memevector (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
memevector) wrote2003-06-22 10:45 pm
memevector) wrote2003-06-22 10:45 pm
Leicester Pride
At Leicester Pride yesterday. Lovely weather. Enjoyed being on the stall.
Seemed like compared to last year there were more people at the festival as a whole, though perhaps not any more walking through the community tent. This year, that and the stalls were to one side of the site. Apparently some of the stallholders grumbled that not as many people had come and had a look. But even if that were true, I thought it was much better, because you could actually hold a conversation at a reasonable volume at the stall, whereas last year we were in line with the main stage speakers and it was really loud and boomy.
I was on the stall most of the time, but I did take a few wanders round, and heard the later part of Peter Tatchell's speech from the main stage. He was talking about the new Sexual Offences bill. Apparently if it goes through as presently drafted, it will be criminal to have sex with an educationally disabled person (not sure if that was the terminology he used), criminal for under-16s to have sex with each other regardless of consent, and criminal to support (I think the term might have been "aid and abet") under-16s in having sex with each other. Uh-oh.
I also had some excellent chats with various people, both from other stalls and visiting ours, which might lead on to other interesting things later. By a strange coincidence, it turned out that the person running the Stonewall stall was someone I'd met for about half an hour back in 1997 when they came to look at a room in my house! (They'd wanted to move in, but circumstantial reasons of theirs meant they couldn't in the end.)
One of the aspects of doing the stall that I really like is observing how people respond to the badge words. I often notice what they smile at and what they comment on to their friends. One thing that struck me yesterday was people's reactions to the "fat & gorgeous" badge. For a lot of people it's the first one they mention and they'll go to their friends either "That's me" or "That's you". Lots (maybe most) of them aren't even noticeably fat - I think it's indicative of how much space that whole "body shape" discourse takes up in people's heads. When you poke it a little bit with something contrary to the default culture, there seems to be something compelling about the dissonance, like it can't go unremarked.
Another thing that I noticed yesterday was about the police. Five or six different police people came by the stall during the course of the afternoon, and all of them chatted in a friendly way. There was something about that which felt really different, to me, from how I remember police people being at Pride. My vibes about them in the past is more like "they tolerantly look upon us but they don't get involved". Like Pride is nothing to do with them, and they're only there to make sure that nothing gets out of hand. Whereas yesterday it was much more like "We're really pleased to be around this excellent diversity, and we're part of it". And much more like they were there "as themselves".
Aside from my interactions with the individual police people, they had a "recruitment" portakabin there - and that in itself struck me like "you wouldn't have seen that ten years ago".
Last year I went to this discussion day by the Department of Health about the state of LGBT inclusion in health care. One of the people there was a police person with a "diversity implementation" job, who made some very interesting contributions to the discussion. Apparently after the Stephen Lawrence enquiry there was this big long report with lots of recommendations for the police (the number that sticks in my mind is 70, though I could be misremembering). And they were quite major stuff, so that it would take several years to fully implement them, so even now I don't think they've necessarily all kicked in yet.
Obviously that story was very usefully relevant to the discussion about the NHS, because the question of "how do you deal with institutional prejudice" can be mapped from one to the other. But it came to mind again yesterday, because yesterday I began to actually experience a sense of "something has changed" with the police. I began to get a sense that the changes they were strategising for there might actually be happening.
I wouldn't necessarily generalise from "Police people who volunteer / are selected to work at Pride" to "all police people everywhere". But still I feel optimistic.
There were plenty of us doing the stall for most of the day.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cujosmurf came by and offered to take a turn and I don't think it ever happened - we were all so contented sitting there that no-one specially wanted to be replaced! Thanks especially to E & J for arriving early, and to Grant & Elizabeth for taking a turn towards the end when the others had gone.
As we hadn't been able to get hold of BiCon & BCN resources, I had boshed off some A5 leaflets the night before, with "Five ways to be supportive of someone coming out as bi" on one side and some listings on the other. So at least people did get to find out that BCN and BiCon exist. (There was supposed to be some BCN stuff coming fromkerrykat, but it hadn't arrived at E&J's place - presumably still in the post somewhere.)
Using the "5 ways" text, and having the flyers displayed with that side up, was an expression of my "make it safe for the scared people" stall design principle, because it implies that one could be picking up the flyer to support a friend rather than necessarily outing oneself as bi. I've written about this before (in an article for BCN a few years ago which may or may not have made it onto the web by now). For the same reason, the banner reads "Assume nothing" rather than "Bi stuff over here, hey look, everyone standing at this stall is probably bi" ::haha::
A nice moment wascujosmurf's twins being allowed to choose a badge each and both of them picking, as they described it, "Love add love equals love". I'd been thinking of polyamory when I originally came up with that one, but somehow their twinliness seemed like an oblique and beautiful expression of the words.
Seemed like compared to last year there were more people at the festival as a whole, though perhaps not any more walking through the community tent. This year, that and the stalls were to one side of the site. Apparently some of the stallholders grumbled that not as many people had come and had a look. But even if that were true, I thought it was much better, because you could actually hold a conversation at a reasonable volume at the stall, whereas last year we were in line with the main stage speakers and it was really loud and boomy.
I was on the stall most of the time, but I did take a few wanders round, and heard the later part of Peter Tatchell's speech from the main stage. He was talking about the new Sexual Offences bill. Apparently if it goes through as presently drafted, it will be criminal to have sex with an educationally disabled person (not sure if that was the terminology he used), criminal for under-16s to have sex with each other regardless of consent, and criminal to support (I think the term might have been "aid and abet") under-16s in having sex with each other. Uh-oh.
I also had some excellent chats with various people, both from other stalls and visiting ours, which might lead on to other interesting things later. By a strange coincidence, it turned out that the person running the Stonewall stall was someone I'd met for about half an hour back in 1997 when they came to look at a room in my house! (They'd wanted to move in, but circumstantial reasons of theirs meant they couldn't in the end.)
One of the aspects of doing the stall that I really like is observing how people respond to the badge words. I often notice what they smile at and what they comment on to their friends. One thing that struck me yesterday was people's reactions to the "fat & gorgeous" badge. For a lot of people it's the first one they mention and they'll go to their friends either "That's me" or "That's you". Lots (maybe most) of them aren't even noticeably fat - I think it's indicative of how much space that whole "body shape" discourse takes up in people's heads. When you poke it a little bit with something contrary to the default culture, there seems to be something compelling about the dissonance, like it can't go unremarked.
Another thing that I noticed yesterday was about the police. Five or six different police people came by the stall during the course of the afternoon, and all of them chatted in a friendly way. There was something about that which felt really different, to me, from how I remember police people being at Pride. My vibes about them in the past is more like "they tolerantly look upon us but they don't get involved". Like Pride is nothing to do with them, and they're only there to make sure that nothing gets out of hand. Whereas yesterday it was much more like "We're really pleased to be around this excellent diversity, and we're part of it". And much more like they were there "as themselves".
Aside from my interactions with the individual police people, they had a "recruitment" portakabin there - and that in itself struck me like "you wouldn't have seen that ten years ago".
Last year I went to this discussion day by the Department of Health about the state of LGBT inclusion in health care. One of the people there was a police person with a "diversity implementation" job, who made some very interesting contributions to the discussion. Apparently after the Stephen Lawrence enquiry there was this big long report with lots of recommendations for the police (the number that sticks in my mind is 70, though I could be misremembering). And they were quite major stuff, so that it would take several years to fully implement them, so even now I don't think they've necessarily all kicked in yet.
Obviously that story was very usefully relevant to the discussion about the NHS, because the question of "how do you deal with institutional prejudice" can be mapped from one to the other. But it came to mind again yesterday, because yesterday I began to actually experience a sense of "something has changed" with the police. I began to get a sense that the changes they were strategising for there might actually be happening.
I wouldn't necessarily generalise from "Police people who volunteer / are selected to work at Pride" to "all police people everywhere". But still I feel optimistic.
There were plenty of us doing the stall for most of the day.
cujosmurf came by and offered to take a turn and I don't think it ever happened - we were all so contented sitting there that no-one specially wanted to be replaced! Thanks especially to E & J for arriving early, and to Grant & Elizabeth for taking a turn towards the end when the others had gone.As we hadn't been able to get hold of BiCon & BCN resources, I had boshed off some A5 leaflets the night before, with "Five ways to be supportive of someone coming out as bi" on one side and some listings on the other. So at least people did get to find out that BCN and BiCon exist. (There was supposed to be some BCN stuff coming from
kerrykat, but it hadn't arrived at E&J's place - presumably still in the post somewhere.)Using the "5 ways" text, and having the flyers displayed with that side up, was an expression of my "make it safe for the scared people" stall design principle, because it implies that one could be picking up the flyer to support a friend rather than necessarily outing oneself as bi. I've written about this before (in an article for BCN a few years ago which may or may not have made it onto the web by now). For the same reason, the banner reads "Assume nothing" rather than "Bi stuff over here, hey look, everyone standing at this stall is probably bi" ::haha::
A nice moment was
cujosmurf's twins being allowed to choose a badge each and both of them picking, as they described it, "Love add love equals love". I'd been thinking of polyamory when I originally came up with that one, but somehow their twinliness seemed like an oblique and beautiful expression of the words.
no subject
It didn't happen, unfortunately. Not because I didn't want to, but by the time Steve and Rob turned up offering to take a turn at looking after the girls for me, the twins were getting really scratchy and tired and were bickering, and we all decided it was probably time to go.
A nice moment was cujosmurf's twins being allowed to choose a badge each and both of them picking, as they described it, "Love add love equals love".
An even funnier moment, for me, was when Jeni pointed at a badge saying "Queer As Fuck" and loudly asked what it said... your face was a picture! *grin*
We all had a great day though. I'm so glad we went along. I nearly chickened out of going, as it would mean taking all the girls, but I am so pleased that I did take them, they had such a happy time. :-)
no subject
Some people from the BiCon committee have been trying to contact you for a while now, but attempts to email you have failed (bounced), and this may also be why you've not been aware of attempts to reach you through comments to this livejournal.
I think it's great you managed to get some material together of your own, but IMO slightly disingenous to imply that the lack of BiCon material was their fault (especially when so much is available online at http://www.bicon2003.org.uk/promote_bicon.shtml ).
no subject
I think it's great you managed to get some material together of your own, but IMO slightly disingenous to imply that the lack of BiCon material was their fault
You think "hadn't been able to" is a way of implying fault?
Suggest a rephrase if you like.
"ingenuous": frank: honourable: free from deception.
"disingenuous": not ingenuous: not frank or open: crafty.
Wanna take that back?
(especially when so much is available online at http://www.bicon2003.org.uk/promote_bicon.shtml ).
Fair point. As you know, it was postcard flyers we wanted for the stall, but yeah, I could have got the press release and booking form and printed a few out. Never thought of that at the time. Still, everyone who took a leaflet got the BiCon web address to be going on with.