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Calling All Bisexual Role Models: What Bi People Can Do to Help Heal US Wounds

It is the latest summer of America’s discontent: Despite the wonder and glory of the upbeat London Olympics, 2012 is proving to be a horrific year of fires, droughts, mass shootings, hostility, and inflammatory rhetoric …

So it is up to all of us out here, the 99 percenters, to show leadership ourselves and set our own examples of compassion and civility. Bisexual people are accustomed to having to be our own leaders and our own role models, so we’ll try to help get this ball rolling again. You see, even though Celebrate Bisexuality Day — aka Celebrate Bi Visi-BI-lity Day — is still over a month away (September 23), bisexual people continue to have trouble finding role models, because media outlets and other community forums insist on keeping us invisible, essentially erasing our identities and our very being … So, in such a climate of intolerance, suppression, and denial, bisexual people have had to find our own ways to come out, be out, stay out, and be role models of equanimity. We need to take those “lessons learned” and apply them to the broader world.
Garry North is a longtime journalist who founded the first US national bisexual newsletter back in 1987-8, helped co-found BiNet USA (and served several times as an officer, including president, VP, secretary and treasurer, plus task force member), and led the organizing of the first Bisexual/non-Monosexual Leadership Institute at Creating Change.

He is in the process of editing/rewriting “The Book of Taun,” about the life and AIDS-related death of his husband in 1993.

He lives with his wife of 13 years in the greater Los Angeles region, loves his eight grandchildren (thanks to his wife’s three grown children), and still keeps in touch with his late husband’s many relatives. He’s also a former president of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild (now the Southern California Media Guild), which merged with CWA 9400/AFL-CIO, and he remains active in various other labor/societal causes.