Tuesday 8 February 2011

From inventing homosexuality to erasing bisexuality in few years

So, I was down at the LGF for a bi group meeting and discovered upstairs from our meeting was a great big exhibition display doodah about LGBT history, focused on health issues and in the North West in particular. 

It was ever so pretty; I must post pictures here (I did take a few snaps).  However, it is rather lacking in one of the four strands of LGBT.  You can guess which, it's the one I'm almost always grumbling about when I say things like that.

Now the early stuff, fair play, it is really a matter of debate to try and apply modern labels and meanings to relationships before words like homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual were in circulation.  Sappho, for instance: lesbian icon, killed herself over her love of a bloke, but where would her sense of self have been if she'd had the modern Western-European sense of identities and life choices.

Even 100 years ago, when we started to have a notion of homosexuality but for many people things could lead to social ostracism, imprisonment and more.

But in the last 30 years - let's call it the "post Bowie era", there has been a growing amount of definitely, definedly B stuff.

When you're doing a timeline that talks about the first lesbian and gay things in modern Manchester, stuff like the arrival of LGF on the scene or the lesbian newsletter, the TV/TS helplines and groups... to not include similar things in the bisexual community looks like a deliberate omission.

Who was involved in putting it together? Damnit, display boards without email contact addresses on them...!

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