Happy new year

Many people’s favourite bisexual, Angelina Jolie, is in the news again (well, the Daily Mail, if that counts). According to that esteemed [sic] organ, both she and the lovely Brad don’t rate fidelity as important to their relationship. They got this factlet from a new book Brangelina: The Untold Story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, by author Ian Halperin, via a German newspaper Das Neue.

Many people don’t think that physical exclusiveness is essential to a happy relationship. Infidelity (in the sense of lying) is another matter. I think not lying is essential to a happy relationship myself. Not being "physically exclusive" (aka polyamory) is entirely up to the people concerned.

Apparently, Brangelina don't "restrict" each other. That's nice. And it seems that Jolie and her ex Jenny Shimizu kept a jungle love nest for “trysts” – one of those words that never appears in ordinary vocabulary. Perhaps only celebrities have them.

However, as a mother (only of one) I am baffled that parents of six - even with "help" - have the time and energy to pursue more than one sexual relationship but perhaps I am being lazy.

Anyway, this non story has given me the chance to add another pic of the toothsome couple - and when Ms Jolie is pictured here, my blog stats always leap up. I’m cheap like that. Sometimes.

For a more nuanced view of some bi stories in 2009, take a look at the Bisexuality Examiner here with its best and worst bisexuality stories of 2009.

In other news
I have done a bit of tidying on this site, by removing most of the blogs I had linked to on the right. It is telling that, in the three and a half years since I started writing here, almost all of the personal blogs I listed then are no more. Blogging consistently over a long period is hard and, if you start to do it for personal reasons, often outlives its point. Others come to take their place.

Anyway, the ones I have added here are (at the moment anyway) posted to regularly and hopefully will keep you amused, entertained, challenged and supported.

If you know of any other good sites or blogs, especially your own, let me know as it is easy to miss them. I know there are more to add but I can't find them right this minute.

My last blog of 2009
For those of you whose New Year’s resolution is to act on your bisexuality, which often seems to people to come here at this time of year, I would say “go for it”. To me, anyway, the fact that you are thinking about it and weighing up your options means that you have a good chance of making it work for you.

Bisexuality is not necessarily difficult – from my point of view it is cause for celebration, something that I am proud of and is an intrinsic part of myself – but for many people it certainly can be. Perhaps those who find it easy-peasy tend not to comment on this blog! But I hope that even people who have found it difficult are on the way to a happy bisexual life.

Have a great 2010.

Duncan from Blue comes out. Etc.

Another week, another celebrity comes out as bi. I stopped posting on bi celebrity long ago, but there is something about male celebrities coming out as bi that does, in fact, deserve more attention.

I’ve done the women, as it were – Megan Fox, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, et al all the way back to Madonna c1990… well, they may be bi, or they may not. They may have felt a sudden desire to be, like, totally honest with their public at this particular moment in time, or they may have seen a marketing opportunity.

Celebrities, eh. You just can’t trust them/their public images/their people. And they do real bi women no favours at all.

However, female bi celebrities don’t really get flak from anyone (apart from the likes of me, who matters not diddley-squat in the big old world of music PR). Bi male celebrities (like bi men in general) are not seen as that teensy bit sexier, they are seen as pretend gay men with all the homophobia and ridicule that implies in mainstream society.

Complementary posts
Two blog posts on this subject cover pretty much everything I could or would have said on the subject. I have never heard of Gary Nunn before, but Marcus Morgan is a long-time UK bi activist, and knows of what he speaks.

However, I want to highlight the many comments these posts attracted. The negative comments, that is; the positive comments are similar and from people who actually know other bi people or are bi themselves.

Obviously, the Guardian’s Comment is Free site attracts a different set of prejudices to that of Pink News – a gay news site. Specifically, CiF commenters tend to believe that there is no problem in being gay or bi these days, that gay/bi people still “shouting from the rooftops” aka mentioning their sexuality are somehow oppressing heterosexuals. Or, connected, that we should just all love whoever and it really doesn't matter any more.

Biphobia really does exist
But it is depressing that the bile posted on PN by gay people (men) beats that on CiF by the factor of many. Specifically, that bi men cannot be trusted because X poster has met a no-good one (or two).

Perhaps most people who are out as bi have heard this already - God knows how many times I have heard this in my life! So bi people are supposed to police / apologise for the bad behaviour of every other person who has ever said they were bi. You can't be judged as yourself, but against what others may or may not have done.

I find that extraordinary, nothing but downright prejudice. It puts us in an impossible position. We “good” bis, by our attempts at openness and honesty, are as nothing beside these bogeyman “bad” bis. And there are bad bis, of course. There are bad people of all sexualities. Sexual identity does not correlate to good or bad behaviour.

'Bi now, gay later'
I don’t know where those gay people posting get the idea that being bi is so much easier than being gay. That, as a result, all the bi (men) they have ever met who then turned out to be gay negate the very existence of genuinely bi men.

One commenter says that a lot of people who say they are bi are really gay. How does he know? Some people say they are bi and are really gay. True. Some people say they are gay and are really bi. True. Presumably, both think that the sexuality they profess is easier to manage / more acceptable than the one they feel in their hearts that they are.

Well, I have met plenty of gay men who turned out to be bi. Including some bi men who have girlfriends they do not tell the gay community about. And married bi men who were completely honest with their wives. And monogamous bisexuals by the bucketload.

The supposition remains: bi men = really gay; bi women = really straight. Are men, or perhaps Men, really so irresistible?

Casanova a "brainy bisexual"

The 18th century randy man may have loved the ladies (130 of them it seems, which is practically celibate by writer Georges Simenon’s standards) but he was also partial to the odd gentleman. And he wrote a book or two.

It’s all explained on this link, which discusses Ian Kelly’s new biography of him.

Royals in messy relationships shock

I don’t know if any British readers saw last night’s mind-boggling TV programme on the marriage of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. There’s more here.

Dearie me, what a mess their marriage was, principally due to his inability to keep his trousers on. To say he had an eye for the ladies was an understatement – he had two eyes for the ladies, and a couple in the back of his head as well by the sound of it. He probably still has all those eyes: he doesn’t sound as though age (78) is likely to wither him. And while a certain amount of open-marriage, swinging-sixties-ness was perfectly fine by both of them, he essentially treated PM horribly – abandoning her at parties, making her cry on the shoulders of semi-strangers, being very unhappy when she found lovers of her own.

It seems there are also “persistent rumours” that he “refuses to deny” that he is bisexual! Apparently when they first met, PM thought he was gay. Many of his social circle were gay or bi men, and viewers were lucky enough to see the photo of a young male Snowden in drag?!? His closest male friend – Jeremy Fry - was openly bisexual and had been done for importuning (ie trying to pick up men for sex). This apparently stopped Fry being best man at the wedding (which you will note is not mentioned in his obituary)! Snowdon also had an affair with (Mrs) Camilla Fry, and fathered her daughter Polly.

These are Mr and Mrs Fry…




Fascinating stuff – and this is from me, who finds the royals usually very yawnsome. Perhaps you can see it via the Channel Four look again thingy?

And weren’t there also rumours that she was bi? Lawks, those royals!

Celebs gone wild again. Yawn

Word has reached me that Lindsay Lohan – she of Mean Girls, Freaky Friday, that film with the stock car Beetle, and other items of crap - has been spotted at Cannes canoodling with her “best friend” Samantha Ronson. See here, here and here for sundry nonsense, confirming and denying that they are and aren’t in a relationship.

Of course, I don’t really know whether or not their relationship is genuine (it seems that it might be; in any case, Samantha Ronson is apparently a lesbian) as distinct from the publicity-seeking, girl-on-girl-action type of bisexuality that I detest. So what might be behind all this? Has Lohan got a film out or anything? Or is her problem that she hasn’t got a film out?
Then again, it seems she fits in to another celebrity stereotype: “they said that I should go to rehab, I said No No No.” Stealing fur coats? Unwise sex videos? General out of control behaviour?

Why not try snogging some girls? That’s really naughty! That’ll get you in the tabloids. People will be talking about you, noticing you, again. Cue three types of reaction: 1) that’s hot (or, for some reason, hott). 2) that’s disgusting. 3) that’s sweet, you leave her alone.

Hmm, I haven’t blogged about bi-girl celebs for a while and it makes me feel a bit… dirty. This post isn’t very edifying, is it? Then again, because of this rather sweet pic some people who wouldn’t see this blog otherwise will hit on it and might find something to make them think about bisex a little bit differently. It has happened.

Girls [sic] on film

I know it’s not being released for another 10 days or so, but – in the opposite of my usual procrastination - why not get in early? Yes, it’s my very own Sex and the City post. While I fully realise that not everyone has to have one, urban women all over the world (probably) will be writing about it because they related to the TV series and, now, the film. It certainly speaks to me and, yes, there’s even a bi angle!

I wasn’t an “early adopter”. When I first saw an episode of SATC, I felt completely alienated by the fact that all they did was talk about men. But soon (very soon) I began to appreciate their escapades and their relationships. There was something actually believable about the characters… and although they seem to have preposterous amounts of money (I have met the owner of a PR agency, a media lawyer, and many journalists, none of whom were anything like SATC wealthy) I could relate to them.

Yes, I did like looking at the clothes. Even when the SATC gang were wearing preposterous nonsense, it was still interesting. And yes, why I ended up liking it after all was the reason that other female commentators have said: it foregrounded female characters (still unusual); talked about sexuality in an unprecedently open and truthful way; and presented friendship between women as the most important and stable thing in their lives (although where such busy women got the time to meet so often, God knows).

Bisex in the city
In SATC – the TV series - bisexuality in some shape or form appeared quite a lot, if ambivalently. As an aide-memoire to anyone else who watched it:
In one episode Samantha is asked by a gay male couple if she will have sex with them and she agrees. However, half-way through sex they chicken out, disgusted.
Across another few episodes, Samantha - the most sexually adventurous character - actually has a relationship with a woman, but it ends after she puts her back out using an inadequately harnessed dildo. (I mean really, anyone looking at that dildo could tell it wouldn’t work properly!)
Carrie meets some younger people - including a character played by Alanis Morissette - who actually identify as bi, but backs off from dating a bi man.
Then there is the very ambivalent - in many senses - episode where camp cabaret singer Bobby Fine marries Betsy von Mufling. The SATC quartet presume he’s totally gay, so why are the two marrying each other? At the end of the episode, Bobby tells Carrie that he really does love Betsy while the melancholic song “Is that all there is” plays in the background. But in a subsequent episode, a heavily pregnant, extremely happy Betsy turns up, her husband seemingly as camp as ever as he wants to name their daughter Barbra or Judy.
Who knows whether there is any bisex in this film (I would hazard a guess as to not), or indeed whether it will be terrific or a pile of poo.

Cynthia Nixon


Then of course there’s a real-life bisexual storyline, the I’d-count-as-bisexual Cynthia Nixon (Miranda Hobbs in SATC) who is now several years into a relationship with a woman she plans to marry.

This is the first, and I fully expect the last, time I have ever used that right-wing rag The Daily Mail on this blog, but credit where it’s due I suppose. There’s a long article about her and her gf Christine Marinoni here, and even the comments are nice!
They quote her as saying:

“In terms of my sexual orientation, I don't really feel that I changed," she says. "I don't feel any different than I did before. I don't feel like there was some hidden part of myself that I wasn't aware of.
"I had been with men all my life and I had never met a woman I had fallen in love with before. But when I did it didn't seem so strange.
"I don't define myself. I'm just a woman in love with another woman."

Aaah!

Bisexuals a bit less jolly... revisited

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about unforeseen consequences – the “unknown unknowns”, if you like. You have no idea that something could happen because A had never crossed your mind as having anything to do with B. It certainly resonates with what’s happened to my blog viewing figures.

Ever since I posted up a picture of Angelina Jolie on this blog a little more than a month ago, my reader figures have gone through the roof. Well, as far as “the roof” for a non-publicised, non-monetised, non-famous blog like this is concerned. Today, more than 1,000 people will read this blog. Well, I say read, but in actual fact it’s more like: click on for a nanosecond, see what’s here, then click off immediately. This blog is currently listed as number two on Google Images’ places to see Angelina Jolie. And then last week, aol.com put a link to this blog right in the middle of a story. Mini jackpot.

So, if all I wanted was “clicks”, then all I’d have to do is post endless pictures of Angelina Jolie – with perhaps the occasional picture of a buff-looking man to attract a few people who were into them.

What's it all for?
But that’s not all I want. I want people to actually read this blog, to think about what it says. Some of them have, I suppose. Some people who would never access sites that are purely and simply about bisexuality. When someone does stay on this site for half an hour, and they have found it through her picture, then I feel really encouraged.

And that, I suppose, is why I think I was wrong with some of the things I said about Angelina Jolie. I stand by the idea that, if we “ordinary people” rely on slebs to be our role models and to show us how to live our lives, then we are sunk. The issues we face are simply too different, and we will never be able to change things if we rely on help from “above”. But. It seems that Angelina can reach parts that I certainly can’t – and nor can the bi community, or health educators, or politicians, or books, or less glamorous spokespeople. Obvious really.

She is a larger than life person, yes, someone with a special life, which is one of the things I have a problem with. But as that is what many people really want her for, and, although this may sound harsh, to live through her, then she certainly is valuable as a spokeswoman, a beacon for, bisexuality – or indeed anything else.

Because she – or her image – is certainly doing something I can’t.

The next post will have absolutely nothing to do with celebrity. Promise.

Tila Tequila and the MySpace bisexual

You couldn’t make it up – although someone obviously has. A bisexual dating show where a woman who is quite literally famous for being famous is getting “16 gorgeous straight guys!" and "16 hot lesbians!" to compete for her affections on the MTV show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. It sounds positively demure besides her previous series: Pants-Off Dance-Off. And that’s “pants off” in the underwear sense of the word, rather than simply an overly constricting pair of trousers.
Now Tila Tequila is most famous for having completely invented herself as a sleb through self-promotion, and clearly she’s very good at it, with currently 2,170,161 MySpace friends – more than when I looked a couple of hours ago. Now she’s a singer/actress/presenter/model/stripper/all-purpose brand, and good luck to her I suppose.
She has also been credited for giving rise to the term MySpace Bisexual, which Urban Dictionary defines as:

“A girl who makes out with other slutty chicks at parties and then claims to be bisexual because it's trendy to say so and gets people's attention on Myspace.
Pretty much any girl on Myspace who lists her sexual orientation as "bisexual". Hence, Myspace Bisexual.”

Well, being a “girl” who lists my sexual orientation as “bisexual” on MySpace I obviously have a quarrel with that. Actually lots of quarrels with that. You could equally well call them “Girls Gone Wild”. But moving on…

Now this show has attracted a lot of commentators – both bi (who hated it), anti-celeb (who hated it) and homophobes (who hated it). But also, unfortunately, people who didn’t necessarily hate it but considered that it gave a marginalised group (bisexuals) some much-needed publicity.

Yet, given that millions of people are watching this programme, what can we make of it? In fact, it reminds me in some ways of the Jerry Springer programmes of the 1990s, where bisexuals took their place among all the other freaks who wanted to show off in public.

It seems to me that the problems with A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila are a) that she had to lie to the contestants, making out that she was straight/lesbian – and Any Fule Kno that bisexuals lie; and b) that because there is nothing else about bisexuality on TV, this is seen as What Bisexuals Are Like.

The world at large has a strange and unusual view of “bisexual relationships”. Even Ms Tequila herself says: “The show will be about me finding love as a BISEXUAL!!!!! THAT IS CRAZY, RIGHT?”. Er no… how sad it would be if that were true. But it isn’t and I can’t believe she thinks so either. The world is actually full of bisexuals having good, bad and indifferent relationships, if people only knew. And they certainly aren’t going to be finding out through this show.

Of course, there are stereotypes a gogo in this programme, but that’s reality TV. Anyone who seriously thinks that, say, The Bachelor, is a realistic view of heterosexual relationships needs to be thrown into a vat of Mills & Boon novels and left to claw their way out.

The problem isn’t that there are wacky views about bisexuality in the media – there are wacky views about everything - it’s that all of them are wacky. Isn’t it about time that there were some genuine ones too?

An hour later…
Tila Tequila has added another 46 friends.

Bisexuals a bit less jolly today

I don’t think it’s just my age that makes me feel decidedly underwhelmed that Angelina Jolie is perhaps, maybe, just possibly, not actively bisexual any more.
According to Nicole Kristal, on the website After Ellen, the undoubtedly pulchritudinous Ms Jolie has consigned her bisexuality to the past. And Ms Kristal is bereft.
I’m not. I’m sure I’ve written before about my ambivalent feelings towards bisexual (female) celebrities, or rather, as Kristal’s piece rightly has it The Pop-Tart Publicity Whore Bisexual. You can’t trust celebrities, “bi” or otherwise. And I’m not sure they are doing real bisexual people any favours.
Celebrities aren’t real. They have publicists who decide which bits of the person we can see, where they can go, what they can do, the public words that come out of their mouths. Including the B one. And whether or not they should be pawing other celebrities.
Of course, when you’re young, and alone, you need role models. You need people who are successfully doing what you’d like to. Obviously, in a way, celebrities are the best people to do this – after all, they are in the public eye. You can see what they’re doing. But we can’t rely on them to act consistently, or do something if their PR people tell them it might involve the loss of money/status/fill in gap here.
Angelina Jolie is a celebrity, the daughter of celebrities, the wife of another. That is her job, not being an actress, mother, goodwill ambassador for the UN or anything like that. She doesn’t operate under the same rules as the rest of the world. She lives in celebrityland, an other-worldly place built on money, whose inhabitants can do whatever they like as long as they realise that they cannot be themselves. (This, of course, exacts its price – Britney Spears, another possible bi gal, is currently paying it.)
So who knows what Jolie’s real motives are in anything at all? At the moment, she seems to exist to be a larger than life character whose current role is as the 21st century’s answer to Mia Farrow: earth mother extraordinaire. There’s not much space for bisexuality – or any sexuality – in that.

And another one
I feel a bit the same (yawnsome) about Ani DiFranco – who was interviewed in the Guardian yesterday without “bisexual” being mentioned once. Strange, when according to Jennifer Baumgardner, whose book I mentioned in a post not so long ago, Ani DiFranco was almost single-handedly responsible for the increase in young American women’s bisexuality in the mid 90s. But that can’t be true, surely? Were there no other social factors involved? Even David Bowie – who really did encourage a whole lot of young men to “try it out” – was part of a glamrock movement and a culture that was challenging how men and women dressed and behaved.
Angelina Jolie may or may not still be bisexual. The same goes for any other bi celebrity – past or present. But if we rely on them – rather than less celestial beings - to show us the way, then we really are sunk.

Big Brother is not watching me

First of all, my apologies to the three-quarters of this blog’s readers who don’t live in the UK. You won't be directly involved in this conversation, and that's just plain rude of me. Except that, dollars to doughnuts, South Korea to South Dakota, you’ll have your own version of this farrago to contend with.
So, another end of May, another season of the manipulative television drivel that is Big Brother. And, comme toujours, we have a “comedy bisexual”. This “comedy bisexual” is a bit different from the usual Chicks (Channel 4’s official description of the women in the house) in that Carole is a 53-year-old member of the Socialist Workers’ Party rather than a WAG wannabe. And a vague acquaintance of my partner’s, given that London’s middle-aged lefties are not exactly thick on the ground these days.
Oh dear. Did she learn nothing from the George Galloway fiasco? Has she never SEEN Big Brother? You can’t expect that ANY of your political views will get over to the viewers untrampled. Perhaps she thought she was increasing bi invisibility/Trotskyist invisibility, to which I would respond – more fool you. The producers will edit out anything sensible and you too will end up in a cat costume.
Of course, there have always been a sprinkling of LGBT BB contestants. Indeed, about three years ago MTF transsexual Nadia won – which said a lot about something, although I can't for the life of me decide what. But if you are interested in having your every move monitored by the general public before being a two-month sleb, whatever else you are in your life, then Dr Sue would diagnose some kind of personality disorder. There are plenty to choose from.
Still, the media commentary will give pause for thought, I expect. Mark Lawson in the Guardian described Carole as a “divorced bisexual” using inverted commas. Not sure why – if she is divorced and says she is bisexual, then she’s a divorced bisexual. The Sun, in its usual caring, sharing way, divided housemates into “beauties” – the women under 30 who all look like models and “beasts” - everyone else. That's probably how the producers see them too.
Anyway, don’t watch – you’re only encouraging them. If you want to do your bit for bisexual visibility, you could always go for a walk with a badge on or something. Or, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you could go to the Big Bi Book Weekend in New York.

The many secrets of Daphne du Maurier

Another bisexual I never met... (and whose pictures stubbornly refuse to upload).
I'm doing something old-fashioned at the moment: convalescing. I've had a minor operation - a TVT if you're bored/nosy enough to google it; there's no point in being coy – that only required an overnight stay in hospital but means that I am having two weeks off work to "recover". This means sleeping/dozing a lot and walking small distances gingerly because my thighs feel like I’ve been riding a horse for 12 hours. I assume.
I can't really concentrate a great deal, but one thing I am doing is listening to the radio. BBC radios 4 and 7 are excerpting My Cousin Rachel and Frenchman's Creek respectively, the reason being that their writer Daphne du Maurier would have celebrated her 100th birthday on Sunday. Interesting links are here and here. Apparently there will be a BBC TV drama about her tomorrow night (12th) which should be interesting. There's also the cententary version of the annual Daphne du Maurier festival in Fowey,Cornwall, where she lived.
I'm not really a lit crit person, so can't give a run down or analysis of her work – although I read her most famous books as a teenager – but in a nutshell she wrote romantic/historical/psychological/gothic novels. As well as the two mentioned above, she wrote Jamaica Inn, the House on the Strand, very many short stories – including two on which were based the films The Birds and Don't Look Now – and, most famously, Rebecca.
Its opening line "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is one of the most famous openings to any English novel. Alfred Hitchcock also made it into a fantastic film. I do know that many argue she wasn’t taken as seriously as a writer as she deserved, being, instead, pigeon-holed as a "women's writer". Bah!
But anyway, I'm in deep water here as this isn’t an Eng lit blog, but a bisexual one – and this is about D du M’s bisexuality.

Divided loyalties
Or rather, her sexuality. Apparently, she kept things pretty close to her chest - many of her letters are sealed until 50 years after her death - and according to her official biographer, Margaret Forster, lots of things about her are shrouded in mystery.
Her relationship with her father, actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, was at the very least... troubled. Daddy wanted a boy, or alternatively wanted to be her brother, or perhaps her lover. And was vociferously homophobic to boot. She married "Boy" Browning, producing three children, and they stayed married till he died, but she had a strong "lesbian side" too.
Apparently Gertrude Lawrence - a musical comedy star who may also have been her father's lover - was her main female love. She also had a powerful crush on Ellen Doubleday, wife of the publisher. Du Maurier saw herself as having two distinct sides: wife/mother (female) and lover/writer (male), a side of herself that she showed few other people and a division that she found tormenting. So she was constricted by the mores of the time and the expectations of both herself and other people.
A complicated psychology, then, but the right sort of creative compost from which to grow her dark psychological fiction.

Two more fascinating women I never met…
… and who (evidence suggests!) weren't bisexual, died this week. Isabella Blow, fashion journalist, icon and muse, discoverer of many a designer, wearer of fabulous and eccentric hats and woman who ploughed her own furrow, drank weedkiller. At 48, her third suicide attempt worked.
Lesley Blanch, traveller, "great and glamourous beauty well into extreme old age", writer of The Wilder Shores of Love - about Victorian women who chose exile and love with Arab men rather than settle for stifling English conventionality, has died aged 102. Ladies, I salute you!
If anyone is interested as to what "my type" is – so far as women are concerned – they, to a large extent, are it. Not the posh part probably (they were both pretty upper crust), but eccentric, flamboyant, unconventional, larger than life women… well, hello!

Do we need any more bi celebrities?

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who can relate to this cartoon. I always have lots of serious stuff to do, but concentrating, alas, is often beyond me. Still, I found this list on the internet when I was gathering some ethereal wool and my interest was piqued.
It's a list of bisexual celebrities. Well, not necessarily bi. Certainly not necessarily celebrities (actually it says "people" but Janet and John down the road would hardly attract their attention now, would they?) Various countries' Big Brother contestants, for instance... A selection of MAWs*. Then there are a few bi activists - interesting, important, essential people, but not celebrities in the sense that paparazzi follow them out of night clubs or the world's press attend their press conferences. And there are, of course, the usual sleb suspects: Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore and so on.
But there are also some people I'd never considered, and who will offer interesting subjects for "bisexuals I never met" at some point in the future. French poet Louis Aragon, for instance, dancer Isadora Duncan, painter Tamara de Lempicka.

Who counts as bi?
There is, of course, a big big problem with these lists - and it's not just "why are people so interested in celebrities"?
Now, it is probably all right to describe someone as bisexual if they are well known as having had sexual and emotional relationships with men and women, even if they lived in, say, Syria in 800BC when things were just a tad different from the modern western world. I know that people - up till arguably the early 20th century, and much later in many parts of the world - never looked at their sexuality like that. But, to me, that's OK although, yes, I know many people disagree.
Still, lots of people on this hugely long list have done no more than hint at an interest in the same sex. God, how I hate that. I have mentioned this before on this blog. Having reluctantly had sex with someone of the "wrong" sex doesn't make you bisexual, OK? You have to want to do it. Nor does it mean anything to say "everyone is bisexual really" in the hope that your gay audience might spend more money on your products and you'll look a bit more exciting.
I'd like some real bi celebrities please, if (sigh) we have to have celebrities at all.

*model, actress, whatever

Blogger's block

Hmm. Been a bit quiet on this blog recently, hasn't it? Well, this is a themed blog and recently I haven't had a bisexual thought in my head. In fact, I haven't had many thoughts in my head at all, except on the subjects of 1) moving house after 21 years, and the practical, emotional and financial difficulties therein. And 2) the health of my poor mother.

While 1) is working itself out — well, we have moved anyway, and the world hasn’t come to an end like I thought it might — the worries over 2) continue. This isn't the place to discuss them, though.



However, I did read some "bisexual" celebrity gossip in The Sun yesterday. Britney Spears, apparently, is into group sex with women. The links on The Sun’s site are broken, so I can’t add them, but this site has more details.

BS has had an interesting transmogrification from celebrity born-again virgin to celebrity knickerless party girl via a few marriages, a couple of babies and some wild "best friends". Oh, and that two-second snog with Madonna.

But does she like sex with women? Has she been living a "secret life of wild sex"?

Maybe. And maybe not.

I no longer believe anything I read, certainly not in the likes of The Sun. And that includes "and" and "the", as someone once said about the writer Lillian Hellman. There is nothing anyone could write about BS (an interesting acronym, non?) that I would automatically believe. Some people have humungous amounts of sex, drugs and rock and roll with each other, paid companions, and the odd passing sheep. Others don’t. Members of either group may or may not be famous. Likewise, those who retire early to bed with a mug of cocoa.

Can I go now? I'm nodding off and smelling that cocoa.

Bisexuals I have met - Alan Freeman

So, here's a bisexual I did meet, disc jockey Alan "Fluff" Freeman, who died yesterday.
Of course, many of you readers will have no idea who he was, but to British teenagers in the 70s - and subsequently adults who liked his rock shows - his radio programmes were a highlight of the week.
"Greetings, pop pickers", he used to say on his Sunday night chart show Pick of the Pops. "Not 'Arf".

I had no idea he was bisexual until I read the Guardian obituary last night. Apparently, in 1994 he told a "shocked" breakfast TV programme host that he had been celibate since 1981, but before that was bisexual. According to a (non-bisexual) chat room I often frequent, AF was outed in Michael Palin's autobiography - although it sounds like no outing was necessary. Unfortunately, though, I have no idea what his bisexuality consisted of... Or am I just being nosy?
So how did I meet him? Well, I am using the term "meet" in a very loose kind of way, of course. I was working at the BBC (years and years ago) and I had to collect him from the lift and make sure he could walk the few steps down the corridor to some programme-making bod. He was gushingly friendly and, at that point, the campest man I had ever met, wearing some kind of tunic-thing over his velvet trousers. That goes to show what a very, very long time ago it must have been!

All right. Stay Bright. RIP Alan Freeman

Bisexuals I never met: Brenda Fassie

I'm not sure now whether or not South African pop star Brenda Fassie was still alive the first time I heard of her, but I remember very distinctly how I heard of her. It was an Arena documentary, re-broadcast on BBC4, all about her and her life, following her comeback and forthcoming wedding to Landile Shembe.
She was an amazing woman - endearing diva, yet down to earth woman; massive star living in what seemed to me an ordinary bungalow; a larger than life character possessed of an amazing voice. She was also openly bisexual, a taboo for many Black South Africans.
Dubbed "Madonna of the Townships" Brenda was born in 1964 in the Cape Flats township outside Cape Town, she started singing at the age of five. Her career proper started in the early 1980s, when she and her band The Dudes recorded their hit song Weekend Special. It's a brilliant piece of music - catchy, cheerful, get up and dance-worthy. Other greatest hits-style tunes followed shortly after.
If she had been American, she would have been world famous. South African singers, though, particularly of the Apartheid era, rarely made it outside of the continent and for a long time the only people who knew of her were Black South Africans, for whom she was a superstar.

A hard life
But her life was also very difficult, and not just because of the political situation. She became addicted to drugs, chose a selection of bad husbands and boyfriends and saw her career go down the toilet. Then, in 1995, her girlfriend Poppie Sihlahla was found dead of an overdose. Brenda, in a drug-induced haze, was lying next to her. This horror sent her into rehab.
But while she recorded some more great songs, now in the specifically South African Kweito genre - including one used by the ANC in their 1999 election campaign - the drug problems continued. As did her bad taste in men. Her teenage son Bongani begged her not to marry the last one. He turned out to be a conman only after her money.
In April 2004 she collapsed at home and slipped into a coma. Nelson and Winnie Mandela and Thabo Mbeki visited her in hospital when she was dying. Although people were initially told it was due to asthma, in fact it was a cocaine overdose; brain damage meant she never regained consciousness and she died in early May.

Her fans react
There was a massive outpouring of grief from all parts of Africa, as can be seen on this rather morbid death site. There's a good obituary here about her life and times.



But her music lives on. You can buy some of her albums here and of course, she has a myspace site where you can play some of her tracks. It's here.

I notice that one of her albums that I possess Memeza (Shout) - her big comeback album - is currently for sale on Amazon from £49.35. But I think I'll keep it thanks.

Bi-girls of the 20s

Bisexuals I never met, part two



I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment, Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet. He's writing about the British film industry from its beginnings to the 70s, and it's based on discussions with those very very elderly movie people still alive in the late 1990s/early 2000s, who talked to him about what it was like when they were young.

I started reading it really because I wanted to know about Nerina Shute.
In fact, I had intended to post at length about her, because she sounded so downright fascinating, but I think I've come to the end of what I can know about her - at least, without extensive research elsewhere or reading her entirely unavailable autobiography.
NS was Britain's first female film critic - starting in 1928 at the age of 19. She had a weekly film column as the studio correspondent of the biggest fan magazine. Perhaps leading writer on Heat would be today's equivalent. But she was also a very harsh and influential critic, known for being able to make or break a career. There's lots more about her in the link above - her obituary when she died in 2004.
She was also a fierce, passionate, amazing, bisexual - quite consciously so, none of this: oh it was so different then malarkey. "I'm bisexual, you see," she told Matthew Sweet. "Tell me, what do your generation think about such things?" When she came to London in the mid-1920s, she became part of a group of "ambisextrous social radicals", and proceeded to embark on a lifetime of marriages to men, and dalliances with women, to be rounded off with a long-term relationship with a female ballroom dancer that only ended when the dancer died.
NS's autobiography, Passionate Friendships, was only published in 1992 but the whole of the internet yields not one second-hand copy. A few years ago, I read her book We Mixed Our Drinks, published in 1945 but written about her youth in the 20s, and it seems like she toddled along from one club to another, a hotel here, a bar there, having a simply marvellous time. No mention of the sex though.

Gay's the Word
This book (the bits of it I've read so far) is quite fascinating. The utterly gay composer (of the song Gay's The Word) and film/musical comedy star Ivor Novello (who also appeared as a character in Gosford Park, played by Jeremy Northam) used to have a club in London's Wardour Street called the Fifty-Fifty - a direct allusion to the bisexuality of its clientele. The club also appeared under the name The Half-and-Half in the 1932 film The First Mrs Fraser. I remember seeing that - or perhaps just the relevant clip from it - and being pleasantly shocked by its overt gayness. I mean, men in white tie and tails quite openly dancing together...

My name is Tallulah
Then there was the uber-bad girl Tallulah Bankhead. Actress, dope fiend, drinker, "well-known for being a lesbian and immoral with men", who spent a lot of time in Britain that decade. Her quotes are legendary, for instance: "my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine". In fact, she's certainly known more these days for her wit and sexual exploits than anything she did on stage and screen.

Roaring 20s
Of course, many people know that the 1920s were jam-packed with same-sex sexual activity (among the upper-class bohemian set, I mean let's not get over-romantic here. Can I say the words "Bloomsbury Group"?) and lots of those people were also married. I remember reading Evelyn Waugh's diaries where he talks with irritation about sharing a ride home with two women and that he was fed up with them "lesbianising in the back of taxis"!
But there was also what seems to have been a dramatic increase in sexual activity in general among girls of all classes. Young women were allowed a great deal more freedom after the first world war - earning their living, wearing short skirts, cutting their hair, casting off their corsets, abandoning their chaperones. And, if you knew where to go, contraception in the form of the diaphragm. Both men and (particularly) women adopted a fashion and hair style that was, for the time, shockingly androgynous. Noel Coward's song Masculine Women and Feminine Men was about precisely that. And here's an amazing site called Queer Music Before Stonewall that includes it.




Well, that's the British film industry. Female bisexuality of the time in Hollywood sounds much, much more frenetic. If Marlene Dietrich had sex with half as many people as it's made out she did, I can't imagine she'd have had time to make any films whatsoever!

Bi-stars

So, singer Nelly Furtado is bi. (See <http://tinyurl.co.uk/lmlm> which was posted on the Bimedia yahoo group by the ever-efficient Grant Denkinson). Thinks women are beautiful and sexy. Believes everyone is really bisexual and loves hanging out with her gay friends. And that experimentation is a part of human history.
Whoopee-doo.
These days, it seems almost mandatory for female stars to talk about how much they like girls. But has anyone ever seen one with an actual girlfriend? Or even talking about a woman they fell in love with x years ago who was so important to them?
Hello... I don't think I hear many voices calling.
Rebecca Loos has many faults, no doubt, but at the very least she was a proper bisexual, not bi-lite. She had real relationships with women, lived with at least one. Anne Heche was deeply and publically involved with Ellen DeGeneres in between boyfriends. Madonna may or may not have been involved with Sandra Bernhardt but they were "linked"... about 15 years ago.
Any more? Do let me know.

Just one look
Is it any more than an easy popularity ploy for female celebrities to imply that they find women attractive? Such celebs are exotic, interesting but still pretty safe and always always conventionally feminine. After all, women don't seem to mind it, men are presumed to enjoy it, and the queer community can claim another star on their side. And the celebrities - they sell more of whatever commodity they are trying to sell. That hint of bi shifts units.
When this celebrity-bi stuff first appeared, I was pleased. I thought that the more publicity about bisexuality there was, the better. That simply discussing the issue, getting it out in the open, increasing visibility - as we used to say - was an end in itself and would benefit all of us.
Now, I'm more than a little peeved. This kind of "straight-bi" confession is what many people think bisexuality IS. And for some, their bisexuality is like that. But when there is only one view of bisexuality that ever appears in the press, it just seems to me like oppression under another guise. That how my sexuality - for instance - is and has been is as hidden as ever. It certainly doesn't help bi women who want to be taken seriously by lesbians.
And let's not even get started about bisexual men. Bi celebrity boys? In your dreams. Anyway, that's a whole other rant!