What Happened to Bi Activism?
By William E. Burleson
Several years ago, I had a conversation with a prominent national bi activist at BECAUSE, the Midwest conference on bisexuality. He told me he thought the bi community was in a similar position to the gay community in the 70s: activism was still new and growing and bisexuals will soon be a considerable force politically and socially.
So how’s it going?
I’m sorry to say, not very well.
It’s easy to wonder why: there are, according to all studies, at least as many bisexuals as there are gays and lesbians. It’s a good bet there are at least nine-million self-identified bisexuals right now in the United States. And yet there are no bisexual bars, no bisexual stores, no bisexual magazines, no bisexual…well, just about anything.
It’s not that bisexual activism is new. The first bi organization was formed in 1972, and by the end of the decade there were groups in most major cities. In 1974 both Time and Newsweek had stories about bisexuality. In the Newsweek article, “Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes,” one interviewee said, “But everybody does bisexuality right now. It’s really big.”
By 1976 this early bi activism peaked with the opening of the Bi Center, a resource and community hub in San Francisco. However, by the early 1980s, these groups were on the wane. The Bi Center closed in 1983. The era of the sexual liberation movement was over and Reagan was president; AIDS now ripped through the community, refocusing some activists’ energies while killing others.
The early 80s also saw the beginnings of a new bi movement, a second wave, one more rooted in the women’s coffeehouse scene than the Sexual Freedom League. Many bi women were becoming dissatisfied with their lesbian separatist communities where they were sometimes seen as traitors and failed lesbians. The feeling of being treated like second-class citizens radicalized many bi women to create spaces of their own. From that spark, 1983 saw the beginnings of both BiPOL in San Francisco and the Boston Bi women’s Network (BBWN). These were now expressly feminist organizations led by bi women, bringing a new politic and culture to bi activism.
With this spark, bi activism blossomed. The Boston Bi Women’s Network led directly to several other organizations, including the Bisexual Resource Center. Throughout the nation, new bi groups popped up. 1990 saw the first national Bi conference hosted by BiPOL. A national bisexual magazine, Anything That Moves (ATM), began publishing. In 1993 the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston opened. BiPOL led to BiNet USA, the only all national bisexual organization, which at its peak had 20 regional representatives working with bi groups throughout the country. By1998, when Harvard University hosted 900 bisexuals from around the world for the Fifth International Conference on Bisexuality, the sky, it appeared, was the limit.
So where are we now?
There is good news. The Bisexual Resource Center is humming along as ever. Dr. Fritz Klein’s Bisexual Foundation is now on the scene, having been instrumental in keeping the conference culture alive by helping fund several conferences in the last few years. Some groups are flowering, most significantly Indianapolis’s Bi-Versity (and their newsletter the Bi Tribune) and San Diego’s Bi Forum.
On the other hand, ATM is gone; lost to an energy drain so common to all volunteer organizations. When they tried to find some bi organization to take it over and continue, they found no takers. BiNet is all but gone. They were a victim of a host of problems depending on who you ask, most importantly a culture of infighting. The last two international conferences’ attendance, from the aforementioned peak of 900, hosted less than 100 in Sydney, Australia, and just over 200 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Perhaps most concerning, of 36 bi organizations listed under regional resources at Bisexual.org, 20 are in fact dead or no longer meet in person. Of the remaining 16, five have web pages that are significantly out of date. My own local bi organization, the Bisexual Organizing Project (BOP), once the proud host to its own resource center, quarterly newsletter, and several groups a month, is nearly just a memory. And, for me worst of all, it looks like in 2005 BECAUSE will not be held after fourteen straight years. In the past it hosted nearly 200 people, and last year the attendance was less than 50.
I think optimistically one might say bi activism has been flat. Pessimistically, one might say bi activism is tanking.
Why? Could it be there is less reason for bi activism now than there was ten or twenty years past? Robyn Ochs, editor of the Bisexual Resource Guide and one of the founders of the BBWN so long ago, has seen bi activism past and present. Ochs believes a lot of good bi organizing still going on, but sees the reason many bi-specific organizations are failing to thrive “is a direct role of our success. The more visible and welcome we are in the larger GLBT community, the less need there is for separate bi groups.”
From early on, the one clear mission of the bisexual movement was about inclusion with the lesbian and gay movements. Things have changed. For example, the 1987 “March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights” was a key moment for the bisexual community. Bisexuals were not included, not only enraging bi activists from around the country but also sensitizing many non-bi people to the challenges faced by bisexuals within the greater GLBT community. By 1993 bi activism had achieved success: that year’s march was called the “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights.”
This greater inclusion has been a trend throughout most of the country. According to Ochs, “We have made tremendous progress toward putting the 'B' into LGBT both nationally and locally. Many organizations have become more inclusive toward bisexual and transgendered people, and also toward our allies. This progress is especially visible in youth groups.”
But is inclusion all we wanted? Certainly not, but most of our other clear goals, fighting homophobia, same-gender marriage rights, partner benefits, ending job and housing discrimination, etc, we share with the lesbian and gay communities. “In fighting against oppression, for example, our issues are almost entirely the same as those of lesbians and gay men,” Ochs says. “So for those of us who are committed to working against bigotry, organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, or our local statewide equality organization meet our needs.”
Perhaps this is a problem that both defines and may ultimately doom bi activism: few clear goals of our own. Indeed, even the one thing a bisexual community can give that none other can—community—often isn’t enough. As Ochs says, “Most of us find that our social needs are met though ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ communities, or through our existing straight, gay or mixed social networks. Many of us turn to bi community for reinforcement while coming out, and then move on to other arenas.”
So do we need bi activism at all? Is it a thing of the past? Certainly people seem to be voting with their feet, with “no” holding a growing lead. Even in the hay-days of bi activism, there weren’t hundreds of thousands of bisexuals marching on Washington with gays and lesbians on the sidelines demanding to be included. If there was a strong enough need, if there were enough people energized to the cause, then we wouldn’t be talking about ATM’s energy drain, nor would squabbling at BiNet mean any more than the squabbling all groups experience. This is, at the beginning and at the end, an organic process. There are more than enough coffeehouses and library meeting rooms for all the bi groups we want to form, if there were only enough people interested in forming them.
So if there is to be a bi movement in the future—and that’s a big if—it means we have to have issues all our own and are willing to fight for them. That might be a tall order. But then again, in the early 80s when the first wave of bi activism was winding down, did the elders foresee the next group or organizations such as the Bi Resource Center? Am I too blinded by my vision of what bi activism had meant to see the next wave coming? Does it mean anything that while BOP is gone in Minneapolis, a new local group has begun, one more social and much less political, or that the socially oriented and very sexual Bi Men Network claims a quarter million members? What does it mean that for youth bisexuality has become much more normalized and often rejecting of traditional labels?
I’ve said to fellow bi activist on several occasions that when our work is done, when it’s time to close the doors and turn out the lights, we’ll be the last to know. I hope I’m wrong about that.
Perhaps it’s time for me to focus not on what we are losing, but on what we’ve achieved. As Ochs says, “To our credit, though we still have a tremendous way to go, we have achieved a level of acceptance and visibility that I never would have thought possible twenty years ago.”
Right on, sister.
William E. Burleson is the Author of Bi America: Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community, from Haworth Press. You can contact him at www.bi101.org
©2005