Whose adviser said what to whom in News Corp? With both Rupert and James Murdoch up in front of the Leveson inquiry last week, the plot thickens. One begins to wonder how many adviser and ministerial resignations and demotions Messrs Murdoch will have to their name by the end of this.
Read more at the Scottish Times.
I remember my first Stonewall Workplace Conference, maybe in 2006. We had spent most of the day discussing issues of “lesbians and gays” in the workplace when a woman interrupted one of Ben Summerskill’s keynotes to point out that we weren’t just “lesbians and gays” – some of us were bisexual. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a fraud for being there.
Despite the huge progress we have made over the past ten years in LGB (and to an extent T) rights in the UK, bisexual invisibility is still a huge issue. The Bisexuality Report found that bisexual invisibility, biphobia and bisexual exclusion have a profound impact on bisexual people’s lives in every area from health and crime to school and the workplace.
Fast forward to this year’s Stonewall Workplace Conference. There was a strong theme of role modelling going through most of the keynote speeches. Perhaps I am also more sensitive to it, having attended last year’s brilliant Stonewall Leadership Programme. One remark in particular, by Beth Brooke from Ernst & Young struck me: “We cannot be what we cannot see.” That sentence really rang true for me and reminded me of the woman who stood up at the same conference six years ago and pointed out that some of us were, you know, bisexual. That woman gave me a voice.
At any rate, I was delighted to see that Stonewall have produced a booklet in which they showcase 17 high-profile LGB individuals from across the private, public and third sectors, “Role Models – Being Yourself: Sexual Orientation and the Workplace”. I leafed through it on the train home after the conference, and the part of my brain that notices that less than a quarter of people travelling in business class are women, or that there are very few ethnic minority faces at an event, started ticking. When I counted, it turned out that there were eight lesbians, eight gay men, and one bisexual man profiled in the book.
I completely understand the challenges of coming out as bisexual. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you enter into a relationship with someone of a gender different to the people you’ve previously dated, some of your friends, gay and straight, may feel terribly betrayed. If you do explicitly identify as bisexual regardless of who you’re going out with, you’ll face reactions ranging from “Why are you flaunting your sexuality?” to “Don’t be stupid. You’re not bisexual, you’re married!” There is also a significant gender difference in how society views bisexual people. Bisexual women are to an extent more “accepted” but also considerably more fetishised than bisexual men. (The answer is no, I don’t want to have a threesome with you and your girlfriend.) Certainly in my experience that leads to more out bisexual women than men, but I haven’t got hugely scientific data sets on this.
I do have huge respect for Edward Lord OBE who was brave enough to take on the mantle of the one bisexual role model in Stonewall’s booklet. He tells a story that may ring true for many of us – how coming out as gay wasn’t half as dramatic as coming out as bisexual, how at least one of his friends stopped speaking to him after that, how his second coming-out was necessitated by him entering a relationship with a woman, how before that he had hidden his true sexuality “within the broader gay closet”.
It’s as good a story as any, but that’s the problem with it – it is just a single story. The booklet tells the story of the lesbian mother; the black Welsh gay man; the lesbian disability rights campaigner; the gay head teacher whose Irish Catholic family disowned him when he came out; the lesbian woman who grew up in Singapore where homosexuality is illegal; the gay soldier who with his partner celebrated the first civil partnership in the Household Cavalry’s 350-year history; the gay scientist from a northern Methodist mining family; the first openly gay peer ever; the lesbian former vice chair of the Conservative Party.
While sexual orientation is a reasonably significant part of some people’s identity (both straight and not, incidentally), it is not our only defining characteristic. Just because someone happens to be of the same sexual orientation as me doesn’t mean that their experiences are similar enough for me to be able to build a rapport with them and see them as a role model. Therefore providing a range of people with varying backgrounds and experiences is crucial if lesbian, gay and bisexual people are to find role models among the individuals Stonewall have profiled.
Equally, it is unfair on Edward Lord to cast on him all of the responsibility of being the one person that all bisexual people should look up to. That’s a role no one can be expected to play with any level of comfort. So where are the bisexual women? Where are the bisexual people in long-term relationships – the “don’t be stupid, you’re married!” ones and the “don’t be stupid, you have a civil partner” ones? Where are the ethnic minority bisexuals, the bisexuals whose families cast them out, and the bisexuals whose families accepted them? There is more than one bisexual story, and both bisexual people ourselves and those who tell us that we’re married/it’s just a phase/we’re only seeking attention need to hear those stories.
There isn’t a simple answer to all of this. For as long bisexuals continue to be invisible and face the potential of double discrimination, few of us will raise our heads above the parapet; yet unless more of us do so, we will continue to be invisible and biphobia will continue to go unchallenged. To an extent it is up to us to fix this by being more open, more visible, more honest about who we are.
Some of the responsibility, however, has also to be shouldered by Stonewall. They claim to speak for all of us – L, G and B. Yet reading the “Role Models” booklet made me feel a bit like I did back at the conference in 2006 – tokenised at best, silenced and invisible at worst. We cannot be what we cannot see.
The 1st of April this year saw the entry into force of a key new citizen engagement tool at a European Union level, the European Citizens’ Initiative. First set out in the Lisbon Treaty, the ECI allows one million EU citizens representing at least seven member states to call on the European Commission to initiate legislation in a policy area that falls under the EU’s competency. So far so good – it’s a great idea, giving citizens powers equal to the European Parliament and the Council (of the European Union – not the European Council or Council of Europe – but now I’m just being facetious) to request the Commission to initiate legislation. The implementation, however, is sub-optimal to say the least.
It is telling that the domain citizens-initiative.eu is owned by a group campaigning for the initiative rather than the Commission or another EU institution. To find the official website of the ECI you have to delve into the Commission’s website – which is unwieldy at the best of times. It is also telling that three weeks in, there are currently no formally registered open initiatives. Say what you will about the current incarnation of the UK government’s e-petition website, but on day one is was attracting 1000 hits a minute, taking the site down, and pro-death-penalty campaigners managed to get nearly 1500 signatures by mid-afternoon.
At EU level, things move at a rather more leisurely pace. There are a few reasons for this. Of course, working at a transnational level presents additional complexities over and above what a national government might face. Having to reconcile the interests and views of 27 separate member states, as well as work in 23 official languages will add a certain amount of overhead to even the simplest of undertakings. Yet just the fact that the ECI needs a 5MB, 32-page guide book tells me the number of hoops citizens have to jump through to create a successful initiative are disproportionate and likely to put off all but the most determined. Here are just a few areas where the European Citizens’ Initiative could do better.
The Citizens’ Committee
Each citizens’ initiative needs an organising committee made up of seven EU citizens resident in seven different member states. “This committee is considered as the official “organiser” of the initiative and is responsible for managing the procedure throughout.” The committee needs to be in place before you can register your ECI on the Commission’s website. Compare this to the five minutes it takes to set up an e-petition to “[b]an rioters and looters from holding passports” in the UK, and the timescale for setting up an ECI starts looking positively geological.
Of course, we’re looking at two extremes here. The UK approach is highly likely to get you some pretty ludicrous stuff – but equally, the silliest petitions are unlikely to get a huge number of signatures. And let’s face it, if you can get 300,000 people to declare themselves Jedi then maybe you deserve your day in Parliament anyway.
Requiring an organising committee from seven member states, on the other hand, makes initiation of ECIs highly exclusive and reserved for the European “elites”. Yes, I may have easy access to the right people, but I am fluent in three languages and have lived in five members states myself! Additionally, the time commitment required from committee members is hardly sustainable for the average EU citizen with a full-time job and a family. Between raising funds, making your funding transparent, getting your materials translated into 23 languages and publicising your initiative, you would pretty much be giving up about two years of your life.
There are a couple of good reasons why you might want something slightly more organised than the UK e-petition approach, generally to do with inclusion. Having representatives from seven member states on your committee makes it more likely that you will get the required minimum number of signatures from each country; you will have local expertise on the ground to help you promote your initiative rather than simply releasing it into the wild and hoping it goes viral on the internet. It also helps you remember that you need to reach out beyond the internet, opening access to ECIs to the one in four EU citizens who have never been online.
Both of these are good ideas in principle. What strikes me, though, is that when the Commission set about resolving implementational issues with the ECI, their guiding principles probably were around making everything water-tight, rather than making it functional with the least amount of hassle possible. While this is the right approach for transnational legislation, when it comes to citizen engagement I’d be inclined to err on the side of open and accessible rather than bureaucratic.
Signing a Citizens’ Initiative
Organising a citizens’ initiative is not without its challenges – but neither is signing one. For a start, unlike Direct Gov’s e-petition website, there isn’t a Commission site where you can simply add your support to an initiative. Every ECI has to build its own signature collection site which – this is my favourite bit – has to comply with the Commission’s technical specification as laid out in the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1179/2011 of 17 November 2011. I dare you to read through all seven pages of that!
There is a silver lining here. The Commission has actually developed open source software (and kudos to them for it being open source!) which already meets the technical requirements. However,
Organisers will need to ensure that the other elements of their online collection system – i.e. the hardware, hosting environment, business processes and staff – also comply with the remaining technical specifications of the Annex to Regulation (EU) No 1179/2011, namely: points 2.1, 2.2, 2.15 to 2.20.2 and 3.4.
Once their online collection system is set up and fully complies with the technical specifications, organisers should request the competent national authority of the member state where the data will be stored to certify the system.
Why the Commission doesn’t just run a central ECI signature site is anybody’s guess.
There is another issue with regards to the amount and nature of the personal data you have to surrender to sign the petition. Because signatures are validated by individual member states, each member state has different requirements for the data they would like from you. So if you’re Austrian you have to provide your passport or ID card number as well as (judging from the sample form in the guide book) your date and place of birth and your full address. If you’re Finnish you get away with just your date of birth and country of permanent residence, and no need for an identifying document. If you’re Belgian and live abroad, you have to have told the Belgian authorities about it. The rules are ambiguous, but a number of countries don’t explicitly state that foreign nationals resident in that country are eligible to sign. So if you’re Belgian, living in the Czech Republic and haven’t told your embassy that your permanent residence is now in Prague you may not be able to sign an ECI in either your country of residence or your country of citizenship.
The rather awkwardly named but otherwise very helpful Initiative for the European Citizens’ Initiative estimates that up to 20% of signatures could be invalidated by national authorities and advises to aim for collecting around 1,250,000 signatures rather than the 1,000,000 headline figure. With rules as complex as this, that is not surprising – but disappointing nonetheless.
Who can (afford to) run an initiative?
It should be apparent from the above that there are significant costs associated with running an ECI. Even assuming you can get your translation into 23 languages done by volunteers and get some pro bono legal advice on whether your idea falls under EU competency, you’re still likely to have printing costs for your publicity materials and signature collection forms, and significant technical costs for hardware, hosting and administering your online signature collection system. Given the number and nature of hoops to jump through, hiring an intern or three might not be a bad plan. So as well as getting people to support your idea, give up their personal data and possibly some of their time to help out, you are now suddenly asking them for money as well – which of course adds another layer of bureaucracy to the whole thing.
The rules state explicitly that ECIs cannot be run by organisations; they have to be run by individuals. Organisations can still support an initiative (including financially), but the initiative’s funding has to be transparent. In principle these are good ideas. They’re designed to prevent professional lobbyists from hijacking the tool for their own purposes. Yet the implementation here seems both heavy-handed and inadequate. There is nothing stopping organisations from nominating individuals to run the initiative – and while funding transparency provides some additional protection I suspect there are ways around it. Equally, “organisations” is a very broad term. There are plenty of civil society organisations which simply represent citizens, and arguably there is no harm in them running an initiative. I would for instance love to see an initiative on digital rights supported by the Open Rights Group, the Chaos Computer Club, La Quadrature du Net, various Pirate Parties and other similar organisations.
A number of factors come together here to make the ECI process even more exclusive. The Commission’s failure to provide a single signature collection website saves costs for the EU by outsourcing them to citizens running an initiative. This in turn pushes up the cost of running ECIs, making the process inaccessible to those without either money or serious fundraising skills. The “no organisations” rule exacerbates this further, while not necessarily being effective at preventing lobbyists from hijacking initiatives.
Where next?
As someone who self-defines as European above all else and who passionately believes in the European project, I think the principle of the Citizens’ Initiative is a great idea. I very much want it to succeed. Despite not being fully registered on the website yet, there are a few initiatives out there already. High(and low)lights include the Let Me Vote, the Gay Marriage, the Right to Life, and the Free Sunday initiatives.
I very much hope the Commission monitors the progress of these early initiatives and gets feedback both from those who run them as well as those who thought of starting an ECI and were put off by the bureaucracy of it all. Citizen engagement should be about openness and accessibility, aiming to make it easy for people to get involved. The ECI doesn’t quite hit the mark here – yet.
The overwhelming feeling I left this year’s ORGCon with was that digital rights in the UK had grown up. The depth and complexity of debate has come a long way since the last conference in 2010. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the two keynotes: Cory Doctorow’s “The coming war on general-purpose computing” and Larry Lessig’s “Recognising the fight we’re in”. Both painted, in broad brush strokes, a picture much bigger than the current digital rights space.
Read more at ORGZine.
This article has also been reposted on OWNI.eu.
Last week, the Economist raised some concerns over the economic viability of an independent Scotland. I am inclined to agree with Alex Salmond that the way these concerns were raised was patronising and condescending. I’d go as far as saying cheap and crass actually; yet there are some valid questions here.
Read more at the Scottish Times.
One of the small tragedies of my teenage life was my unfortunate addiction to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series. I have a number of excuses for this. For one, I was reading it in translation, and unlike MZB herself, her German translators could actually string together a grammatically correct sentence. Most importantly, though, I found the books addictive because some of the characters were “people like me”, where in this particular context I mean LGBT people.
Growing up in the 1990s in a small town in the Austrian mountains and working out that I was bisexual was an… interesting experience. For a start, Austria’s a bit Catholic. Some of the key social issues at the time were whether people who divorced and remarried would be allowed to receive Communion in church (file under “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”), and who the President would take to the Opernball now that he was divorced (file under “Hello magazine”). This was very much not a world in which people like me existed, so I turned to badly written science fiction as my last resort.
Things are better in 2012 in the UK, but not hugely better. The BBC’s own research identifies significant opportunities for improving the portrayal of LGBT people in the media. While things are steadily improving, we’re still essentially in single story territory. More often than not, we still talk about the gay character, rather than the character who has a full life and just happens to be gay. More often than not, the story is about coming out rather than anything else – and while showcasing a range of coming out stories is still hugely important, so is getting beyond that point and showcasing diverse and authentic characters for whom sexual orientation is only one facet of their life.
This is where Alex Woolfson’s Artifice comes in. Artifice bills itself as a “gay sci-fi webcomic” – a label I originally struggled with because I’m not too fond of pigeon holes, but which seems to get the title the kind of exposure and audience it needs. Set in a distant future where a mysterious corporation makes “artificial persons” – androids far stronger and smarter than humans but visually indistinguishable from them – it follows the story of android Deacon as he ends up stranded on a mission in the company of gay teenager Jeff.
As the story’s wonderful antagonist, Deacon’s “shrink” Dr Maven, tries to figure out what went wrong with the corporation’s asset to make him kill several members of the recovery team and assault a guard, Artifice helps us explore what it is to be human. This is of course precisely the kind of question good science fiction should ask, and Alex Woolfson does this well. The comic owes a lot to science fiction’s classics – from Dick to Asimov – but adds its own unique touches. Alex is a skilled storyteller, and artist Winona Nelson is great particularly at capturing facial expressions and body language – both absolutely crucial to a story as character-driven as this.
I found Artifice fairly recently so was lucky enough to have a huge chunk of the comic to read in one go before having to obsessively reload the page every Wednesday and Saturday morning. Yet once I got to the weekly update schedule, obsessively refresh I did as the pace of the story speeded up to what looked increasingly like it was going to be a tragic ending. I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say that page 83 of Artifice is perhaps the single most satisfying page in webcomics. The bottom line is that Alex and Winona have told a story that is intelligent, compassionate, good science fiction which happens to have characters which happen to be gay.
Something else which drew me to Artifice was its funding model. Readers of my writing on digital rights will know that I have an interest in alternative funding models for art. Alex combined an ad-supported model and weekly publishing schedule with a “tip jar”. Hitting a donation target of $250 would generate a bonus page in a given week, thus giving readers more of the story faster. It speaks volumes for the quality of Artifice and the kind of community Alex has created with his tireless engagement with fans that for the last six months or so it has pretty much been running on a twice-a-week update schedule as fans have donated $250 every week.
Now that the story of Deacon and Jeff is told, Alex is working on a project to produce a printed version of Artifice. A Kickstarter campaign is already well funded, but any additional money raised will go towards making an even better finished product and generating bonus Artifice content such as poster prints and mini comics – all of which is to be encouraged. After all, with more Artifice in our lives, fewer kids will be forced to read Marion Zimmer Bradley as their last resort.