counteract the image of bisexuality that I got from my home town's scene. The only female characters who I saw on the screen at the time who were interested in men and women were of the depraved bisexual trope. Hardly people to look up to.

It's much better now, there is Angela from Bones, who although is now married to a man has had loving relationships with women in the past. Here, Heather Hogan praises Bones creator's crafting of the character.  There are also Myka and HG from Warehouse 13, although the creative team don't seem to want to admit it. Finally but not least, of course, there is Brittany from Glee whose sexuality I praised in my last post.

So, yes, had these characters been around 10 years ago, maybe I wouldn't have taken those three extra years coming to terms with my own sexuality. Who knows?