Berkeley Recognizes Bisexual Pride Day

Yesterday the city council of Berkeley designated September 23rd as Bisexual Pride Day, becoming the first city to make such a proclamation.

Councilman Kriss Worthington introduced the resolution, telling his colleagues ahead of Tuesday night’s meeting that it was important for the city to support an occasion “conceived as a response to the prejudice and marginalization of the bisexual persons by some in both the straight and greater LGBT communities.” “Increasing bisexual visibility is a way of saying, yes, they do exist, and they deserve our support and acceptance,” Worthington said. Some bisexuals nevertheless say they feel overlooked or misunderstood, frequently finding themselves portrayed in popular culture as the punch lines of jokes or pathological. And while bisexuals are part of the acronym that makes up the LGBT rainbow, some activists protest that gays are some of their harshest critics. “They think we have ‘straight privilege,’ and we hide in that,” Martin Rawlings-Fein, a director of the Bay Area Bisexual Network, told the Chronicle. “We get pushed to the side in the LGBT community and told we don’t exist, that we’re actually gay or lesbian and just not totally ‘out.'”