Getting Bi In America

 

Getting Bi Ed: Robyn Ochs, Sarah E Rowley
From www.biresource.org, approx £10 (US$15)

Bi In America William E Burleson
Harrington Park Press, approx £13

Two-thirds of Getting Bi is, alas, a really nice idea that doesn’t quite pan out. Scores of bisexuals from across the globe each get a couple of hundred words in which to talk about their lives and what being bi means to them.

It reinforces that there are all kinds of bisexuals all over the place, gets across some of the diversity of the wider bi movement, but such short pieces don’t really give anyone enough space to do more than engage the reader and then run out of space in which to deliver anything more meaningful. Some writers get a page or a page and a half and so get into their stride, and there are pearls of wisdom dotted all over the place (as it’s one I’ve tried too, I liked the reference to proposing that an GLBT organisation changes its name to TBLG and sitting back to watch the fireworks).

The final third is where it finally gets going. Articles of a few pages in length each, on how to build more harmonious relationships between the bi and gay/lesbian movements (from both perspectives rather than just the LG-bashing approach), quotes about bisexuality, a long list of literary references. There is a list of national “places to start” for bi information on the web, but given it cites the email list uk-bi as the only resource for England, that might need looking at for revision if there is a second edition of this book.

Worth having so you can read the final sixty pages, and treat the rest as one of those books you keep in the loo to dip into at random, or if you are going to an international bi conference and want a handy primer of names and faces to watch out for.

Bi America takes the opposite approach to what is largely the same task as Getting Bi: presenting a face of the bi movement in the mid noughties. Where Getting Bi tries to cover the globe, Bi America is much more modest in setting out to reflect the state of the bi movement in the USA (the author notes the difference between ‘America’ and ‘The Americas’ at the start to ward off criticism).

This is more like a travelogue. Not only does it focus simply on America, it gets even more narrow than that, often talking about the bi spaces of the USA in the middle belt, between the livelier bi communities on the East and West coasts.

Provided you take it for what it is, though, it does make for a much more rewarding read. Burleson’s approach allows himself and the people he has interviewed the space to develop issues in a way the main part of Ochs’ book doesn’t. The other voices contributing - and there are many - add to the narrative flow as he considers the who, why, where, and hows of being bi. Polyamory and monogamy; visibility, the impact the internet has had on how the community exists and how we find one another and find support. And the way that the 90s vision of a growing network of real-world bi groups has been changed by social and technological progress. It’s almost like going to a whole BiCon’s worth of workshops in the course of one book.

His conclusions may be a little hard for a BCN writer to take - that the bi movement will collapse inevitably back into the GLBT movement which in turn is ebbing away as equality before the law and social acceptance slowly spread - but they are in the end the goal of most people in both the bi and GLBT activist circles.