Last week rural soap Emmerdale broke an unwritten rule of primetime storytelling: you don’t say bisexual. Robron fan Charlie tells us what else they’re getting right.
Finding an on-screen bisexual is about ten times harder than finding one in real life. This is because films and TV shows seem to have an obsession with alternating a character’s sexuality depending on who they are with at that current moment – especially in soap operas. ITV soap Emmerdale, has been no stranger to this trend.
Ali, who was on the show last year with her partner Ruby, was the butt of many lesbian jokes as she left her husband to be with her new girlfriend, yet it was never explored whether she was bisexual or gay. Earlier this year, a plotline involving Lawrence’s old lover returning did nothing but create confusion regarding his sexuality, since he had been in… Continue reading
Here’s a round-up of some of the news, blogs posts and comment we missed this week.
Last weekend, Biscuit’s editor-in-chief Lottie was privileged enough to join a panel of inspiring lesbian and bisexual woman at the Lesbian and Gay Foundation’s Sugar and Spice event. One of these was Nigerian Aderonke Apata, who is fighting to stay in the country in light of a Home Office ruling that she cannot be a lesbian because she has children and has been in heterosexual relationships.
Apata appeared in the High Court last week to challenge the Home Office’s decision to refuse her asylum. During the hearing, Home Secretary barrister Andrew Bird insisted that she was simply someone who had “indulged in same-sex activity”. “You can’t be a heterosexual one day and a lesbian the next day,” he asserted.”Just as you can’t change your race.” Apata was told that the results of her appeal would arrive at the end of the month. Outside the court, Apata fell into the arms of her wife-to-be, Happiness Agboro.
Apata’s story is a harrowing one. When Apata’s family found out she had a female partner, they dragged her to a Sharia court to be stoned for adultery. A “legal technicality” gave her the time she needed to flee to England. After she left, her female partner of 20 years was killed by vigilantes.
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It’s official! A new online survey of 1,000 British women reveals a startlingly open-minded attitude to same sex relationships.
Conducted by your friends at Biscuit, we recruited a random sample of women via Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, asking them to choose which of 15 statements most closely described their sexuality.
While similar surveys ask respondents to identify themselves as ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bi’ (and sometimes ‘asexual’), Biscuit’s study reflects an increasingly accepted understanding that sexuality falls along a much more specific spectrum.
The study differentiated between behaviour and fantasy, revealing that 26.5% of women are fully bisexual, although some of this group did express a preference for one gender or another. However, the figure rises to 38% when taking into account straight women who have occasionally had sexual contact with a same-sex partner and gay women who have sometimes had sex with men.
The completely anonymous questionnaire did report a… Continue reading
Janis Hetherington was the first UK woman in an openly same-sex couple to be artificially inseminated… In this, the second part of her exclusive autobiographical series for Biscuit, Janis discusses the conception of her son.
Despite the amazing consequences of a decision my lover Judy and I made in September 1970 – for me to conceive a child by artificial insemination – in our household it wasn’t an earth shattering moment and didn’t seem like such a big deal. She already had a six-year-old daughter (although not the product of her estranged marriage) and I had been discussing AI for years with doctor friends and lawyers who made up the guest lists of the notoriously naughty parties I was famous for in the late 60s.
Although well known for my lesbian relationships I had been living with an infamous lawyer (his… Continue reading
Janis Hetherington tells Biscuit all about her explicit new book, Love Lies Bleeding: Memoirs of a sexual revolutionary
Love Lies Bleeding is a graphic sexual voyage. It explores in detail, sometimes brutally, the journey of a female who was aware at a very early age of her sadomasochistic and lesbian tendencies.
It has upset many people that I began the saga by detailing fantasies I had at the age of four. It is not the story of a victim and has therefore been subjected to some vitriol by those who mistakenly feel I condone child molestation and encourage self-harm. What I try to achieve is an understanding of the process I went through to obtain sexual gratification.
I was also the first lesbian to have openly declared that I was artificially inseminated, 42 years ago. When I bore a son, my late female lover was… Continue reading
Giving Up Men is a Slippery Slope
Our Ed Libby thinks they’re missing one vital point.
Since the Gay Liberation movement first found its feet way back in the 1970s it has been asking bi women to call themselves lesbian, seek only relationships with women, and generally refuse to acknowledge their attraction to anyone else. It was, we were told, not fair to muddy the waters with multi-gender attraction. Better to stick to one and make things easy. It was an act of solidarity, they said. Attraction to one gender is just easier for people to understand. After all, weren’t we all working towards the same goal?
Similarly within the feminist movement, both bi- and heterosexuality were, in some quarters, roundly… Continue reading →