{"id":267,"date":"2010-12-23T16:27:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T16:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com\/489383.html"},"modified":"2010-12-23T16:27:48","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T16:27:48","slug":"its-okay-to-say-youre-lying-it-gives-you-a-chance-to-say-youre-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2010\/12\/its-okay-to-say-youre-lying-it-gives-you-a-chance-to-say-youre-not\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s okay to say you&#8217;re lying, it gives you a chance to say you&#8217;re not!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.projectqatlanta.com\/news_articles\/view\/need_wood_gay_friend_says_hes_bisexual?gid=7065\">Project Q Atlanta<\/a>, the old canard &#8220;Bi Men Aren&#8217;t Real&#8221; has reared its head again. I&#8217;m not going to waste any time telling you (many of whom are bisexual men) why it&#8217;s false, (see the comments via the link for that) but I do want to look at something else.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I emailed the editor and said, hey c&#8217;mon now are you an LGBT organisation or not? Why is someone on your staff saying we don&#8217;t exist?<\/p>\n<p>I got back no defence of the position (which was the argument I was expecting) and no &#8220;Oh, sorry &#8211; no-one checked it before it went out&#8221; (which was my fondest hope) but instead was told that <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the columnist often writes things that provoke comments, which is good\n<li>the comments from bi people are sufficient to show other readers that some people disagree with the columnist&#8217;s views,\n<li>the existence of those comments is enough balance.<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m shocked that the existence of bisexuality is still something it&#8217;s okay for an LGBT organisation to agree to disagree on. The idea that &#8220;all bi men are liars&#8221; is an opinion that someone touted as an advice columnist in the LGBT press can hold, and it&#8217;s okay because others disagree! If you&#8217;re an LGBT organisation, your <i>policy<\/i> (nevermind your opinion) should be that bi people exist!<\/p>\n<p>Hello! My existence isn&#8217;t a matter of your opinion! And telling an entire subcategory of your community they&#8217;re liars isn&#8217;t something balanced by waiting for them to disagree with you. To do so would involve coming out, for starters. And who wants to do that when to say &#8220;I am a bisexual man&#8221; is to be branded a liar?<\/p>\n<p>Bigotry doesn&#8217;t provoke debate, it stifles honesty. It promotes the exact climate that keeps us from debating, and keeps the topic hateful.<\/p>\n<p>(Interesting to note, it&#8217;s not the bi guy writing in, it&#8217;s a gay friend who &#8220;only sees him in gay bars&#8221;. I wonder how many non-gay bars that friends goes too, but I&#8217;m still sad that people feel we need to prove our bisexuality)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Project Q Atlanta, the old canard &#8220;Bi Men Aren&#8217;t Real&#8221; has reared its head again. I&#8217;m not going to waste any time telling you (many of whom are bisexual men) why it&#8217;s false, (see the comments via the link for that) but I do want to look at some&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[246,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bibloggers","category-bisexual"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}