helen-louise's journal

Happy Bi Visibility Day to all the bisexuals, pansexuals, & bi/panromantic asexuals here!


I kinda slept through it in the UK but it's still going in North America and timezones to the west!

Who's going to Brighton Pride this year?

I haven't decided what to do about it yet because they're charging this year for the first time. It costs £12.50 for adults living outside Sussex, if you buy the ticket in advance. There's no concessions whatsoever, so if you're a disabled person who needs a carer, that's £25 up front. I don't need a carer, as such, but I need someone to push my wheelchair when it gets stuck in a hole. Hrm.

Pride for me is about two things: 1) watching the parade, 2) seeing my friends. I don't care about the other paraphenalia. It's fun to see lots of queer people all dressed up, but you can do that in Brighton on a normal day. I'm not sure if I want to spend quite a lot of money just for the privilege of sitting in the park being deafened by music that I don't like - when it costs nothing to stand or sit on the pavement to watch the parade.

Does anyone know to what extent the ticket income is expected to fund the park event itself, and to what extent the income will be fed back into the community as donations to help run events that I do want to go to? Like quiet Pride events associated with queer books, and money being given upfront to run Brighton BiFest?

If I knew for a fact that £2 of my donation was going to pay for toilets, £2 for policing and other essential services, with £4.50 going to be fed straight back to community events, and it was only £4 that was going to pay for the bloody noisy sound systems - that'd make a big difference to my desire to pay the money; compared with a situation where it's £10 for the noise, £1 for toilets, £1 for policing and 50p going back into the community...

Birkbeck Students' Union is having an election right now. Not that you'd know it if you didn't keep your eyes open. Unlike Imperial College Union elections, where you'd see posters up all over college, this one is strangely understated. Possibly due to the lack of noticeboards that students are allowed to put things up on? It's really different from the experience of walking down the Sherfield Walkway and being bombarded with election propaganda, that's for sure. The election started on Monday, I voted on Thursday, and got ballot paper number 75.

Bizarrely, one of my old friends from the Royal College of Science Union is one of the current sabbatical officers in Birkbeck SU. I still haven't spent enough time with him to know how he ended up studying there - the last thing I'd heard of him was that, having failed the second year at Imperial twice, he went to Queen Mary & Westfield, got a first in chemistry, and successfully completed a PhD. I'm not quite sure why he then decided to go to Birkbeck and study, er, law I think he said it was. I bumped into him after voting and commented on the fact that this election looks like it's going to be even less quorate than the RCSU elections used to be, and he said that the most people that have ever voted were 400. Four hundred people voting for sabbatical officers! That's just...

Anyway, one of the people standing had in her manifesto that she "identifies as bisexual, polyamorous and queer". So I voted for her. Not that having sexuality in common necessarily means that you'll get on with someone or they'll do a good job (witness the various trolls and idiots on, say, alt.polyamory, soc.bi, polyamory andbisexual), but I'm really rather pleased to live in a world where someone can declare that in their election manifesto. I remember when I was 21 and thought I was one of only about 20 polyamorous people in the country. Now there are so many of us that I don't even know them all!

And now for something slightly cheerier. Who's going to Brighton Pride tomorrow?

I am feeling sufficiently blah that I haven't decided if I'm going to stay with Ludy tonight, or get an obnoxiously early train down in the morning. I plan to go straight to Preston Park to watch the parade come in, then go into Brighton for lunch afterwards.

Is there a specific train that London bi folk will be on?

[crossposted to londonpolybis]