On Stonewall

Posted by Sebastienne



OK, so, everyone's heard of Stonewall, right? They are the leading queer rights organisation in the UK. They're the ones who put up billboards everywhere saying "Some people are gay.. get over it!". They've been around since 1989 and have had a hand in everything from the abolition of Section 28 to the creation of Civil Partnerships.

So why, when Lashings got offered a charity gig raising money for Stonewall a few weeks ago, did we seriously consider turning it down?

I'm bi and monogamous

Posted by Annalytica

This is the second post in the Hand in My Pocket series. For the first post, see "I'm queer and vanilla". For the perspective of someone who is bi and poly, see this post by Sebastienne.



In the Lashings version of “Hand in my Pocket”, we list some of the labels we use to describe ourselves which might be regarded as contradictory. We also invite the audience to share their own labels on the Board of Contradictions. The song and the board pretty much just put the labels out there, as a way of drawing people’s attention to the fact that yes, people who are both of those things do exist. Here on the blog I’d like to explore some of my own lines from that song in more detail - what do the labels mean to me, and why might people think they are contradictory, and how is it possible for those things to co-exist in one person? And why, when labels are associated with so many problematic stereotypes, are we so keen to use them?

Being bi & poly in LGB spaces

Posted by Sebastienne




Below is the text of the presentation I gave at a panel discussion for Oxford pride, "We are Family: LGBT Community in 2011". It's a bit more introductory-level than I'd usually blog here, but it seemed to raise some interesting talking-points so I thought I'd let the discussion carry on here if people were interested.

Wanted: Bisexual-identified women to participate in research

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Sarah Robinson at Huddersfield University is researching bisexual women's identities and is looking for research participants. She says:

Overall, the research aims to develop our understanding of women who define their sexuality as ‘bisexual’. More specifically it aims to:

1 Explore the ways in which bisexual women narrate their identity in the 21st Century.

2 Explore the extent to which bisexual women experience ‘biphobia’ or discrimination.

3 Explore how identifying as a bisexual woman impacts on her lived experience.

I am looking also at how women maintain their bisexual identity when engaged in a monogamous relationship. The women I require don’t necessarily have to be in a monogamous relationship – just be able to speak about the difficulties/or not associated with it.

Participants will be asked to keep a diary for four weeks. They will be asked to include details of specific events that they feel are related to some aspect of their sexual identity. This will be the first stage in developing an understanding of the everyday lives of the participants.

Following on from this I hope to conduct an interview which will seek to explore any issues that may have arisen out of the participants’ diaries.

Following the life story interview participants will be supplied with a disposable camera and asked to take photographs of people, places and objects that are meaningful in relation to their sexual identity. Participants will be requested to take at least 12 photographs within a week of receiving the camera. They will be supplied with a stamp addressed envelope to return the camera after they have completed the task. When the photographs have been developed the participants will take part in a photo-assisted interview.

If you are interested please email Sarah at s.robinson at hud.ac.uk

On Identity And Choice

Posted by Sally Outen

This post begins, as so many things do, with a Google search. This might not have been the case a decade ago; it might not be the case for somebody lacking the situational privileges that I enjoy - but an estimate of the percentage of my life I spend using Google these days would probably bring me out in a cold sweat. The thing is, Google is so very helpful. It can find over 15,000 images of "cute little naked mole rats". It can give me all the heady thrills of traversing the streets of Swindon, from the comfort of my own home (that's one £5 train ticket I'll never need to buy). It can even present me with a helpful drop-down list of predicted search terms when I start typing a standard search, just in case I wasn't sure what I was looking for in the first place.

That drop-down list does occasionally make for a fascinating (if entirely unscientific) survey of people's opinions. "My favourite animal is" yields "cat", "dog", "tiger", "rabbit", and, thanks to Fran Lebowitz, "steak". Now let's try "Being gay is a". Depressingly, the four suggestions provided are, in order, "choice", "sin", "mental illness", and "disease". OK, so the wording I used was always likely to reveal more of the usual hate and misconceptions than anything else. The point I'd like to run with is that "choice" was at the top of the list.

In this post, I'll make a quick examination of the concept of choice as it applies to sexual and gender identities; then I'll explain why I feel that such attempts at analysis are ultimately futile; then I'll explain why that shouldn't be a problem.