Bisexuality Visibility Day is Sept. 23, so this month is all about quintessential bisexual history rooted in the Midwest. In 1992, the inaugural Bisexual Empowerment Conference: A Uniting, Supportive Experience, or BECAUSE Conference, was hosted in Minneapolis. Gathering bisexual people for community building, education, and resource sharing was critical because of the ways that the broader gay and lesbian community has deprioritized the visibility of bisexual people. This inaugural conference was planned by a handful of community members in the Twin Cities, and they were uncertain how many people would show up. Incredibly, approximately 120 people showed up.

The success of the annual BECAUSE Conference led to the founding of the Bisexual Organizing Project (BOP), a non-profit that not only sponsored the conference, but developed year-round programming for the bisexual community in Minnesota and throughout the region. BOP has run regular events since 1999 including discussion and lunch groups, a Bi Hotline that offered resources and support, and even opened a short-lived community center for bisexuals from 2002-2004 in Minneapolis. BECAUSE Conference is still the largest conference bisexual conference to date and is, “dedicated to building an empowered bisexual, pansexual, fluid, queer, and unlabeled (bi+) community in the United States.”

One of their most critical contributions to bisexual history and culture is BiCities!, a public access television show hosted in St. Paul, MN. Launched in 2002 and hosted by Dr. Marge Charmoli and Dr. Anita Kozan, BiCities! offers programming focused on educating the bi community and demystifying myths surrounding bi people. It is the longest running television program related to bisexuality.

BiCities! has certainly documented local, regional, and national history surrounding bi+ people and experiences in their 21 years on air. Co-hosts Charmoli and Kozan have always been attentive to intersectionality in the bi+ and broader LGBTQ community. Through their television show they have documented an array of incredible community organizations including SOY or Shades of Yellow, a Hmong LGBTQ organization in the Twin Cities (1999-2017) and hosted Earnest Simpkins, the chair of the Twin Cities Black Pride organization in 2010.

Although BiCities! airs on local Channel 15 in St. Paul, MN, their current episodes are hosted online and over 300 episodes from their archive are digitized and available through the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. Cheers to the increased national visibility of bi+ people emerging from the Midwest!

From the Queer Archives is a monthly post dedicated to LGBTQ history by culling queer and trans history from archival materials across the United States. Reckon focuses especially in the Midwest, a region where the experiences, contributions, and struggles of queer people and communities have been overlooked in historical narratives.

This series is critical in our current political and cultural moment where LGBTQ history, books, and representation are being removed from schools and public libraries. It is through historical visibility that LGBTQ people can understand this moment and themselves as part of a long legacy of queer and trans community-building.

Aiden M. Bettine is a trans archivist and historian. He is the Curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota Libraries and the co-founder of Late Night Copies Press, a Minneapolis-based micropress that publishes zines on queer and trans history, libraries, and archives. He specializes in researching and writing about queer and trans history throughout the Midwest.