Bi Groups at Pride Events: Inquiry

[Sensuallovers2]

Hi, everyone:

Yesterday (Aug. 2) was the annual Pride parade in Vancouver, BC Canada, which we attended and thoroughly enjoyed. We've placed some pictures from the event on a new Flickr group that we started:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/pride__2009/

Which brings me to a question for the rest of you: If your city has an annual pride event (parade or otherwise), are there any bisexual organizations that participate and make themselves visible during the events? It's disappointing that despite the more than 600,000 people who attend Pride Vancouver each year, there are no bisexual organizations represented or participating.

We'd love to hear from others, to see if this is a common trend...

[Doggiestyle]

I go to the Atlanta GA pride event ever year (since 96 I think) and they always mention bisexual, and have a booth set up there. But they are a small presence there. Thats all! I clicked on the website to view the pics you were talkin about, but cannot unless I join the "flicker group" website. So I became dis-interested and clicked it off.

Your friend, :doggie: .........:bipride:

[-Dyva-]

Hiya! I'm a member of the collective who organise my local Pride (Norwich, UK). We had our first ever Pride just over a week ago. It was much, much smaller than yours - Norwich is a small-to-mid-sized city in a largely rural area - but for a first year, it was brilliant, and we exceeded our wildest expectations. However, there was no bi visibility whatsoever, so over the next year I'm planning to do a few bi-focused events and hopefully have more of a bi presence at Pride next year. For one, I'm gonna prod our merchandising guru into getting some bi (and trans, for that matter) flags, and I'd like to have a spokesperson from a bisexual organisation give a speech following the parade (this year we had speeches from spokespersons for the major political parties, Stonewall and The Justin Campaign, among others). If anyone has any more ideas, let me know - I've never done this before!

BTW, Vancouver is one of my favourite places in the world, and I must get over for Pride sometime. Sounds amazing.

[softfruit]

My city's Pride - bis are visible there on the parade and with a stall in the community fair area most years excepting when it clashes with BiCon, which is the big UK bi gathering and most people involved in "doing bi stuff" would rather go to that.

The bottom line is it needs there to be a functioning local bi group or organisation, and those are still too few and far between. Is there one in Vancouver?

In the UK we have bi presences at Prides most places where there are local bi groups such as BiPhoria - but that means just at Scotia, Manchester, Brighton, London, Birmingham and a couple of other Prides out of over 30 Pride festivals a year.

Everywhere else, it's either about getting people from out of town to come in on 'outreach work' to get the bi visibility to happen, or the locals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and getting something bi happening down their way.

[bearisbare]

In Toronto, there has been a bisexual presence at Pride since 1990. It's a full-weekend event with the Pride Parade on the Sunday and the Dyke March on the Saturday.

A community fair happens on both days and Toronto Bisexual Network always has a table where you can find information on the group as well as women's and men's bi discussion/social groups. You can also pick up buttons, keychains, magnets and more. Bisexual Women of Toronto takes part in the Dyke March and Toronto Bisexual Network is in the Sunday parade. This year is the 20th anniversary of TBN and to mark it, there was a float in the parade and we had about 30 people take part. The theme was "Much More Than A Phase".

Btw, Vancouver's bi community was much stronger in the early part of the decade. Back then, there was a group called BiNetBC that took part in Pride and also hosted a large bisexual conference in 2001. It no longer exists. There is a bi women's group that continues to meet, but as I understand, they do not get involved in Vancouver Pride.