Let's Celebrate Bisexuality! Download the new e-book BI by LGB International for free, with stories from bisexuals around the globe.
Bi Visibility Day is the occasion for LGB International to call for greater visibility for bisexual people. They are often defined only by their current partner, English journalist Jo Bartosch says in a new podcast.
Bartosch herself — she recently published the book Pornocracy — is often assumed to be a lesbian because she has lived with a woman for 15 years. "It is important to say what we are. Because my life experience is different from that of my girlfriend, who had a harder time as a lesbian," she says.
Since the beginning of the second-wave women's movement, it has repeatedly been claimed that bisexuality does not exist: a woman is either heterosexual or a lesbian. Editor-in-chief Sybilla Claus heard that then — and still hears it today: "Those people are just too cowardly to choose." It is not that simple. It really is a different experience. Bisexual people also need time to work out how to arrange their lives so they can be happy — as they are.
The e-book BI is free to download
How they manage that can be read in the freely downloadable e-book BI, which contains ten life stories from Europe and Asia; six of them are by women.
Claus found working on the project with openly bisexual people very liberating. "But I also greatly valued the support of gay men, such as the Swedish designers, and of a Swiss lesbian. At LGB International, people really do work together with care and professionalism."
Especially striking are the testimonies of young women from non-Western cultures. Arin (25) from India describes how hard it is for a woman to survive on her own at all — for example because most landlords will not even rent to single women. Vivian Kuo (34) from Taiwan describes how she suffers under a Confucian-influenced society in which daughters and women still come second, and in which a bisexual life is hard to lead.
In Claus's latest book Rebel Girls, which appears in German in November from Diametric Verlag under the title Null Bock auf Frausein: Wie frei sind unsere Töchter eigentlich?, Bev Jackson of the LGB Alliance wrote a chapter on the disappearance of the L for lesbian. Jackson founded the LGB Alliance in 2019 together with British lesbian Kate Harris. At the time they officially split from the aggressive TQIA+ wing and from harmful gender ideology.
Why did they keep the B for bisexual? "Very simple," Bev Jackson explains in the new e-book and in the podcast: "It is about sexual attraction. Bi means two. Either you like women, or you are attracted to men — or both. Yes, there are always prejudices: among gay men towards lesbians and vice versa, and from both groups towards bisexual people. In our organisation we want to go beyond that and work together in a genuinely positive way."
The e-book can be downloaded free here; the LGB International website also has the link to the podcast: www.LGBinternational.org/bvd