The call has gone out to make the next Creating Change the most bi-positive and transformational one yet. That shouldn't be hard to do, even though it's in the dead of winter (Jan. 25-29) in a none-too-warm clime (Baltimore). Yet despite CC's nearly 30 years of existence as a Brigadoon of queer leadership togetherness and training, this will be only the third consecutive time the gathering has hosted a bi "institute" -- a one-day pre-CC conclave, and it's one of the few times the CC has had several bi-identified workshops at the same location.
Why is that? Why is it that even after more than 40 years since the modern gay movement exploded into being during the Stonewall Riots, it's only now that bi people are beginning to be more visible at CC, let alone the rest of (American) society?
Well, it could be because bi people were too timid or shy, too non-insistent, too chameleon-like (gay in gay setting, straight in straight situations), too unsure or too scorned and rejected, and/or we were insistent -- and shown the door, or not even allowed through the door.
Whatever. Now, three generations later(!), we're already almost at the post-bi/post-label era of sexuality, where people (mostly younger people?) don't identify with the idea of bi/straight/gay identity and dichotomy. (Thus the real name of the aforementioned institute is the Bisexual-Pansexual-Fluid Organizing Institute -- or, as I semi-joke, the Whatever Institute.)
A good time will be had bi -- oops -- by almost all: bi leaders will be energized, nurtured or spawned (nonsexually, please; let's keep this PG-rated), and as Dr. Loraine Hutchins puts it, it will help us activists reunite "as a movement, as a common cause, to take the interests of bi people in the U.S. and everywhere to the next step."
That would please me as a longtime accidental activist who's no longer a spring chicken and wants to see more activists come forward -- and a helluva lot more people openly parade their sexuality daily (if congenially) as bi-pan-fluid-whatever (bpfw... naw, doesn't work as an acronym). I'm not suggesting that you/we/me do so with chips on our shoulders or with anger at past or current rejection (that attitude never works at changing minds) but in friendly, casual, but consistent, everyday ways -- and to help bridge the world's divides, to be agents of subtle acceptance and change.
Ah, but how to do that? Well, now, that's a subject for a future blog entry, isn't it?
But a good place to start to get such tips is at the BPF Institute at Creating Change. So we'll see you in Baltimore -- and the neighborhood store, the schoolyard, the city council meeting, the workplace...