By Faith Cheltenham
We arrived at this year’s Creating Change completely and utterly exhausted, having made a pit stop in Washington D.C. for the 2nd Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Witnessing such a historic moment was so amazing that despite being dead tired, I was pretty excited to arrive at Creating Change, baby and husband in tow. That’s right; I traveled from Los Angeles to D.C. to Atlanta with a ten-month-old teething baby! For bi moms like me and so many others, we gotta do what needs to be done, so I’m very lucky to have a partner who can burp, feed and change when I can’t! Luckily, the Creating Change conference provides FREE childcare every day of the conference, so our kid got to have a fun time with other queer babies while his dad took much-needed breaks. Me? I headed over to the first ever Bisexual Leader-ship Roundtable (BLR) on Thursday for a day-long meeting to strategize how we, as bi leaders, can work together on our many common goals.
First, I had to manage the elevator! On the way down every morning, each elevator became a mini party bus since a full elevator still has to stop at every floor from the 28th to the Lobby. It turns out that elevators are a great place to network, hear new jokes and generally rub up against every type of person imaginable. After many a comforting snuggle from random friendly attendees, I made it to the third floor for our meeting, and what a wonderful meeting it was! The BLR is an idea every bisexual leader has had and shared with each other for years. It makes a lot of sense: many organizations are doing great things but when do we have a chance to sit down and talk about what we do and why? When you’re a leader of a bisexual organization on a national or regional scale, there’s rarely a dull day, and your opportunities to help move forward a movement for freedom and equality never cease. There will be more said about the BLR in the future, but for now I can tell you it was a historic day for all of us present and for the many folks who worked so hard for us to get there. Part of our collective challenge is to find new ways to express the same thing, which is that bi folks comprise just over half of all self-identified LGB people (Williams Institute study, 2011), and our needs are important, no matter our relationship status or chosen family. We don’t have to be in same-sex relationships to work on marriage equality, nor do we need to prescribe to a life of monogamy to hear our voices ring within the narrative of the queer experience.
Once we finished our BLR session, many of the attendees went on to present extremely successful workshops, some with over 100 attendees. Bisexual Resource Center President Ellyn Ruthstrom (my co-organizer of the BLR meeting this year) ran an amazing discussion on how we identify and why. Of late, there’s been some discussion about retiring the label bisexual since so many folks erroneously think it limits our options of attraction (as if!), or the many stereotypes associated with our orientation have become too much for any one bisexual to process. What became clear to me in this session is that all of our ways to describe our love should be treated with equal respect, no matter whether you’re pansexually bisexual, a bisexual lesbian, a queer bi, bi dyke, one without labels, bisexually fluid or a bi geek like me. The gay and lesbian movements have had time and money to “re-brand” their identification labels so no one assumes a lesbian wants to be deemed “Sapphic” or that all gay guys are SUPER happy, but many folks assume our label cannot evolve past what it once was. Based on the myriad of bisexuals I saw at this year’s Creating Change, soon there will be no choice but to recognize that WE are the many who refuse to be defined by anyone’s definition but our own.
Faith is President of BiNet USA. Keep up with BiNet USA at www.binetusa.org or via Facebook, www.facebook.com/groups/binetusa or Twitter, www.twitter.com/binetusa.
Postscript by Robyn: Faith had to leave the conference before the closing plenary and so she missed what was possibly the most bisexual moment of the conference! Singer Frenchie Davis closed out the conference with an amazing set that had the audience dancing in the aisles and even up on the stage. Early in her act she referred to herself as an “LGBT performer.” Then a few minutes later, responding to the audience’s excitement, she called out, “It’s a bisexual’s dream – a room full of men and women screaming my name!” I was sitting at a table of mostly bi folks, and we all had enormous smiles on our faces. What a wonderful…
The entire closing plenary can be viewed on YouTube at: www.youtu.be/XthojbkPtFQ.
Featured image: First Bisexual Leadership Roundtable. Back row: Sabina Labor, Heidi Bruins Green, Denise Penn, Lauren Beach, Faith Cheltenham, ABilly Jones-Hennin; Front: Chiquita Violette, Robyn Ochs, Ellyn Ruthstrom. Also at the BLR: Luigi Ferrer, Paul Nocera.