Coming Out to…the Youngest Aunt
Posted inbangladesh bisexuality coming out english family islam

Coming Out to…the Youngest Aunt


I've always worried about coming out to older Bangladeshis. LGBTQ issues don't even seem to exist for them, so how can they be understanding of my sexuality? But I guess you never know till you try.

This post is about my aunt who lives in the States. Earlier this year I flew over to hers as I'd not seen her in half a decade, and I came out to her while I was there. It was unlikely I'd be able to do it face to face any other time in the near future, so I thought I should take the chance. She is the first and currently only Bangladeshi over a certain age to whom I have revealed my bisexuality to. She doesn't know about this blog, and so right now I can only write about my point of view. Hopefully one day that'll change, and I'll be able to share her thoughts as well.


My aunt was born and brought up in Bangladesh. She is a religious Muslim woman in her late thirties who prays five times a day. Make of that what you will. She is also a thinking woman, a scientist and a person who relies on logic and reason in a manner that the world could learn from. We were close while I was growing up. She was still at university when I was in school and this made her feel young and approachable. She is openly liberal, and accepting of the fact that my peripatetic upbringing has made me different. She always acknowledged that said upbringing meant I was not the traditional Bangladeshi son my parents once wanted me to be. Most importantly, she also asserted that this was completely fine. This made me feel that there was someone in my corner, something that was often missing during my childhood.

She eventually left Bangladesh to live, study and work across Asia and America. These experiences have made her, in her own words, different now – although I would personally argue she has always been different. All of this made me think she would be the ideal first candidate to come out to amongst my older relatives. If things went well, she could become an ally. If things went badly, I couldn’t imagine her telling my parents or setting out to harm me in any way. Nevertheless, the actual act of explaining my bisexuality to her was a daunting experience. I was planning to spend almost ten days with her family, and I had already decided to let the first half go by as a normal holiday. The day I eventually did decide to tell her, the baby cousin got sick. The day after my uncle decided to come home early and take us out to dinner. The day after that my aunt decided to have a massive migraine, but by now I was going crazy so I decided to hell with the headache.

I told her we needed to talk, and so we sat down and talked. Same-sex marriage had actually come up a few days earlier on the news, and her own commentary on it had left me a little nervous. She had said that physical pleasure had many forms, which was no big deal, but had questioned its need to be validated through marriage. I made the point about the emotional aspect of a same-sex relationship, she hmm-ed and didn’t press the argument further. Now, we had the entire conversation. Hours of it. In a way, it helped that I was bisexual. I can be emotionally and physically attracted to a woman in the same way I can be attracted to man. This duality actually seemed to make it easier for her to understand. I put it to her in other ways too. I can be attracted to a man a same way she can – we experience the same spectrum of feelings and emotions.

She accepted that a variety of attractions can exist. She didn’t need the cliched question of “when did you choose to be straight” posed to her. But she did want an explanation of the origins of sexuality, biologically speaking. I didn’t have an exact answer and frankly I don't think anyone definitively does at this time. I mentioned various studies that I had read of, including one relating to higher female fertility being directly proportional to a greater number of gay men in a family. She countered that these studies ultimately proved nothing as correlation does not prove causation. She offered the explanation espoused by her friends in Bangladeshi medical circles – the idea that same-sex attraction was a mental disorder. I questioned their qualification to comment on mental health given that this was not their specialisation. I also asked her if she thought I had a mental disorder. I don’t think she believed I had, but was rather setting me up for what I’d face in Bangladesh. I was glad that she was willing to communicate openly and unflinchingly.

We even briefly covered the thorny issue of Islam and its stance on non-heterosexuality. The conversation was actually quite tentative on both sides. Neither of us could claim any great amount Islamic knowledge, me even less so than her. My aunt admitted that she was becoming less certain of what is sold to us by the status quo, from an Islamic perspective at least, as right and wrong. She mentioned the usual obstacles to seeking more knowledge, like her inability to speak Arabic and the need to rely on translations of the Quran and questionable Hadith. She expressed her frustration with not being able to question the validity of scripture others quoted to her, or indeed quote scripture back. To this end, she asked me about a rather popular 'Hadith' used to condemn homosexuality and usually worded as: “when a man mounts a man, the throne of Allah shakes.” Now, I haven't ever been able to find a chain of transmission for this Hadith. Not that the internet knows everything, but I've never seen it backed up with thorough references and contextual information. This is scary given how commonly it's touted online, even to the point that my aunt would ask me about it.

She set about asking a few more practical questions. Who else knew that I was bisexual? Did I talk about it a lot? Did people in Bangladesh know? Her tone implied that she thought I should keep it quiet. I think this was partly because she wasn't completely comfortable with it herself, although she maintained it was because it could put me in harm's way. But I've left behind that phase of hiding for a long time now. All of my close friends know, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Younger members of the family know, as do many colleagues and acquaintances in the UK and around the world. I told her as much, and she pursed her lips and glared at me. This made me laugh a little. I knew that look – she was annoyed with me. But I knew she would help me deal with things, if things were to ever happen.

The conversation then took a lighter and bizarrely amusing turn. She asked me if sexuality was indeed genetic, who did I think were the other queer folk in our extended family? And then she rattled through all the possibilities. Was it the cousin who'd not gotten herself a boyfriend yet? Or was it the uncle who's marriage had broken down in divorce? Or was it was the one who'd resisted getting married for years on end? Or maybe it was the other cousin who'd never gotten married at all! All of this speculation really did make me laugh. But I had to wonder, with such a large extended family, surely someone else out there isn't heterosexual?
She asked me about my relationships, and if I was dating. When I said yes, she asked me if I slept with everyone I dated, being carefully gender neutral with the word “everyone” in Bengali. This I loved. At the same time, I wondered where she was coming from. Was she uncomfortable with the idea of promiscuity, or the idea of gay sex specifically? Did she think I was dating, or just hooking up? I thought it would be better to clarify my approach to dating – which really meant meeting someone to hopefully establish a meaningful relationship with. That meant a lot of forgettable first dates, or even second and third dates that went nowhere. I was honest about how I did things – I wouldn't jump into bed with someone if I didn't think things were headed somewhere. So no, no promiscuity, but yes, gay sex is implied. Trying to gauge her feelings, I asked her if it mattered to her who I brought home. She was frank. She said she needed time to get used to my bisexuality. For now, she'd encourage me to bring a girl home. It would make my life easier, and it would be easier for her to accept at present. But what if I brought a guy home? Well, she was sure one day she would accept him too. Which is all I needed to hear really, as one day I may be counting on her to be a stand in for my parents.
Why are homos and heteros scared of bisexual adultery?

Why are homos and heteros scared of bisexual adultery?

One of the many classic reasons given by heteros and homos as to why they don't want to date someone who is bisexual is that they would be scared of the bisexual cheating on them or leaving them for someone of the opposite gender to themselves.And it c...
The joy of bi groups
Posted inbi binary my arse biphoria legalise bi

The joy of bi groups


One of the main ways we’ve created room for bi identities for the last thirtysome years in the UK is local bi groups; starting in September 1981 (I think?) with the London Bi Group holding its regular meetings in a gay bar, there is an unbroken thread of such things going on around Britain, whether in the corner of a pub, a function room at a bar, a meeting room at a community centre, or a café.  LBG closed down a long time ago and so the longest-running group now is BiPhoria in Manchester, which I’ve been a part of since 1994.  As it’s in its twentieth year its very existence is by now one of the ripostes to bi being “just a phase”.

It’s something we have in common with lesbian and gay communities, but it also reflects our lower level of organisation, reach and support.  We can do that first helping hand out of the gay / straight closet, but there aren’t the football teams or open-all-week bars that the gay community has.  A shame as I think the Kinsey Rangers is a crackingly cheesy name for a bisexual football team (and in the absence of a real one, I’d still love to have a fictional cartoon strip about it each issue in BCN if anyone’s up for doing that).

Looking back at listings of bi meets from the 80s and 90s and comparing them with today one of the interesting trends is the falling away of gendered bi groups.  I think it’s good that it has happened, but if it’s more than sheer chance, I’m interested as to the pressures that led to that. I get the impression that in the USA for example things have remained a lot more gender divided, but that may just be the bits of US bi culture that I happen to notice.  My best guesses are that there are at least three factors at play.  One being some persistent trans and genderqueer volunteers who came along, stuck around helping make things happen, and so forced some cis bi activists to think about things sooner. Two is that where groups are a little borderline in their existence, a mixed gender space potentially pulls in more than twice as many people, albeit then swapping one set of issues as to how the space is run for another sometimes.  And three the way it can tie in with a sense of bi mission. Picturing the Manchester bi scene in 1993 there was a bi men’s group, a bi women’s group, and at some point the penny has to have dropped for the people organising each: we’re running social spaces for people where the common factor is that gender isn’t a boundary condition for them the way it is for other people, and we’re running them in carefully gendered spaces – are we missing a point perhaps?

Certainly in gender my experience of bi groups and spaces contrasts hugely with LG / LGB spaces.  Not all bi people, groups and spaces are or have always been trans-sorted and accepting of gender diversity, but more of them are and they seem to have got there quicker than the gay scene.  It seems to have been a conversation that went on in the UK bi community in the early 1990s, whereas in lesbian and gay communities and spaces it took another ten or fifteen years – at times painful to watch from the higher moral ground of spaces that had ‘got it’ a short while before.

There’s gender difference beyond trans too, as the male/female balance of bi spaces I’ve encountered has been so much better than that of LG/LGB spaces.  There is some research suggesting there are more gay men than lesbians and more bi women than bi men.  I don’t think the research is perfect and such questions are so loaded by the wider culture that it perhaps tells us things about what words people think they can own for themselves as much as it tells us a truth about human sexuality diversity.  But that might explain why spaces that are lesbian and gay and notionally bi have a male skew that bi spaces don’t so often have.

There are those who see no need for bi groups any more: even ten years ago I found myself in conversations about how there was ‘no point’ in things like BiPhoria meeting any more as ‘it’s all fine now, people don’t have any problems’.

I’m not persuaded of that, and not just because of the statistics on bisexual people’s life experiences nor the steady stream of new people through the door of my local bi group every month. 

That’s not to say that nothing has changed though.  Where once people came to a group like BiPhoria knowing little more than the words from a poster in a bookshop or a photocopied leaflet they picked up on an outreach stall, work like the Getting Bi In A Gay / Straight World  booklet and video means a lot of new members arrive now knowing a lot more, perhaps needing a slightly different kind of a space than we had in the 1990s.  That’s good, the world has changed in so many ways and the recipe for a good bi group will change with it.

BiPhoria might still be happening from sheer force of habit, but out there in the rest of the country the desire for bi space and bi meetups has its ebb and flow but is still strong.  Last year new groups launched in Edinburgh and London, the latter one focused on bisexuals over 50.    And this winter I know of two more about to spring into life in Nottingham and Southampton.  Though the latter two are run by people I know, neither will be quite the same shape as BiPhoria.  And good luck to ’em: while there are a few ways of running a bi group that I think are wrong, there are surely a lot of ways of doing it right. The more of us who are trying the better our chances of hitting on some really good formulae.
Our LGBT History and the People’s History Museum
Posted inbi bicon lgbt history lgbt history month manchester city council manchester. biphoria

Our LGBT History and the People’s History Museum

There are a lot of things I meant to blog about in 2013 but the raw doing things that need doing of tackling the most pressing problem got in the way. In the winter months I hope to write up a few of these, having made a start this week with the review of the year and writeup of the Charles Dickens talk at LGF. Today I'm going to look back to August 2013 and the Manchester People's History Museum LGBT Exhibition for Manchester Pride 2013.  This one will be decorated with photos as I was being a bit snap-happy with my camera at the time.



In March 2013, when planning the People's History Museum's summer events programme, it seems the suggestion came forward to run an LGBT history tour, to coincide with Manchester Pride at the August bank holiday weekend. The people's history of Manchester, after all, includes a whole series of stories of our place as a key city in the country's LGBT history.

But as a social history it is fleeting and ephemeral, with some of the tales of bars and battles captured by the rainbow plaques on our city streets and many more missing, let alone how they piece into the jigsaw of the battle for liberation and equality on a wider level. If you didn't live through it all back then, then in a 2013 where one of the six parliamentary divisions on same-sex marriage didn't even go to a vote because well it's obviously going to pass why bother, it's hard to imagine how things were for queers of all stripes twenty or forty years ago. It's something that didn't hit home to me until I had the good fortune to meet and spend time with Bernard Greaves, a magnificent gay (and later LGBT) rights activist who has been fighting the proverbial good fight longer than I've been alive.

As Catherine O'Donnell, one of the exhibition organisers, blogged at the time: "(As a straight woman) I knew that there had been a struggle, however I didn’t realise the lengths that campaigners had gone through to gain rights for something as simple and natural as kissing in public, let alone the repeal of Section 28 and equal marriage."
Most of the 'popup' LGBT history exhibition

Catherine got the plans for an exhibition included in one of LGF's regular circulars and that's where I picked up on it, as it landed the day after I'd had a conversation about archives and the many bi banners BiPhoria has made over the years.  Regular readers will know that I work a mixed week, and Wednesday is normally my day of beavering away at various bi volunteering projects at BCN Towers. By sheer chance the two LGBT history workshop afternoon PHM had planned were on Wednesdays, so I could take part without having to take leave from my paid working week.  If People's History Museum had picked Fridays for this project it would probably have passed me by.

When you only have two afternoons to bring a group of a dozen or so people together, get them to go through museum archives and their own materials from home, understand broadly how to select, label and present the most important things and turn it into a ready to roll exhibition that's a tough call.  While perhaps half of the volunteers contributing history and time to assembling the exhibition already knew one another from a group at LGF that the People's History Museum had done a targeted outreach evening with, the rest of us didn't know one another and there is quite a bit of needing to find a comfort level around strangers and learning to share stories and space. It worked well, though I was always worried I was hogging the floor with stories from twenty years of bi, trans and LGBT activism - or geekily correcting historical references. No, he was bisexual... of course at the time both of them were in the closet... the word dates back to the late 1800s... that's the wrong pronoun... I'll shush now.

Those exchanges of stories highlighted some of the limitations of the rapid recruit - prepare - present cycle. We had, from what I could tell, a skew toward cis lesbians and gay men among the volunteers. That's not to bemoan any of them being there, just that as so often, ideally there would have been more and different voices.  Thanks to my background and extensive if ill-filed bi archives I can hold up the B end well, but I think there was only me and one ally speaking up on trans issues and representation. There was at least some B and T in there though, which was one of the things that made me glad I'd taken part.  Especially seeing this little "bisexual corner" with two of my final three nominated items for the display, one of which reflecting the internal struggles within the LGBT umbrella:
"Dear Stonewall, you say you're LGB but you keep letting bisexuals down..."

It all came together and while it felt a little bit compact-and-bijou compared to a full museum exhibition areas, it was a grand feeling once the frenzy of Pride weekend was over to come in to the museum in September and see it in its polished final form. I got all self-referential and took photos of the projection wall where my own photos were among the rotating display running (many thanks to the kindly front desk people who noticed what I was up to and dimmed the main lights so I could get better snaps!). 
That's a photo of a projection of a photo I took of one of my teeshirts.
This blogpost may eat itself :)
I do hope PHM will run similar exhibits again, Pride week is an obvious date to hang things off, but so are LGBT History Month, IDAHOBBIT or Bi Visibility Day. Having started with a broad LGBT exhibition I naturally gravitate to thoughts of whether in years to come they could focus on areas within LGBT, such as the bi, or trans, or BME LGBT tales of the city.

Much kudos and congratulation to Harriet Richardson and Catherine O'Donnell from the museum's Play Your Part project, who steered the whole thing through to completion. It was great to see the finished exhibit there at the front of the museum to welcome all visitors, to be a part of make it happen. Further it filled me with thoughts of how to go about exhibiting bisexual community history in particular; but that's a story for another blogpost!
So much more than marriage: #bi 2013
Posted in2013 bi end of the year roundup ldb

So much more than marriage: #bi 2013

It was the year Bi Community News – a survivor in an ever-shrinking field of LGBT print magazines – turned eighteen, and the year Brighton BothWays celebrated ten years of giving bisexuals a friendly and supportive space. What else might we remember 2013 for?


Bi-coloured UK map For England and Wales the first six months of the year were the story of the Same-Sex Marriage Bill. Unveiled in February after Westminster’s largest public consultation exercise ever, this seemed to go on forever at the time, and eventually passed by a huge majority in the summer. So great was its success, by later stages the anti-equality camp in the House of Lords – which over the last fifteen years has blocked or delayed so much legislation on bisexual and gay equalities – didn’t even press the decision to a vote. A number of issues remain with the Bill, or Act as it now is, including pensions issues and problems for intersex and genderqueer people, but it was a huge step forward – in a year where many other nations were taking the same step.

@bisexualhistory - Putting the B in LGBT History MonthFebruary is LGBT History Month and there were no bi-specific events this time around, but twitter saw the launch on January 31st of @bisexualhistory, giving a daily “on this day…” snippet of bi history. It’s now on Facebook too.

In May the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency published the findings of a large-scale research project across the EU, looking at how LGBT experiences compare from country to country.  Over 93,000 people took part so the scale of the research was much larger than most similar projects. Across the 28 member states, about four in every 10 respondents did not reveal their LGBT identity to anyone in their social environment bar a few friends. However, this rose to half of respondents among bisexual women and transgender people, and three quarters of respondents among bisexual men.

As the summer approached, Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski came out as bisexual – the first Conservative MP to do so and one of only two out bi MPs currently in Westminster. Sharp as ever the Daily Mail trumpeted Kawczynski as the “first bisexual MP”, forgetting Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes, as well as former MPs like onetime Secretary of State for Wales Ron Davies or Winchester byelection winner Mark Oaten. All three main parties have now had at least one out bi MP, and they have all had openly gay MPs too, which is surely a good thing for keeping legal equalities that have been won over recent years.

BCN magazine - issue 121

While we are on the subject of politics it was a year for bisexuals in the corridors of power with both Bi Community News and BiUK represented at the annual 10 Downing Street LGBT garden party with David Cameron in July - and a few weeks later at the counterpart Deputy Prime Ministerial event with Nick Clegg.  Two-party coalition government really means twice as many parties, it seems.  Meanwhile across the pond the White House joined in, assembling representatives from bisexual organisations and LGBT groups across the USA to talk about what the US government could be doing to tackle bisexual people’s issues.

It was a year for community-building as new bi social and support groups launched in Edinburgh, in Dublin, and for Bi Professionals and over 50s in London. Annual bi conference / festival BiCon returned to Scotland for the first time since 2006 and saw extensive engagement from LGBT and wider community groups.

Bi Visibility Day on September 23rd was bigger than ever. We saw bi flags flying from buildings around the country including universities, police stations and town halls, a plethora of local events, and support for Bi Visibility Day from both the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Equalities Minister Jo Swinson, the first time it's had recognition at that level in the UK.

heygoogle280There were new battles to be fought online. In August, Apple backed down on their bi ban – but Google kept theirs in place. Later in the year internet censoring “child protection” filters set up by UK ISPs under pressure from 10 Downing Street turned out to block lots of LGBT info sites like Bi Community News, Bi.Org and more, even including services specifically targeted at vulnerable young people in need of help like Childline.

As the year came to a close Scotland picked up the same-sex marriage baton and the Holyrood Parliament had its first debate on the issue. This passed overwhelmingly with further legislative stages to come in 2014.

And then to round the year off we had Olympic medallist Tom Daley‘s non-specific coming out on YouTube, where he talked about having a male partner but didn’t use words like “bisexual” or “gay”, prompted lots of debate online about identity, relationships, labels and bisexual erasure.

2014So 2013 comes to a close and that naturally takes me to the New Year ahead… some things I'm looking forward to already in the bi calendar:
  • Two new bi groups launch early in 2014 – watch this space for details!
  • The return in July of BiReCon, the bisexuality research and theory conference, along with BiCon in Leeds at the start of August.
  • Big Bi Fun Day on May 17th and the BDSM Bisexuals weekend on March 22nd.
Have a great New Year’s Eve.


As you might have gathered I originally wrote this for BiMedia.