purplerabbits

The second of my Bi Archive posts, this was originally my paper for IBIS 96, the International Bisexual Symposium in Berlin, in May 1996, and was then published in BCN

When I first volunteered to talk about the UK bisexual community, I was still a very heavily involved member of it. I was the editor of Bifrost, which was the national bisexual magazine at the time; I was running, or attempting to run, a Bisexual Resource Centre in Edinburgh which held a library and archives; and as a member of the Edinburgh Bisexual Group I had also just helped to organise the 12th National Bisexual Conference. The paper I would have presented at that time would have gone something like this:

"We have a national magazine and the beginnings of a resource centre. There are over twenty local bisexual groups in the country and many other specialised groups. Our national bisexual conference is in its fourteenth year. We have t-shirts and badges, phonelines and television appearances. We are a large and diverse community."

It would have been accurate, but perhaps very dull.

Then I decided to close Bifrost and the Bisexual Resource Centre, because I felt I had been working for no money and with little support for too long. The reaction of the community surprised me. First they were angry, and then they forgot about me. Any paper I had presented at the time would have gone something like:

"Half the groups never reply to letters. Organisations can't get volunteers. BiCon has had the same number of people coming to it for the last five years. Our bisexual movement is stagnant and people are not interested."

This might have been more interesting, but it didn't exactly sum up the way I wanted to be remembered by the bi movement ...

After I'd got over my initial burnt-out feeling, I thought that I shouldn't run this workshop at all, that others who were involved in the new national newsletter, and who were still enthusiastic about their groups and projects, should be the ones to describe their community. But then I realised that I still had many questions. For instance, how come my feelings - and the level of appreciation I felt I was getting from my community - could change so fast ? How come the community isn't growing - and that some people who come to a few meetings never feel welcome ? Is it a failing in us that we can't cater to everybody ? Do we in fact need a community at all ?

The change I have noticed the most in the bi community recently is a desire to move to more answerable organisations. I feel that this trend may be a good one in the long term - it would certainly be good to hear more of what's going on, although it could also be another burden on our diminishing stock of volunteers. I also worry that some of the complaints about projects not representing the community are aimed at people who volunteered their efforts before there were any rules about how they should go about it. It is also sometimes difficult to see how anyone can be answerable to the bi community. After all, we don't have a national bisexual organisation, and even the conferences have been handed on very informally each year to whoever volunteers to do the next one.

The biggest problem with answerability, though, is who we are answerable to. There are many bisexual communities, even if we are just talking about the UK, and they have very different needs. The one I am most used to talking about is centred around our national conference and the local groups, which meet weekly or monthly. But this community is really very small: certainly, if you count only those who attend semi-regularly, you are talking about a few hundred people. This community can be characterised roughly as young, moderately well-off, mostly confident in their sexuality, and containing a higher-than-average number of people involved in alternative sexual practices (non-monogamy, SM and so on). If you extend this group to include people who attend groups or BiCons only once or twice, you might double the numbers, and if you add on those who read newsletters but don't attend you might get the same number again. There are also those who contact the bisexual phonelines or write to the groups asking for help. If our numbers include all of these we could be looking at several thousand, and if we also include people who practice bisexuality but who have not contacted anyone, for whatever reason, I would no longer be able to estimate numbers and I don't know of any reliable surveys that could help me.

So which of these ideas of community should we be attempting to reach ? My answer to this is probably very different to the consensus of opinion in the UK, which seems to suggest that because we are, or should be, a diverse community, it is therefore the duty of all groups to welcome all comers. In theory this is a beautiful idea, but in practice I have seen it lead to great difficulties in local groups, and I feel it may be one of the reasons that our community is not growing.

There are several problems for groups which welcome all newcomers. One is to do with some of the newcomers you get. I'm sure everyone reading this has been in a group with at least one 'difficult' member. This person may not be evil or bigoted (although I have seen an extraordinary amount of sexism put up with in the cause of 'not putting people off') - they could be opinionated, from a different background to the rest of the group, or just be unaware of what the group is for. They could also have deep psychological problems that the group simply can't handle. This factor is often underestimated by new groups which, because they are small, can easily be totally unbalanced by one person. The problem of the person who persistently makes offensive or inappropriate remarks is dealt with in some groups by guidelines, but the majority of groups in the UK operate on a more informal basis and have no set rules of conduct. Besides, dealing with difficult people is a difficult skill, and one which many groups or group members are unwilling to take on.

Another problem is the difficulty of being unable to please everyone all of the time, and this is closely related to the question of how long-term discussion can progress when new people are constantly joining a group. This is less of a problem at conferences, which are large enough to provide a huge variety of workshops and where, in the last few years, people in the UK have started to state much more specifically who a group is intended for and what it will cover. For a local group, however, particularly one with meetings once a month, a couple of meetings on arcane topics or which require a certain amount of knowledge or agreement from participants, can cause many people to leave and never return.

All of these, and many more, are problems for anyone wanting to run a bisexual group. But I don't think they need be insurmountable. The problem, I feel, with the solutions that have been offered so far, and the reason that the bisexual community is stagnating, is that they are all based on the same model. Groups are expected to run to a similar agenda, each catering to bisexuals just coming out who (the consensus is) need help, support, and organised events. This is not my idea of a community, and from the number of people I know who don't go to these events, isn't that of many other people either.

So do we need a community ? I think we do - or at least that many bisexuals are looking for a way to meet each other and for a place where they can freely talk about their sexuality. Group discussions, though, don't meet many people's needs in this respect, and are only one way of getting bisexuals together. One reason I think that the UK bisexual movement has ceased to serve me, at least, is that I no longer find many of the traditional topics of discussion interesting. And coming up with new subjects is only a partial solution, as some people - perhaps the majority - don't see much point in discussion groups at all, and don't see bisexuality as the most important part of their identity. For myself I already have the sort of community I want. It consists of my friends, mostly ex-students, many of whom are bisexual, non-monogamous, or both. They are punks and goths, science-fiction fans and SM-ers and anarchists. They like the same music as me, and we visit clubs where a surprisingly large number of the people we meet are also bi - or become so shortly after meeting us ! I would like other people to have communities similar to mine, where their bisexual friends are within walking distance every day instead of just at a discussion group across town once a week; and where they share other interests with these people. And in the mean time I would like to see the bisexual community move away from the workshop model and work more towards creating bi space in bars and clubs and parties - perhaps we could even create a change from the type of music usually played at gay events ...

I am glad that some things have changed, and we have had and do now have Bi coffee meetings and clubs, but I think a lot of this still stands to some extent.