Bi people organise too. So where is the night?

Bi Visibility Day is 23 September, and the usual way to mark it is a graphic in three colours and a sentence about how bi people are valid. We wanted to do something more useful than that, so we went and looked at what is actually happening — in our own directory, in the week the calendar says is Bisexual Awareness Week.

There are 130 upcoming events on Halo right now, across eleven cities in Spain. Twenty-nine of them fall inside that week. Not one is billed as a bi night, a bi meet-up, a bi anything. There is a lesbian tardeo in Madrid and a FLINTA speed-dating night in Barcelona and a queer book club in Sevilla, and all of them are real and specific and for somebody. The bi column is empty.

Nobody did this on purpose

That is the part worth saying before anything else, because the easy version of this article blames a scene that is mostly made of volunteers running things at a loss. The absence isn't a plot. It is what happens when a category is assumed to be covered by everything else.

Every queer space in the country will tell you, sincerely, that bi people are welcome. That is true and it is not the same as being organised for. A night is a set of decisions: who is on the flyer, what the music is, who is at the door, what the room implicitly assumes about who you came with and who you are going home with. "Everyone welcome" is a door policy. It is not a decision about any of that.

What bi people actually report about queer rooms

Ask around and the same two sentences come back. In straight rooms you are read as one thing. In gay and lesbian rooms you are read as the other, or as a tourist, or as someone on the way somewhere. The specific tiredness is not hostility — most people get very little outright hostility, and the ones who get it usually get it from strangers rather than from the scene. It is having to place yourself, out loud, at the start of every conversation, and the small maths of deciding whether to bother.

A room organised by bi people skips that. Not because it is more welcoming in some vague way — because the assumption at the door is different, and nobody has to spend the first twenty minutes correcting it.

What we are doing about the empty column

We could add a bi tag to the directory tomorrow and it would filter nothing, because the listings don't exist yet. A filter over an empty set is a worse experience than no filter: it tells a bi person, with data, that there is nothing here for them. So we are not going to ship that first.

What we are doing instead, in this order:

We are asking. If you run a bi or pan night, a bi meet-up, a reading group, a hike, a bar takeover, anything — in any of our cities or outside them — list it on Halo. It is free, it always will be for community events, and a human being reads every listing before it goes live. If you would rather we came to you, say so and we will.

We are going to count it publicly. The number in the first paragraph of this piece is zero. We will publish it again, with the same method, on Bi Visibility Day next year. A directory that says it serves a community should be willing to show its own gaps in a number that can go up or stay flat where everyone can see it.

We are not going to fabricate the middle. We could have built a "bi-friendly" list out of the events already here by guessing which ones qualify. Every one of those guesses would have been ours, not the organiser's, and the first bi person who turned up to a night we labelled on their behalf would have found out we were doing PR rather than listings.

And for the week itself

Bisexual Awareness Week runs 16–23 September. If you want somewhere to be, the twenty-nine events on Halo that week are open to you, and several of them — the book clubs, the film screenings, the tardeos — are the kind of room where you can talk to someone without a door policy in the middle of it. Go alone if you have to. That is the ordinary way people end up in a scene.

And if you finish the week thinking that the night you wanted didn't exist: that is the same sentence every organiser in this directory said once, right before they became one.