I applied to curate @TwkLGBTQ on a whim. I found out about the account from a Twitterstorm caused by one curator questioning whether bisexual people existed. In all fairness, they handled the conversation reasonably well, but I figured this was a debate I had something to contribute to, so I applied. I must admit I expected the waiting list to be months long – but in the end it only took four weeks from applying to being given the password and responsibility.
When I applied I had a vague idea that I wanted to talk mostly about bisexual issues. Slowly, and in conversation with others, that idea started to crystallise. I brainstormed a bunch of topics which I thought might be interesting. I wanted to introduce each topic and then ask the follower community to share their thoughts, views and experiences. I wanted to facilitate a discussion more than I wanted a soap box for myself.
With about two days to go, it hit me quite how much work I was setting myself up for. I had settled on 13 topics – two per day, with the exception of the one day I knew I was going to be mostly afk at an all-day meeting of the Broken Rainbow board of trustees. I was originally going to introduce each topic with a few tweets, but found the need to say slightly more than that, so short(ish) blog posts it was.
There was a fair amount of content I could recycle. Old blog posts or chunks thereof, stuff that I’d written for other people that hadn’t got published, etc. But there was also the need to create quite a lot of original content. Even with the recycled content, I reckon prep took between 10 and 15 hours of solid work.
I produced a lot of writing for and during the week. Final word count excluding tweets and this post was around 10,000 words. It is not my most polished writing (I’m still fixing typos everywhere!), and I was deliberately trying to keep most of the items short. Both of these are well outside my writing comfort zone. I like long, philosophically consistent, polished arguments. I like setting out my assumptions and facts, analysing them, reaching a conclusion. I didn’t have time to do all that, plus at two topics a day I don’t think my audience could have coped with much more content than I already produced. What did help was that I was talking to an audience who didn’t need QUILTBAG101 explained to them. One thing I hadn’t foreseen was that I would feel the need to write up summaries of the discussions. With the richness of the engagement and insight I got from the community, it became apparent halfway through Day 1 that summaries would add value – definitely for me and possibly for others. That upped both the word count and the amount of work I had to get done during the week significantly.
One of the things I learned through the week was to fine-tune my language better. I already knew that marriage wasn’t “gay”, it was “same-sex” – because some of us are bi. By the end of the week, relationships weren’t “opposite-sex”, they were “different-sex” – because some people are “they”. Deal with it. I’m a big believer in the power of language, and what you call things matters. I will probably continue fine-tuning my language as I get my head around new concepts and gain new insights.
Something else I learned is that there’s a fine line between facilitating a discussion and dealing with trolls. As I said earlier, one of my main aims for the week was to facilitate a discussion and allow a plurality of views and experiences to be represented. I RTed almost indiscriminately, regardless of whether I agreed with a particular point of view or not. As long as tweets were vaguely on topic (where on topic was defined as fitting within anything I was planning to or had talked about within the week), they pretty much got RTed. People shared deeply personal views and stories, talked about how their biphobic views had changed, talked about how they fit some of the biphobic stereotypes around, and questioned each other’s views and attitudes. Largely this was done extremely respectfully and generated insights and better understanding. I used the phrase “Tread carefully” on a couple of occasions where discussions got slightly more personal, and that seemed to work. One of the things I loved the most about curating the account for the week was that people were talking to each other. All I had to do was ask a couple of questions, and off we went.
I was lucky that throughout the entire week I only had one troll who sought to deliberately challenge, silence and erase people gender identities. He started with what could have been an honest question which I RTed and engaged with but it went downhill pretty quickly from there. A few people engaged with him. Here’s the fine line I decided to walk: I stopped RTing his comments pretty quickly as they were transphobic and I didn’t want to give him a platform. I mostly let other people challenge him if they wanted, but backed them on a couple of occasions – sometimes when you’re dealing with a troll it can be extremely helpful to get a few supportive comments so you don’t start doubting your own sanity. Eventually everyone lost interest and that thread went quiet.
Both preparing the content for the week, and throughout the week, I had a lot of help. A couple of people, most notably Charlie Hale and @drcabl3 helped me bounce ideas and wrote additional content which I could reference. The two of them and @geek_manager also participated very actively in the discussions – and it was nice for me to know there were some friendly faces there who would have my back (about anything other than Joss Whedon) should I manage to get myself into trouble. The good friend who acts as sysadmin for my blog put up with me breaking the stylesheet four times a day for the first half of this week and found a permanent fix in the end. My partner, who is infinitely patient, put up with hardly seeing me for the week, with my bone-deep exhaustion when he did see me, and he made sure I ate real food, didn’t disappear under a pile of washing-up and didn’t end up with a laundry crisis on my hands. Finally, I found the entire community extremely helpful. I was touched by the experiences people shared, by the richness of the discussion and the insights, by the number of people who reached out privately to me via email, DMs etc. to share their views and stories. I’m very grateful to everyone for making it such a fantastic experience!
There are a few things that with hindsight I would do differently, mostly logistically. I haven’t got numbers behind this but it felt like the morning discussions got more engagement than the afternoon discussions. I think I could have worked out time zones a bit better to manage that, and timed the start of the afternoon discussions better – though to an extent that had to fit around my working day too. I RTed most of the discussion to my own Twitter feed – partly to have a record of it, partly to get more people engaged. The feedback I got on that was overwhelmingly positive, even though I did spam people’s feeds a few times a day. There are probably better ways to do this though. There were a few specific people I tried to engage with some of the discussions – film makers, writers, community leaders, one politician. Most of them were incredibly gracious to join in as and when I took their name in vain. If I were to do this again I would probably try to identify such people up front and give them a heads-up on what I was planning, but the magic of Twitter is such that a lot of it did work very well on an ad-hoc basis. One last thing I would do differently if I ever did something like this again: take the week off work. It’s been a fun and exciting week, but dear gods to I need some sleep now!
I learned a few things about myself and many many things about bisexuality, pansexuality and how other people experienced their sexuality similarly or differently to me. Mostly I think these are already documented in other posts here. One thing that I both expected and didn’t was how much of a chord an openly bisexual woman in a different-sex relationship talking in-depth about bisexuality, biphobia, bi invisibility and bi erasure struck with people. Within seconds of posting my introduction I had people asking “Hang on, really? There’s a bi person curating @TwkLGBTQ?” And most of those people were bi themselves. I hope I did right by them.
Finally, here’s what I hope others will take away from my week on @TwkLGBTQ:

1. Bisexuality, biphobia, bi invisibility and bi erasure are real things. They have a real impact on people’s day to day lives. Whether you are bi yourself or know bi people or think you know about bi people, these things have an impact on you.
2. QUILTBAG is not a perfect acronym for our community (for a start it lacks a P for pansexual and possibly for polyamorous), but it’s the most inclusive one we’ve got. And yes, it might be a bit twee, but I think that’s actually a strength as it engages people. Use it.
3. Between us, I think we’ve created a whole bunch of interesting reference resources. I’ve tried to sum up as much for the views and experiences shared, the role models and fictional bisexuals we came up with, and the books and articles people linked to as humanly possible in my blog posts. I hope people find them useful and share them further.

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