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.

Previous: Bisexuals and gender
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I’ve known for a while that bisexuals’ experiences vary markedly by gender. There’s a certain social acceptability around bi women that has its roots in thoroughly biphobic and misogynist concepts like “gay till graduation” and the assumption of availability. Throughout the week I’ve had maybe twice as many bi women share their experiences with me on Twitter as men, and considerably more men than women have done so in private (DM, email, etc.). A lot of bi men seemed to feel that their orientation was something incredibly private that they didn’t want to share with the world, that it didn’t matter in the wider context of their lives. There were some women who shared this view, but a much higher proportion were much more open about their identity and experiences. And of course, being genderqueer and bi brings a whole different set of challenges too, one that we probably don’t understand terribly well at all.
At the same time, if you look at public figures out as bisexual, a slightly different picture emerges. Based on a few sources I’ve leafed through this week (the Guardian’s World Pride Power List, last year’s Independent on Sunday Pink List, Stonewall’s role models booklet) and on highly unstatistical numbers, openly bisexual women tend to be found in entertainment – singer Jessie J and boxer Nicola Adams being the two most prominent examples. There are no openly bi women in politics. On the other hand, we have three openly bi male politicians: Simon Hughes (who in all fairness was forced into the open), Patrick Harvie, and Edward Lord, as well as a reasonably high-profile lawyer and journalist in David Allen Green. (For the sake of completeness, Craig Revel Horwood is openly bi and in the entertainment industry. And I don’t know of any genderqueer bisexuals in the public eye.)
To me this looks like an interesting object lesson in intersectionality. I think the same things that make bi women slightly more accepted (albeit in a sleazy sort of way) in everyday life are the things that stop them from being out in public life outside of the entertainment industry. Our Prime Minister already feels it’s okay to tell female MPs to “calm down dear” – imagine the field day he would have with an openly bisexual female politician.
ETA
This discussion went all sorts of interesting places, particularly because I also threw in a question on how sexual orientation impacts gender presentation. We touched on everything from body hair to men in skirts and the right/wrong kind of pink.
A couple of genderqueer people shared their experiences:
From Charlie Hale: (In that I’m still seen as a guy. Just about.) I did feel less comfortable coming out as bi. Maybe because it’s seen as more overtly sexual? I don’t really know. if I understood my feelings on gender I’d be much less confused 😛
And from anonymous: I’m out in terms of sexuality but not genderqueer, and only to my mother. Pansexuality was hard to explain to her, and I expect genderqueer will be harder. Publicly coming out will be easier, I think, because I can do it all at once with both, because the people who matter will know already.
We talked a lot about femininity, and different ways to appear feminine or otherwise (make-up, removing body hair, wearing frilly sleeveless tops to proudly show off your armpit hair and the reaction that tends to get). We touched on gender presentation within the goth community. Some insights from @nanayasleeps:

I don’t think so, but goth interpretation of gender & sexuality is different anyway. I think it’s more about: what is high femme elsewhere is the base state for goths, as a very rough rule. That pony-tailed guy in t-shirt, skinny jeans & eyeliner? He’s the blokey one. Lacy cravat/cuffs dude? Middle-of-the-road. And a long-haired woman in lacy/pirate shirts, jeans, winkelpickers and eyeliner is actively butch. But only here.

This then led into a discussion of pink as a feminine and/or goth colour and @drcabl3’s wonderful chart of the right and wrong kinds of pink.
We had a couple of book recommendations in this area: Alternative Femininities and Brazen Femme. As well as this wonderful feminist make-up tutorial.
@drcabl3 and I got into an interesting discussion on femme as a gender presentation vs. gender identity. The identity side of this is something neither of us know a huge amount about, and neither of us feel comfortable speaking for other people and their identities but we’d love to hear from people for whom femme is a gender identity and how that relates to their gender presentation.
We also talked about the effect gender presentation has on how people perceive you. @geek_manager who’s a fairly butch lesbian with a strong interest in sports, motorbikes and shooting things tends to be seen by men as “one of the guys”. My own gender presentation tends to be androgynous in an “a bit of both” sort of way. (Or as I said on Twitter, my gender presentation is “jeans and t-shirt” or “business casual” with a side helping of “no sense of style”.) And while my gender identity is female, I’m not especially strongly attached to it. I find I don’t fit in terribly well with either very masculine men or very feminine women.
We touched a little bit on why there are four out bisexual men in British politics and no women. @geek_manager had a theory:

Some bi men are camp. Camp men get hounded to admit/come out, even if with women? More incentive to be open? Whereas I think the bias against bisexual women is strong in the lesbian community. So many if in SSR “pass as lesbian”. And bi women in diff sex relationships certainly end up passing or having to Educate The Whole Damn World Daily?

Edward Lord joined in this discussion too as he’d been interviewed on Radio 4 about Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski coming out as bi earlier this week. Here’s his blog post about it.
Previous: Domestic abuse in the LGBT community
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The power of domestic abuse is in the fact that it happens in secret and often goes unacknowledged by society, which in turn means victims can feel ashamed, isolated, and unable to seek help. Shining a light into this dark corner of our society is therefore vital.
One type of domestic abuse that remains broadly unacknowledged is that of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. While domestic abuse is just as prevalent in the LGBT community as in society in general, it is often difficult for LGBT victims to name the abuse they are suffering because their experiences do not fit within the common stereotypes we associate with the issue. A violent partner of the same sex; the threat by an opposite-sex partner to out a bisexual victim; the power a transgender person’s spouse holds over their ability to gain legal recognition of their gender: these are all forms of abuse which plague the LGBT community yet get very little recognition in the public eye.
This is further exacerbated by the lack of understanding of LGBT domestic abuse among key stakeholders, from the police and GPs to refuges and other service providers. Trans women are often turned away from refuges; police record incidents as hate crime rather than domestic abuse; GPs and other healthcare professionals refuse to acknowledge that the perpetrator is of the same gender.
In the UK, the charity Broken Rainbow provides a national helpline for LGBT people experiencing domestic violence and abuse and works to raise awareness of the issues and challenges the LGBT community faces in this area.
ETA
Some people on Twitter were surprised that domestic abuse was an issue for the LGBT community. In a same-sex relationship, the argument goes, you’d expect more empathy and thus less violence. Of course not all LGBT people are in same-sex relationships. Some of us are bi, some of us are trans, some of us suffer domestic abuse from other family members; and same-sex relationships really aren’t immune to domestic violence and abuse.
One in four LGBT people experience domestic abuse in the UK – that’s the same rate as heterosexual women. People are people, and there are a multitude of factors at play here. The Bisexuality Report also found that bisexuals in same-sex relationships are at higher risk of domestic violence than other groups. I haven’t seen the full research, but I would imagine the biphobia we’ve been talking about all week may have something to do with this.
If you are LGBT, in the UK and experiencing domestic abuse – or if you’re worried that you might be abusing your partner – you can contact Broken Rainbow here:
Helpline: 0300 999 5428 Monday & Thursday 10am – 8pm, Tue & Wed 10am – 5pm help@brokenrainbow.org.uk
You can support Broken Rainbow’s work by donating or fundraising.
Previous: Intersectionality
Next: Bisexuals and gender
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I came across the “Hanging out with white geeky folks bingo card” on Jacqueline Applebee’s tumblr the other day when someone put her up as a bi role model in the #AwesomelyBi discussion. I loved it.
I am a white geeky person. In my short reign over on @TwkLGBTQ this week, I have referenced multiple Guardian articles, we’ve discussed Doctor Who extensively, and I’ve made a Mornington Crescent joke. There’s at least one Cthulhu plushie in my house, I have a number of friends who do the real ale thing, and I will happily hold forth on Apple vs Linux for hours. And while I am friends with quite a few people of colour, I can count on one hand the social situations I’ve been in where white people like me have been in the minority. This bingo card is basically my life, and to me that is completely normal.
What I love about it is how it allows me to see myself and the community I’m part of from a completely new angle. It makes me very aware that there are people out there with very different experiences from very different backgrounds to whom this white geeky shared headspace looks ever so slightly strange. There are people with whom I share part of my identity, who have some similar experiences to me, who nonetheless have other identities and different needs to me, even in the areas where we overlap. And that’s a damn good thing to be reminded of.
We’ve spent a lot of this week on @TwkLGBTQ talking about the experiences bisexual people share: invisibility, erasure, biphobia. What we haven’t quite paid enough attention to is how our experiences differ based on the multiple identities we call our own. How does race or class or disability, gender identity, religion or immigration status affect the way we experience our sexuality and the way others perceive or treat us?
Personally, I find being a bisexual immigrant allows me to make bad jokes about stealing your jobs and your women. Less flippantly, I find those identities collide most not here in the UK but back in Bulgaria where there’s no way I could start challenging biphobia because of the amount of homophobia I have wade through first.
To me, intersectionality matters hugely. We don’t live in a single pigeon hole, and it’s vital to remember that not all our experiences are the same. Different parts of our community have different needs, and the best way to be mindful of that is to learn about them. So I’d love to hear more about other people’s intersectional experiences with bisexuality.
ETA
@applewriter kindly joined the discussion this evening to share some of the assumptions she faces from the white QUILTBAG community. Here’s what she said:

I made the bingo card as a way to not get sad by feeling like a constant outsider. The bi communities are not diverse at all… I find the casual racism, and the persistent assumptions many bi & trans people make depressing. A few: that we have English as a 1st language & are all good w academic-speak, that we have time & money to spare. Another big one: that communities of colour are automatically bi & trans phobic. That whites are our saviours. And lastly that bi & trans people of colour are happy to spend their time explaining racism to white queers. I’m happy to explain a bit now, but its often used as a derailing tactic by racist folks. Plus I’m not that busy.

Previous: You’re bi? Threesomes!
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Perhaps one of the most insidious stereotypes about bisexuality is the assumption of availability. “You’re bi? Wanna have a threesome with me and my girlfriend?” It’s kind of the natural extension of other stereotypes – the fickle and indecisive bisexual and the promiscuous bisexual; but it’s also worse. It’s worse because the fickle, indecisive, promiscuous bisexual still has some agency to choose who they want to sleep with. The assumption of availability, the suggestion that just because I don’t discriminate on the basis of gender in who I’m attracted to I must automatically be attracted to everyone is insulting and downright creepy.
I don’t know if this is something bi men experience in the same way or as much as bi women (something to talk about later in the week). But society’s general attitude to women as sex objects is magnified and intensified when it comes to bisexual women. This is a particularly damaging attitude in the case of bisexual survivors of rape and sexual assault. It’s yet another victim-blaming stick to beat women with.
So if a friend ever comes out as bi to you, do them the common courtesy of not assuming they must automatically be attracted to you. And if you’ve ever asked a bi friend if they want to have a threesome with you and your girlfriend, please do apologise.
ETA
Some key points from the discussion on @TwkLGBTQ:
As Charlie Hale points out, some bisexuals will want threesomes – but that’s not because their bisexual. It’s the distinction between bisexuality and polyamory that’s important – they are different things, independent of each other. They are neither always found together nor mutually exclusive.
@inkiebird pointed out that she didn’t mind people who actually understood polyamory assuming she was poly. It was the assumption that the bisexuality equalled dishonesty and cheating that was the most damaging. The other interesting insight she shared was that she had her sexuality questioned a lot less when she rejected men than when she rejected women.
One of the things I struggle with in some more uptight settings is explaining that bi != poly without throwing poly people under the bus. Some spaces are so closed that even saying something like “You know what, some bisexuals are polyamorous, so are some monosexuals, and that’s perfectly fine. I myself am monogamous.” will get you judged. I’ve had to work on my language a few times to make sure I was addressing stereotypes about bisexuality in a way that left a non-judgmental space for poly folks.
Apparently one way to get propositioned for a threesome is to be asked “Do you have a friend?” Well, let me tell you, I have many dear and good friends. *points at collection of tall, looming, grumpy-looking goths*
A couple of people pointed out that gays and lesbians suffer from similar assumptions. Female same-sex couples often get propositioned by random men, regardless of orientation. And there’s a homophobic assumption that all gay people must automatically be attracted to all members of the same sex.
We also briefly touched on the question whether polyamory is an orientation or a practice. The answer is apparently both, at least for some people.
Previous: Bi at work
Next: Intersectionality
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We started this morning’s discussion on being bi in the workplace with a link to this Guardian article. I asked people if they were out as bi at work, what reactions they got, and what they thought their employers could do to support and proactively include bisexual employees.
One of the things that emerged pretty quickly was that gay-friendly workplaces aren’t necessarily bi-friendly workplaces. Biphobia, bi invisibility and bi erasure can come from lesbian and gay colleagues just as much as from straight ones. Even if colleagues know of past your past relationships with someone of a different gender to the person you are dating now, the assumption that it was “just a phase” is still too prevalent. Certainly in my experience it doesn’t help to have a staff LGBT network that only ever talks about lesbians and gays and that doesn’t even get the basics right (“bisexual”, not “bi-sexual”!).
A common frustration was that to be truly out as bisexual you have to educate people over and over again. In many workplaces now no one would bat an eyelid if you told them you were dating someone of the same sex, but the information that you are not monosexual still takes a while to sink in. You have to educate everyone you meet, and sometimes even educate the same people over and over again. The burden of educating everyone should never be placed on a single individual. An organisation truly supportive of bi employees should cover bi issues as well as other types of invisible diversity in their general diversity and inclusion training.
People felt awkward about the “mechanics” of coming out as bisexual at work, particularly if they were currently in an opposite-sex relationship. Referring to past same-sex relationships can sometimes do the trick – if you have them. Opinions were divided on casual chat, e.g. about “hot” male and female celebrities. Some felt this was sexist and objectifying, others thought it was a good way to break the ice. In my case, most of my colleagues know I’m in an opposite-sex relationship (and have been for longer than I’ve worked for the company), but I am very active in our LGBT network and my desk is covered in LGBT-branded posters, flyers and magnets. This generally does the trick in opening up a space for conversation.
Not being able to be out as bisexual sometimes meant that people were exposed to homophobia and biphobia by colleagues and employers. There were certain settings where people felt they had to pass, e.g. childcare. The overall environment in the company also made a difference to people’s willingness and ability to be out as bisexual – for instance the gender ratio of the work force, whether the company was big enough to have an LGBT employee group or whether you were quite literally the only QUILTBAG person in the village.
Quite a few people felt that their sexuality was private and saw no need to be out at work. Others felt that those able to be out should be, as that improved the environment for everyone. Someone remarked that the conversation made them feel like they should out at work. Ultimately, coming out in any context is a highly personal choice. It is, however, in all our interest for workplaces to be supportive and inclusive and create the kind of environment where we can make that choice freely and safely.
Previous: The privilege of passing, the burden of invisibility
Next: You’re bi? Threesomes!
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“My son saw me in a pink shirt this morning,” my team leader says at the team meeting, “and said I looked like a right poof.” Everyone laughs.
A side effect of bi-invisibility for those of us in “straight” relationships is “assumed heterosexual” privilege. On cursory inspection, we look like a duck and we quack like a duck so we’re assumed to be ducks. An interesting consequence of this is that people will not self-censor their homophobia when speaking to us. When I was less visible about my sexual orientation, comments like the one above used to be a frequent occurrence in my environment. They were never directed at me, and that was almost worse. I can deal with being the direct target of discrimination and harassment; but being there in the room as those things were said made me feel complicit. So I started challenging them and started being a lot more visible as a bisexual and member of the LGBT community.
There are other “perks” of assumed heterosexual privilege. While they’re not as extensive as the full heterosexual privilege list, they’re still significant. I could, theoretically, be engaged and active on LGBT issues while “passing” as a straight ally. In some ways, it would lend me more credibility. It would also make me feel fraudulent and dishonest. Pretty much all of the causes I’m engaged in, and all my writing, are personal to me in some way. To deny – or omit – my sexual orientation would be to deny part of who I am.
It’s easy to forget, ignore and exclude bisexual people – deliberately or accidentally. Those of us who are out and visible as bisexuals can help remind people that we are all still here, and that we need inclusion too!
[Parts of this are taken from another post, ‘Why I “flaunt my sexuality”‘.]
ETA
A couple of points struck me in the discussion on this.
@nanayasleeps said “passing” made her feel “weird as fuck”. “Because I always loathe being misrepresented. I’d rather be disliked as myself than liked as something not-me.” That really rang true for me.
A few people appreciated the peace and quiet of being able to pass at least in some contexts – it’s nice not to be fighting a battle all the time, even if in other areas of their lives they were out and proud. For some, passing was a necessity.
@DrNeevil said her experience growing up where sexuality could get you imprisoned made her more determined to be out and visible even if she does have the option to pass.
Previous: Awesomely Bi
Next: Bi at work
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I started the discussion this afternoon with a reference to my post from last year on bisexual role models and the lack thereof.
I think what struck me most about this conversation was the variety of reasons people gave for why they looked up to some of their role models. There were people we admired for their work who just happened to be bi (or feature on Wikipedia’s list of bisexual people, which we did acknowledge was slightly problematic in terms of self-identification). There were people in the public eye who were simply themselves, no fuss, and we admired them for that. There were also celebrities and public figures who were very visibly bi who we weren’t sure counted as role models. People certainly didn’t feel that role models had to be celebrities or public figures – we had community volunteers, friends, teachers and family members declared awesomely bi too. And some of us admired those bisexuals who had the option to hide and pass as straight and chose not to.
Probably non-exhaustive list of the awesomely bisexual role models we came up with (Note that not all of these are self-identified bisexuals. Some are based on rumour, some on behaviour, some on Wikipedia. Tread carefully.):
Bowie
Alan Cumming
Prince
Frida Kahlo
@robynochs
Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low
Virginia Woolf
Simone de Beauvoir
Alexander Morris of @BisexualityDoc fame
Isadora Duncan
Grace Jones
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Hepburn
Greta Garbo
Marlene Dietrich
@suegeorge
@who_the_heck
@santaevita
@ShiriEisner
@applewriter
Ani Difranco
Sophie B Hawkins
@evanrachelwood
@margaretcho
Anna Paquin
Patrick Harvie
@carolynUK
@BecciJohansson
Lady Gaga
Freddie Mercury
Birgitta Stenberg
David Allen Green
Alice Walker (Here she is on Desert Island Discs, if you’re in the UK or have a UK proxy.)
Amanda Palmer
Tom Robinson
I’m going to leave you with one final thought on today. Today for me was about stories. Fictional stories and real-life stories. It is vitally important that we have lots of different stories about people like us. Here is an amazing talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of the single story. Watch it.
ETA
Some more names to be added to the role models list:
Edward Lord
Daniel Kawczynski
Kate Millett
@jenyockney
@megbarkerpsych
@XTaffi
@laurenbbeach
Surya Monro
Previous: Fictionally Bi
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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 2013 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. And when it comes to representation of bisexuality in media and fiction, things look sufficiently dire that No Bisexuals is actually a TV Trope.

The bisexuals we do see in media and fiction tend to conform to the stereotypes. The fickle and indecisive bisexual who struggles to leave their opposite-sex partner for the same-sex love of their life and the “just a phase” bisexual are particular favourites. What is perhaps worst is that there are very few characters in media and fiction to actually openly identify as bi, which serves to further reinforce the stereotype that it’s action that matters rather than identity.

[Parts of this are taken from my review of Artifice, a webcomic you should totally check out.]

ETA
So what I learned from the discussion about this on @TwkLGBTQ is that Captain Jack Harkness (Doctor Who/Torchwood) and Willow (Buffy) are the Marmite of representations of bisexuality in fiction.

With Willow, the main issue is the portrayal of “straight, then gay” which leaves a lot of bisexuals feeling erased and invisible. Joss Whedon clearly missed a trick there. Though there were also a lot of people who loved Willow, and who could identify with her process of self-discovery.

Jack, too, split the vote. People loved how proudly and nonchalantly he carried his bi(omni?)sexuality. Equally, some felt that he was the embodiment of certain bisexual stereotypes (slutty, attracted to everything), and they felt judged by the “standard” that set.

I also managed to make a couple of people cry with the conversation, as a disproportionate number of bisexual characters seem to have horrible things happen to them. Ianto Jones (Jack Harkness’s also bisexual lover for some of Torchwood) dies horribly in Children of Earth. And no one really survives being loved by Commander Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5 – Talia ends up having her personality erased and Marcus is stuck in cryo with fatal injuries until the end of time.

We talked about the different portrayals of bisexual characters. There are a few out there who explicitly self-identify as bisexual, but the majority of fictional bi characters “act bi” (i.e. have relationships with people of different genders) without necessarily openly identifying as such. Some people preferred the latter, as that left more room for interpretation (not that those of us involved in the fanfiction community need any room at all to interpret things!). Personally, I would like to see more characters identify as bisexual, and one thing I want to see less of is characters going from straight to gay and vice versa without even an acknowledgment that bisexuality exists.

Having said that, the subject of queerbaiting also came up, particularly with reference to Dean Winchester in Supernatural. You know, where are character is obviously gay or bi and there’s masses of unresolved sexual tension for seasons and seasons on end? I must admit I’m not a huge fan of that. But of course, that too is what fanfiction is for.

Of course we found a lot of the portrayals of bisexuality in fiction to be utterly trope-tastic. Here are some of the relevant TV Tropes:
No Bisexuals
Everyone is Bi
But Not Too Bi
Make of those what you will.

Something else we seemed to agree on was that genre fiction (including sci-fi and erotic fiction) and other non-mainstream media such as webcomics do a much better job of handling sexual orientation as well as gender identity and presentation. Erotica author @aleksandrvoinov briefly joined us to talk about the portrayals of bisexuality in his work.

AV: Bi characters are the most natural for me to write.
Mili: I loved what you did with Gold Digger, particularly with Henri being supportive of Nikolai’s sexuality.
AV: I figured he’s seen it all and is confident enough in being gay/himself that he doesn’t feel threatened by loving a bi guy. Though my favourite couple/throuple (?) is Stefano/Silvio/Donata – genderfluid bi menage. And hot as hell. #DarkSoul
Mili: That’s the other thing I like – you show a range of different bi characters.
AV: Well, we are all people. 🙂 Sexuality is not WHO they are, though I love writing sex and am sex-positive. Most of all, I want to get away from usual bi cliches: kill off the other partner so they can be with same/diff sex partner… I also loathe the “Evil Bi” – people so screwed up by conflicting desires they destroy other people. Thirdly, I hate them coming out on one side of the fence and emotionally dis-avow previous other-sex relationships. I try to write charactes who are largely at peace and mature in how they deal with desire and conflict… after all, I have to spend weeks and months in their heads and want to be able to like/relate to them.

Here’s a probably non-exhaustive list of the bisexual characters in fiction that we came up with:
Captain Jack Harkness (Doctor Who/Torchwood)
Reece (Adaptation by Malinda Lo)
Mutant Mystique, esp. as written by Brian K. Vaughan (X-Men/Marvel)
Bo (Lost Girl)
Jen Lindley (Dawson’s Creek)
Willow (Buffy)
Ianto Jones (Torchwood)
Gaeta (Battlestar Galactica)
Xena and possibly Gabrielle (Xena, Warrior Princess)
Quite a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s characters, especially in the Darkover series
Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint series was mentioned. I honestly can’t remember if either of the main characters in the book I read was bi (they were a same-sex couple).
The bisexual vampire played by Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger
Andrew in Desperate Housewives (self-identifies as bi)
Katheryne in Desperate Housewives
Nikolai Krasnorada (Gold Digger by Aleksandr Voinov)
Stefano (Dark Soul series by Aleksandr Voinov)
Kushiel’s Dart series
Commander Susan Ivanova (Babylon 5)
Ammar ibn Khairan (The Lions of Al Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay)
Dora (Questionable Content)
DAR by Erica Moen
Ramona (Scott Pilgrim)
Kat (Gunnerkrigg Court)
Winifred Burkle (Angel)
Homestuck
Knights Errant
Girls with Slingshots
Mal (Firefly; “leans towards womenfolk”)
Possibly Freya (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross)
Possibly Anwar (Rule 34 by Charles Stross)
Possibly Robin (Glasshouse by Charles Stross)
Happy reading/watching/exploring! Let me know what you think of any/all of these.

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Look at almost any privilege checklist and you will see that a significant proportion of the items have to do with visbility or otherwise.

• As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default. (Male privilege)
• I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented. (Male privilege)
• When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. (White privilege)
• I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race. (White privilege)
• I do not have to fear revealing my sexual orientation to friends or family. It’s assumed. (Straight privilege)
• I am guaranteed to find sex education literature for couples with my sexual orientation. (Straight privilege)

Dominant groups in our society construct narratives about what is right, beautiful, true or important, and those narratives are so pervasive that it is easy to mistake them for fact, for “just the way things are”. Looking at our media, cultural output, political representatives or other influential people, a statistically-minded Martian would be hard-pressed to conclude that the human race consists of anything other than white, heterosexual, cis, middle-class, middle-aged men. Looking at Tory suggestions for the brave new history curriculum, a schoolgirl may struggle to see that women have ever contributed anything of value to our society, not to mention LGBT people, brown people, or – *gasp* – poor people.
This kind of invisibility is not only a form of oppression, it is perhaps the worst form of oppression. Invisibility limits our imagination of what is possible. It makes us think that we and people like us have nothing valuable to offer. It makes us think that the things that matter to us are not valuable or important. It limits our desires and ambitions. Most damagingly, invisibility makes us doubt the validity of our own experiences.
We all have experiences that to us are a big deal. They shape us and define us. Sometimes they don’t feel quite right; sometimes we instinctively know that they are exactly right. Yet the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge them or name them. Sophia Collins makes a great point on this with regards to pregnancy. Pregnancy – something which nearly 50% of the human population on this planet experience at some point in their lives – is so marginalised that most of us have no idea what to expect until we’re in the middle of it.

Yet we relegate pregnancy to specialist magazines and the occasional feature in the women’s section. Many people will probably have skipped over this column, thinking that making future human beings is petty and parochial. Not to be compared to IMPORTANT ISSUES like the economy and politics. We marginalise pregnancy and ignore it.

An example closer to home for me is bi invisibility. Non-monosexual identities seem to really confuse monosexual people (both straight and gay), and that confusion leads to denial and erasure of our existence. Being so invisible in turn makes it incredibly easy to internalise biphobia – to think that it’s normal, that that’s just how things are. We let biphobic incidents small and large – from comments like “I just can’t imagine being attracted to both men and women” to scientific studies trying to prove or disprove our existence – slide, because in the narrative of the dominant group they are so normal that we struggle to imagine an alternative.
I am often asked – and I am guilty of asking others – to quantify the impact of biphobia and make it tangible for others; give personal examples of actions that have had a negative impact on me as a bisexual. I struggled with this for a very long time. It was only once I started talking to bisexual friends and we started comparing notes that I realised that I was not alone. I was not the only one for whom things felt slightly off, who heard these comments and thought there was something wrong with them even though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what exactly. When you’re invisible, sometimes you don’t even see that you’re oppressed.
Any effort to change the dominant narrative and to make the invisible visible is to be welcomed. Initiatives like Black History Month, Women’s History Month and LGBT History Month are invaluable to our communities. Women sharing their stories of pregnancy and abortion, rotation curation accounts like @TWkLGBTQ, and even the one dissenting voice – they all help us see that we are not alone, that we are not invisible. They show us that people like us can and have contributed something of value. They show us that the things that matter to us matter to others too. They give us badly needed role models and stories we can identify with.
Yet we need to strive for more. We need to strive to change the narrative of what is right and beautiful and important and true. We need to make sure our stories are everywhere, not consigned to one month of the year, one website, one Twitter account. We – all of us who have at one point or another been made invisible – need to make it clear that we have every right to – we expect – our stories to be told on an equal footing with those of others, we expect to be valued and included, and we expect to be listened to. Only then can the oppression of invisibility be lifted.
ETA
A few interesting thoughts from the discussion on bi invisibility over on @TwkLGBTQ.
Here’s the thing about bi invisibility: if people assume that your sexual orientation corresponds to the gender of the person you’re currently dating that’s quite a clever trap. If you’re monogamous, you’re not bisexual. If you’re polyamorous, you’re clearly a filthy slut and we will judge you for it. And as someone else pointed out, “if you’re single and not looking you may as well not exist at all, because apparently it doesn’t count if you don’t act on it.”
At least one person said bi invisibility had made growing up very difficult for them, as they knew about straight and gay people, but neither of those explained the feelings they had.
Erasure and invisibility comes from both the gay and the straight community. I don’t think I’ve been to a single LGB(T) event where at least one speaker hasn’t talked of “lesbians and gays” (most recently Yvette Cooper MP, discussing marriage equality at the Stonewall Workplace conference). This used to make me feel like a fraud – like wasn’t “gay enough” and had not right to be there.
In fact the political discourse around a lot of recent developments – marriage equality, DOMA, DADT, etc. – was brought up by a few people. It’s almost like no one thinks that any of these pieces of legislation will have any effect on bisexual people at all.
We also talked about using invisibility as a shield, because sometimes the environments we’re in just aren’t safe enough, and invisibility is the lesser of two evils.
Invisibility can also foster a climate where homophobia and biphobia thrive. A few people brought up workplace situations where people made homophobic comments which probably would not be made if the person was out. This is of course a vicious cycle – the last thing you want to do if someone’s not-so-subtly let you know that they’re a homophobe is come out.
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