Background

The report happened for three main reasons:

The first was the publication, in 2010, of the Bisexual Invisibility report by the San Francisco human rights commission. That document brought together the research on bisexual invisibility and biphobia, and their impacts, and drew out recommendations from this for policy and practice in the area. As the first of its kind, the report had an impact far beyond the area it was intended for, as it was circulated in online fora and many of us in other countries began to use it as a key source of evidence.

Then there was a UK bi activist meeting in the summer of 2011 which many of the BiUK research group attended. As we were throwing around ideas about where the most valuable place to put our energies would be, Jen Yockney suggested a report similar to the San Francisco one, but with a specifically UK focus (two other main ideas to come out of the meeting and be acted upon since were addressing race in the UK bi community, and coming up with guidelines for researchers working on bisexuality). We realised that many of us were frequently responding to policy ideas, or media representations, or practices, by pointing out the implications for bisexual people. It would be much easier if we all had a document to point to which summarised why these things were important and what could be done about it.

The final reason the report happened was that there is now a big enough group, with just about enough time and expertise between us, to put something like this together. We had the members of BiUK, together with Marcus from The Bisexual Index, and Jen from Bi Community News, so between us we had knowledge about the academic literature on different aspects of bisexuality, and the specifics of UK bi activism, community and experience. I knocked up a first draft, based on the topics we’d come up with at the weekend, and we passed that around the group, all adding the areas we knew about. On some of the areas we knew less about we got help from other experts (like Ian Watters and Surya Monro), or spent some time reading up the literature.

The Report

The report itself is similar to the San Francisco report in focusing on the key areas of biphobia, bisexual invisibility, and the impact on health. However, we’ve managed to include specifically UK examples in all of these areas as well as international research. For example, we’ve included an updated version of our analysis of UK media depictions and how these often erase bisexuality by suggesting that people can only be gay or straight.

We also spend some time in the report fleshing out the different groups who can fall under the ‘bisexual umbrella’. Diversity is a big theme in the report as we consider how issues may be different for different groups who may define (or be defined as) bisexual, and we also have a section specifically on intersections between bisexuality and other aspects of identity, background and practice (including race, gender, age, geographical location and several other aspects). A major argument of the report is that ‘B’ should not be always be lumped in with ‘LGBT’ because there are aspects of experience that are specific to bisexuality. But we are also saying that the ‘B’ itself doesn’t present one unified experience.

Another couple of things that are unique about the report are that it gives a sense of the bisexual communities in the UK – which are likely both similar and different to the communities in other contexts – and we also emphasise (at the end of the document) the positive aspects of bisexual experience. Despite the many challenges of being bisexual in a culture which generally doesn’t recognise bisexuality and which discriminates, being bisexual obviously brings rewards as well as difficulties. We were very lucky that a research study had recently been carried out on exactly this topic, including participants from the UK who we quote in the report.

Once the report was written we ensured that there were plenty of brief accounts of bisexual experiences throughout, to bring the issues being covered to life for the reader. We also pulled out a set of recommendations for different areas (such as media, education, healthcare, and the workplace). And we wrote a summary at the start of the report to cover the main points.

We were very fortunate that the Open University, once they heard about the project from the three members of BiUK who work there, offered to publish the report and to help us to publicise it. Once we had a final version we were happy with, Amandine Scherrer from the CCIG group at the OU, sorted out the beautiful design that we now have, and getting nice printed hard copies, as well as a pdf to make freely available online. Sarah Batt helped us to book accommodation and food for the launch, and several different groups within the OU provided financial support for all of this.

Whilst this was happening, the authors approached various organisations we were in touch with to see whether anybody would be interested in endorsing the report. The results were amazing, and we are stoked that all of the following groups came on board as endorsers: Stonewall, the Psychology of Sexualities section of the British Psychological Society, The College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists, Pink Therapy, the Metro Centre, the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, and Hertfordshire Foundation NHS Trust.

The final stage is the launch on February 15th, which the OU, Stonewall and the Metro Centre are kindly sponsoring. After that we will hopefully continue to promote to report online, and at various events, throughout the year.

Where next?

The Government Equalities Office will be attending the launch, and BCN, The Bisexual Index, and BiUK have already been speaking with them about how we can work together towards better bisexual inclusion in UK policy and practice. Hopefully we’ll be meeting twice a year from now on to develop some key practical goals which we can work towards in relation to this.

It would also be great to provide more training once the report is out around these issues. Hopefully the report will be a good basis for bi community members to use for training in their local areas.

It would also be great if other countries developed similar reports, drawing on what we’ve done with our report, and the San Francisco one. We’ve already been talking with some of the international bisexual community about a possible report for the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuality, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) to develop a report on bisexuality that was written for them, but not published, some years back.

Obviously The Bisexuality Report will not be perfect. It was an attempt to produce something useful from the knowledge and expertise of the people who had the time and energy in summer 2011 to work together on this. There will inevitably be some areas which could be usefully developed or where we weren’t aware of all the evidence that is out there. Also, as politics and situations change over time, there’ll be a need to update the report to reflect the shifts in bisexual community and experience.

As an online document it will be possible to update the bisexuality report every few years (as long as we have some funds for the design). So it would be great if people with expertise would volunteer to edit the relevant sections when we get to that point. Meanwhile, if there are sections of the report that people would like to elaborate on, it will be possible to put extra documents up on the BiUK website which go into more detail on various points. We would welcome any evidence-based input along those lines, and any responses to the report which we can put up on the website.

A detailed description of the report plus links for downloading will be up here within the next 24 hours.

Reasons we might usefully engage with queer include the way it opens up LGBT to various sexualities, genders, relationships and practices which are outside heteronormativity but don’t fit within LGBT, and the challenges it presents to binaries of gender and sexuality (man/woman, gay/straight). However, the associations that some may have with queer (due to their generation or culture, for example) as well as the potential it has to erase bisexuality, mean that it is worth being careful in the ways in which we employ queer.

BiReCon is a conference for anyone with an interest in contributing to, or finding out about, current work on bisexuality.

The conference aims to bring together academics, professionals, activists, and the bisexual community. It is organised by BiUK (www.biuk.org) and is held every two years – see the BiUK website for information about past BiReCons. This year it will take place on Thursday 9th August 2012 at Bradford University.

We invite papers and workshop sessions on these and other related themes:

• Bisexuality and mental health problems
• Bisexuality and mental wellbeing, resilience and adaptability
• Bisexual people’s access to, and experiences of, mental health services
• Bisexuality and therapy
• Representations of bisexuality and mental health issues in media, culture and literature
• Intersections with other aspects of experience such as physical disability, age, race/ethnicity, nationality, gender (both trans- and cis-gender) and social class.

We welcome papers from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines: social sciences, health sciences, humanities, therapeutic practitioners, activists etc. During the day there will be opportunities to:

• Find out about issues affecting bisexual people
• Hear from experts about cutting-edge research on bisexuality
• Discuss ways in which organisations can better work with, and for, bisexual people, drawing on good practice
• Take part in workshops on specific issues

If you would like to present your research at BiReCon, please provide a 250 word abstract and a brief biography, by 29th February 2012 to birecon2012@biuk.org

If you are interested in facilitating a workshop at BiReCon, which can include data gathering for current projects or research, then please email birecon2012@biuk.org with a brief description of your workshop by 29th February 2012

For attendees, please watch www.biuk.org and www.bicon2012.org.uk for registration details.

BiUK and BiReCon are community organisations so unfortunately there are no funds for presenters or travel expenses. However, BiReCon provides an excellent opportunity to network with others working in the field, to share good practice, and there will be spaces available to conduct research which fits within the ethos of the event.

At BiCon this year BiUK held a workshop to talk about the various projects we’ve been working on during the last year. It felt great to be able to completely fill a workshop with our activities, and a good sign that BiUK is going from strength to strength following its formation in 2007. Here’s a quick overview of what we covered in the workshop. Over subsequent issues of BCN we will fill you in with more details on all of the projects.

BiUK History
BiUK formed in 2007 at a stage when the number of active people researching bisexuality in the UK reached something of a critical mass. A group of us had just had a paper about the BiCon survey accepted by the international Journal of Bisexuality, and Libby had talked us into putting on a research event prior to BiCon 2008 (which she cunningly named BiReCon). We’d been running an email list for some years which had evolved from its original yahoo list format, BiBlio, into the official JISCmail Bi Research Group. At that time we put up a small website to collect together all these things and put together a list of official ‘founder members’.

Things really gained momentum in 2008 following the success of the first BiReCon event. This day brought together researchers, activists and bi community members with organisations who were keen to learn more about working with bi issues. In the morning we heard from organisations such as Stonewall, Mind, the Department of Health, the NUS, and the Met Police about how they worked with bi people. We ran workshops on various topics, and – in the afternoon – we focused on bi research and what our future priorities should be.

After that event we were confident enough that BiUK would continue that we did an interview in these pages about our mission, and began to plan an international BiReCon event in 2010 to run alongside the joint ICB/BiCon. BiReCon 2010 was a huge success, attracting over 100 attendees from many different countries including Canada, Switzerland, Puerto-Rico, Holland, Spain, Israel, and the US. We had top keynote speakers including Robyn Ochs and people from the American Institute of Bisexuality, and many parallel presentations and workshops on a wide variety of bi-related topics. We were even able to record some of the presentations and make parts of them available on YouTube, thanks to some financial support from the Open University.

In the year since BiReCon 2010 we have continued our usual activities (collecting the annual BiCon survey, conducting our own research studies on bi issues, and running the email list). At the same time we have developed our website into a more active and accessible format, and have taken on two big new projects: the researcher guidelines and the UK bisexuality report.

The BiCon Survey
The BiCon survey has been given out at BiCons since 2004 with the aim of collecting demographic data about the people who attend BiCon and exploring how this changes year on year. There’s very little known about bisexual people in the UK, so collecting data about people who attend BiCon helps to fill that gap in the knowledge base. Knowing about things like rates of mental health issues amongst BiCon attenders helps us to make the case for better and more bi-specific services. Information about the people who attend BiCon also helps people planning future BiCons to make them as accessible as possible to everyone who wants to attend.

The first survey was analysed and written up for the Journal of Bisexuality and BCN. Inputting the survey data, and analysing it, is a very time-consuming process which we are still in the process of doing for subsequent years, with a group of volunteers. However, we did manage to conduct an initial analyses on the data from 2008 (the 105 surveys that were returned that year). Tracey Plowman created a poster of these findings which we’ve included here and which was on display at BiCon 2011.

The BiUK Website
The BiUK website (www.biuk.org) has been fully developed over the last few weeks so that it now includes many more pages and links as well as an ongoing blog of what we are up to and matters relating to bisexuality research worldwide.

One thing we are particularly pleased with are the lists of references which we’ve put together on the website under various topics (e.g. health, biphobia and bi invisibility, bisexual experience). We’re hoping to keep adding to this to create a repository of references which will be a useful first port of call for any researchers or writers who are new to the area and want to find out what has been researched so far. We’ll be writing more about the website for the next edition of BCN.

Guidelines for Writers and Researchers
One of the main motivations for developing the BiUK website was that we wanted a place to display the new guidelines which we have produced for people researching and writing about bisexuality.

This project came from Jen Yockney’s suggestion, on the academic bi email list, that we should produce some guidance for all those researchers who contact us in the hope of accessing bisexual participants. We find ourselves saying the same things again and again and thought it’d be useful to have a list of guidelines to point them to. BiUK took Jen’s initial suggestions, along with some trans research guidelines by Jacob Hale, and produced a list of 15 guidelines which we thought all researchers should follow. These are available on the website and can be adapted and edited by anybody to suit their purpose.

In the BiCon 2011 workshop it was suggested that we could create specific versions of these guidelines for people involved in lab-based research, and for people who work in the humanities. We will be exploring those possibilities and hope to link to such versions in future. Meanwhile there will soon be a BCN article including the guidelines and explaining more about the thinking behind them.

The UK Bisexuality Report
The other of Jen Yockney’s excellent suggestions which we ran with was something that she mentioned at the first 2011 bi activist weekend. This was the idea of creating a report about the situation for bisexual people in the UK. Again, we find ourselves often saying the same things to policy makers, practitioners, and LGB and LGBT organisations, about the need to properly include the ‘B’, about the ways that bisexual experiences differ from lesbian and gay experiences, and about the differences between biphobia, homophobia and transphobia. We spotted that people in San Francisco had produced an excellent report about bisexual invisibility and thought that we might produce something similar for the UK context about bisexuality, equality and diversity.

The report is now almost finished. We are going to polish it and then get endorsements of it from various relevant bodies. We’re hoping to publish it by the end of the year through the Open University (who are one of the major supporters of BiUK). We will have a launch event as well as making it available through the website. We’ll write a full BCN article about the report at that point.

BiReCon
Finally at the workshop we discussed our plans for the next BiReCon event which will be taking place on 9th August 2012 (we’re planning to run a BiReCon associated with BiCon every other year). In 2012, BiUK members Rebecca Jones, Helen Bowes-Catton and Caroline Walters will be organising the event. As usual, it will aim to provide an interface between academics, practitioners and bi people and will be open to all. The focus will be on mental health because this is a key issue for bisexual communities: many research studies have found that levels of mental distress are worse in our communities than in lesbian, gay and heterosexual groups. We are planning to look at mental well-being and resilience as well as difficulties. We are hoping to have contributions from various mental health and LGBT organisations, as well as presentations and workshops from BiUK members and other UK researchers who work in these areas.

As with previous BiReCon events, organisations and researchers will pay to attend the day (with all the money going to that year’s BiCon), but it will be completely free to BiCon attendees. This is because a major part of the ethos of BiReCon is to make bisexuality research accessible and available to bi community members, bi organisations and bi activists, so that they can hear about the studies which they have taken part in, feedback into future research, and have access to information which may be useful in their work.

Where do we go from here?
We feel like we have quite a lot to be going on with: publishing the bisexuality report, getting the bisexual research guidelines out to an international audience, analysing the BiCon survey, and continuing to develop the website. Also many of us are continuing to conduct our own research. For example, Meg, Christina and Helen have published two chapters about their ‘creative methods’ research on bisexuality and related issues, which many readers will have taken part in over the years. 2012 should see the completion of two of the major projects from this research which will have very interesting things to say about the diversity of bisexual people’s experiences of home and belonging, and of gender and sexuality.

You can find out more information about all of the work mentioned her on the BiUK website (www.biuk.org), including links to several research publications.

If you have any ideas about future directions, or want to get involved, then please write to us at info@biuk.org, or drop a letter to BCN with your thoughts.