What A Bisexual Letter Of Recommendation Can Look Like: Lynnette McFadzen for Equality March for Unity & Pride

Somewhere out there, bisexual organizers are still hoping against hope to be included in the organizing for the new National LGBT Pride March. May the Lord Goddess bless and keep them!

One of my favs, Lynnette McFadzen, both a friend and colleague, asked for a letter of recommendation and this is what I came up with and just sent along.

Here's hoping that bi+ organizers organizing for bi+ communities also get tapped to be part of the organizing team! Feel free to use a template like this below for your own bisexual letters of recommendation! I honestly just copied Lynnette's approach when she submitted her own letter of recommendation for longtime bi advocate and new BiNet USA board member Ron Suresha.

What can I say? Bisexuals love to share!

XOXO,

Faith

Dear David Bruinooge and Members of Equality March Leadership,

I would like to strongly recommend Lynnette McFadzen, new President of BiNet USA and creator/producer of The BiCast as a National Co-Chair of The Equality March for Unity & Pride.  One of the strongest and openly active bi advocates in the country today, Lynnette first came to prominence in the bisexual, pansexual, fluid, queer (bi+) community when she began The BiCast, the first podcast for the bi+ community.  Visit the archives here. https://archive.org/details/@the_bicast

In the last 4 years, Lynnette McFadzen, has put nearly 200 interviews onto iTunes covering topics from A-Z of the bisexual community inluding critically important interviews with bi thought leaders and celebrities like gender/sexuality expert Robyn Ochs, Korean-American comic and advocate Margaret Cho, bi trans icon Julia Serano, BiNet USA co-founders Lani Ka’ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins and me!

In the last 3 years, Lynnette helped me organize 3 different conferences and meetings at President Barak Obama’s White House including the 2016 Rural LGBT America Summit at the White House, the 2016 Bisexual Community Briefing at the White House, and the 2015 Bisexual Community Briefing at the White House.

In the last 2 years, Lynnette has also co-organized several high profile events for bi and LGBT communities including day long institutes for the Task Force’s Creating Change conference and BiNet USA’s panel at the 2016 Comic Con in San Diego, CA which was called one of the most affirming moments of Comic Con by BleedingCool.com, one of the comic industries biggest blogs. Last year, Lynnette was also instrumental in generating over 200 million impressions for #biweek and bisexuality related social media content working alongside GLAAD and other LGBT organizations on Bisexual Awareness Week, a social media event I co-created that’s led to an inspiring amount of new bisexual activists just like Lynnette.

In any portion of the LGBTQIA community, I have found our newest members to be the most active, but what truly makes Lynnette a legend in the making, is how much she’s gotten done while also being a disabled bisexual demisexual asexual elder who lives below the poverty line. BiNet USA has proposed 2 different co-chairs to you from our organization and I urge you to consider all applications from bi+ organizers working for bi+ communities with the care and respect they have long deserved, and have yet to find, from national LGBT Pride Marches. Change must start with someone, so let it be you David!

Best,Faith Cheltenham

Something New Every Day: June Jordan, Bisexual Boundary Crosser

June Jordan

"[I]f I am not free and if I am not entitled equal to heterosexuals and homosexuals then homosexual men and women have joined with the dominant heterosexual culture in the tyrannical pursuit of E Pluribus Unum and I a bisexual woman committed to cultural pluralism and, therefore to sexual pluralism, can only say, you better watch your back!" - June Jordan, On Bisexuality and Cultural Pluralism, in AFFIRMATIVE ACTS

Like June Jordan, I am of West-Indian/African descent and bisexual!  According to this great SheWired article, 

"Jordan derived her bisexual and  biracial perspectives from having  transgressed two more societal boundaries --an interracial marriage with a white man, and having given birth to a biracial child, both scoffed at during her time by blacks and whites  in this country. But it is Jordan’s “boundary crossings” that gave her the intellectual breath on an issue, and by extension she gave us a new way to see ourselves and the world."

 And in this amazing piece by the Rev. Irene Munroe, she explains why we all have to work hard to remember Jordan's legacy because like too many others her legacy can fall within the cracks of identity politics.  Munroe states,

"Within lesbian circles, the place of bisexual women within the queer women's community was often marginal, if not non-existent, and their commitment to feminism was always suspect. Many lesbians believed that any women who had the ability to sexually love another women had a political obligation to identify as lesbian. Others believed that the compulsory nature of heterosexuality in our culture precluded all possibilities of women freely choosing a heterosexual relationship."

That's a sentiment I've heard but rejected my whole life, just because I can love a woman (or a man) doesn't means I have to.  My body is mine and belongs to me; the freedom of my bisexuality is the ability to define love within my own heart, instead of someone else's.

Munroe goes on to speak about destiny in a way I found encouraging and uplifting,

"Bisexuals are individuals who transgress the artificial socially constructed boundary of gender identity as well as the biologically constructed boundary of sex. Called "gatekeepers" by the Dagara of West Africa and "Two Spirit" by many Native Americans, bisexuals in these cultures were seen as having a special spiritual inheritance and earthly destiny."

Never have I heard so well put the calling I hear in my heart!  Many thanks to Heron Greensmith's work* which turned me onto June Jordan.  It was time, and I was ready :)

*Read Heron's blog and then check out her paper, "DRAWING BISEXUALITY BACK INTO THE PICTURE: HOW BISEXUALITY FITS INTO LGBT LEGAL STRATEGY TEN YEARS AFTER BISEXUAL ERASURE"