Bisexuality and ageing

Hello to everyone reading this blog

It has been a long time since I last posted here, longer still since I updated it regularly. There's a whole range of reasons for that - pressures of work and time, new forms of social media that make blogger look positively 20th century - but I've decided to give it another go.

There are many billions of words now online, even more are being written while you are reading this. There is too much out there to keep up with anything that doesn't really hit the mark for an individual reader. Or for an individual writer, particularly when she makes a living contributing to those too-many words, which is why I am changing the focus of this blog.

Who are you?

Looking at the stats for this site, most people come here for information about coming out. Next on the list is celebrities who may or may not be bisexual, or who may have said something about it.

I have nothing at all new to say about coming out, because I did that so long ago. (Even the repeated coming out that all out bi people deal with is simply part of my life.) In any case, the world people come out into now is too different for my initial experiences to be relevant.

So for information about coming out and celebrities, I recomment Twitter. Twitter works very well for responding to (for example) biphobia, homophobia, the various doings of various celebrities, etc. I can't keep up with celebrity doings, and really don't care what they do. But I can see that they are important for many, particularly young, people. If idiots post stupid things about bisexuality, then various bi people will point out the error of their ways far more quickly and forcefully than I would be able to do. And Twitter is also a great place for finding out about things too. 

Ageing

But I am interested now in bisexuality and older people. For the sake of drawing the line somewhere, I'm calling "older people" anyone over 50. 

I am now in my 50s  myself, and what I have to offer the world of bisexuality (and what could possibly be called bisexual theory) is not necessarily what people coming to this blog are after. Nevertheless, blogs are for the writer as much as for the reader - unless you are specifically blogging for money - a way of clearing our thoughts, perhaps, and getting unmonetisable ideas out there.

My thoughts on bisexuality and middle-age/ageing/getting older are what I'll be writing about on this blog from now on. As you will see from the previous post, I did a talk at the University of Nottingham about my experiences of being an “older” bisexual. The site for that event, including the text of my talk, is here. My talk is 4,700 words long, so I'm not posting it in full as a blog post. It's a general talk (not giving away anything hugely personal!) and was designed to be heard in conjunction with Rebecca Jones' presentation on research into bisexuality and ageing. In brief: there isn't much of it.

I have recorded it on Soundcloud, in case you want to listen to my dulcet tones. It's about 25 minutes long and you can find it here.

I did interview - both on email and on Skype - some other bi identifying people over 50 and - surprise - they covered a range of different behaviours, feelings, and so on. But they pretty much all felt invisible, and that's not surprising because they are. 

There are actually many things that haven't really been discussed about sexuality of any sort and ageing, and I think about them more and more these days. I'll write about some of them here. I'll also write in more depth about the issues I addressed in my talk (so you don't need to read it/listen to it) if you don't want to!

But if you are a person of 50+ to whom the concept of bisexuality is personally important - however you identify sexually, as well as if you don't - then I'd love to hear from you. I know there are a lot more of us than we think!