By Warren J. Blumenfeld
Social movements often evolve through a developmental process. Well, at least successful movements do. The same applies to organizations within movements.
We can visualize social movements and the organizations within them as an ascending staircase. From the ground level, we take a step up and forward. As we rise to the next step, and the next, and the next, we find ourselves at qualitatively different levels from where we were at each of the previous steps. We continue this procedure until the movement or the organization has outlived its function or fails to remain unified. This sometimes occurs from overpowering resistance or backlash coming from the outside. At times, it comes from irreconcilable divisions from within.
I have read, I have discussed, and I have learned that all of the multiple forms of oppression are inextricably connected. I heard the words of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. when he declared that “no one is free until we are all free.” And I have always been struck by Pastor Martin Niemöller’s cautionary poem “First They Came,” ending with “Then they came for me / And there was no one left / To speak out for me.”
I understood that the German Nazis never distinguished between gay and bisexual males; never rankied them as Nazi soldiers pinned pink triangles on their garments in the concentration camps.
From my understanding of the Jewish Holocaust, I connected and attempted to apply what I knew to learning as much as I could about the specific plight of bisexual people in the United States. I again read, I discussed with my bisexual friends, and I learned the forms that biphobia took: the epithets and stereotypes, the marginalization, the violence—yes violence—psychological and physical coming from straight people and from gay and lesbian people.
Throughout the 1980s, bisexual people were villainized falsely in the media and in the minds of many heterosexuals as so-called contaminators or vectors of HIV/AIDS from the gay community to the straight community. Many gay and lesbian people refused to date bisexuals, often considering them as “traitors” and as “sexually confused,” and some Pride March organizers refused to allow them to participate with any visible signage announcing their bisexual activism.
For example, despite the fact that bisexual people had been involved in the planning and implementation of the Pride March in Northampton, Massachusetts, for years, controversy arose in the late 1980s and early 1990 when organizers added “Bisexual” to the “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual March” in 1989.
Tensions arose as some lesbian activists asserted that adding “Bisexual” to the event’s title would marginalize or relegate their own issues to the sidelines. For the next two years, organizers deleted “Bisexual” from the name. Bisexual activists resigned from the organizing committee and bisexual community members called for a boycott of the March, saying they felt erased and relegated to invisibility.
As social movements and organizations are affected by the times in which they exist, the times are also affected by those movements and organizations in a kind of synergistic dance. And so it was and continues to be for what today is known as the LGBTQ+ movement and for SpeakOut: An LGBTQ+ Speakers Bureau of Boston, Massachusetts.
SpeakOut: An LGBTQ+ Speakers Bureau of Boston:
What has become known as SpeakOut: An LGBTQ+ Speakers Bureau (the Bureau) has been operating almost continuously under varying names since February 1972. It is the oldest LGBTQ+ speakers bureau in the United States.
It developed as an outgrowth of two organizations in the Boston area: the Daughters of Bilitis, serving the needs of lesbians, and the Homophile Union of Boston, an organization of gay men. Before 1972, each of these organizations included small speakers bureaus for the purpose of educating the public about their lives and experiences. On occasion, when a professor or community organization requested to hear the stories of both a lesbian and a gay man, the Daughters of Bilitis and the Homophile Union of Boston contacted one another and arranged to send a member of each group to the speaking engagement.
Over time, since the speaking functions of both groups could be more efficiently coordinated through one organization, representatives from each group connected to form the Gay Speakers Bureau.
I joined one year later in 1973 by attending the speaker training session at the Charles Street Meeting House at the lower end of Beacon Hill. There I learned about the format for speaking engagements and facilitated workshops and the Bureau’s mission, composed of four main goals. In summary:
Education: to teach people the truths about our lives and to eradicate the myths that contribute to misunderstanding and oppression.
Social Change: to help create a society free from homophobia and other forms of oppression.
Outreach: to reach out to other members of our community including those who are still struggling to affirm their identities.
Leadership: to build leadership in our community by training public speakers in ways that develop their self esteem and confidence.
Within a year or two after joining the Bureau, I spoke at several engagements in high school and college classes and at community organizations such as the Rotary Club. I became involved in the Coordinating Committee where I helped to plan training sessions. Soon thereafter, I was elected as an officer. The Coordinating Committee passed a resolution, which we brought to our members in our monthly newsletter that, at the next two in-person monthly Bureau meetings, we would discuss whether we would like to add the word “Lesbian” to our name. The resolution passed almost unanimously, and we became the Gay and Lesbian Speakers Bureau of Boston in 1982.
For several years, I served as the unpaid Coordinator. This was before the advent of social media, the internet, email, Skype, and Zoom. I had the Bureau phone installed in my small Cambridge apartment. When I received a request for a speaker, I attempted to match the backgrounds and experiences of our trained speakers with the needs of the host organization.
Meanwhile, in part because of the increasing visibility and political power of the feminist and gay/lesbian movements, bisexuals began to organize as a movement in the 1970s. For many reasons, neither the gay and lesbian rights movements nor mainstream political movements initially responded to the needs of bisexuals. In fact, some bisexuals felt compelled to hide their true identities due to the biphobia coming from these other movements.
At first, bisexual women organized in same-sex groups for support and consciousness-raising; bisexual men later followed their example, and mixed-gender groups were also formed. Over 450 people attended the first National Bisexual Conference in the United States held in San Francisco at Mission High School in 1990, hosted by BiPol, a bisexual political organizing committee out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
This was during a time in U.S. history largely before what we experience today as visible and above-ground transgender, intersex, asexual, intersectional LGBTQ+ movements; before most of us understood the meaning of “gender queer,” “non-binary,” “agender,” “polyamorous,” “pansexual,” and other postmodernist terminology; and before what many of us knew as “critical theory,” “gender theory,” “queer theory,” “trans politics,” and “queer studies” as taught and studied today in the academy and within social movements.
J. Jack Halberstam has coined the term “perverse presentism,” which means that in order to understand the true meanings and nature of historical events, we must not look back at history filtered through our contemporary lens of perception. Rather, we need to understand the social, political, economic, cultural, and so on, contexts in which these events occurred.
In my capacity as President of the Gay and Lesbian Speakers Bureau, I met with a few of our bisexual members and with other bisexual friends from the larger community sometime in 1989. I remember talking with my good friends Robyn Ochs, Laura Sachs, Woody Glenn, and Alan Hamilton about whether they felt we should introduce a motion to finally add “Bisexual” to the Bureau’s title and mission.
We were all excited about this change, but we also understood the forms of resistance this might engender since our members represented a microcosm of the greater gay and lesbian community and the biphobia that had been so apparent.
So, we decided on a strategy for a process leading to a vote by our members regarding whether we would initiate a name change. We crafted an announcement sent to our members and other supporters about the Coordinating Committee’s unanimous vote to place in front of our membership the possibility of updating our name change to provide bisexual people what they have worked tirelessly for and deserve.
In the announcement, we added that for the next two months, at our monthly Speakers Bureau meetings, we would conduct a speaking engagement with panels of bisexuals, some current members of the Bureau, and some invited guests from the local community. At those meetings, our panelists told their stories one by one, followed by questions from Bureau members and other interested participants.
People asked some good questions and were very respectful while maintaining direct honesty over their concerns. The following month, we continued this process for members who were unable to attend the first panel discussion.
Over the course of two months, Bureau members discussed with one another and with people in their communities to better understand the topics and reasons why including “Bisexual” in our title could be positive and empowering or limiting and diversionary to the Bureau and to the larger movement.
Bureau and community members contacted people on the Coordinating Committee to give their comments, some congratulatory and some highly critical. A few members wrote to us that they would resign from the Bureau if we changed the name. Some wrote that they would discontinue their financial support if the change were enacted.
When current Bureau members took a vote, the name change was approved by a substantial margin. In early 1990, we formally became The Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Speakers Bureau of Boston on all our official documents, and on our stationary. While bisexual people had always been a part of the Bureau, their contributions, creativity, and indomitable spirit were finally recognized.
While bisexual people still face difficulties in today’s communities, bisexual people and topics appear more fully welcomed into organizations and included within agenda items. Currently, unfortunately, some LGBTQ+ organizations are figuratively throwing trans people and topics under the bus. These organizations do not seem to understand that in mathematics, addition means adding rather than subtracting, that adding people and intersectional topics not only adds to our numbers in terms of people but also increases our strength and social power. Our work continues.
Warren J. Blumenfeld lives in Massachusetts in the U.S. and is the author and editor of many books and a long-time social justice activist.