BID
Bi-Monthly Magazine For Lesbian And Bisexual Women Issue 14 FREE
BEHAVIOUR . IDENTITY . DESIRE
Contributors Elly Badcock works in a call centre and pretends to be a writer, spending her spare time attempting to reverse this description. Her interests include class politics, Jarvis Cocker and science fiction. A socialist, feminist and long-time activist, Elly specialises in feature-lenth polemics and the overuse of adjectives.
Lynsey Calderwood is a Scottish fiction writer. She’s had several short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies including Nerve, Nomad, Mslexia, The Edinburgh Review and the Scotsman+Orange 2006. She is currently working on a novel.
Sophie Cohen is a19 year old English Language and Media Student at University of Brighton. She regularly contributes to B.I.D Zine writing about fashion. Likes: Rubiks Cube and Tartan Dislikes: Mushrooms and Arrogance
Lotte Murphy-Johnson is a 22 year old writer and TV researcher. She spends her week working for a TV production company and her weekend frantically putting together the B.I.D zine with her girlfriend Holly. Likes: chicken curry, baked alaska, Amanda Palmer Dislikes: Corriander, chewing gum, self-obsessed people
Lili Murphy-Johnson is a 19 year old art student at Central Saint Martins. Nowadays she mainly focues on creating artistic jewlrey but also paints abstract art and portraits. According to her CV she is: an enthusiastic, friendly, full-figured young woman with catering experience looking for love and full time work. Available to start immediately.
Holly is a 23 year old trainee Montessori teacher who lives in London. Her passions in life are tattoos, women and computers. Shes loves music and in her dreams she’s a punk rock front-woman like Brody Dalle, in reality she is trying to learn the ukelele and can just about play Hot Cross Buns. Holly is an avid photographer and rarely ventures far without a camera. She launched B.I.D zine with her girlfriend Lotte and she enjoys being her own boss.
Contents Page
Lili Murphy-Johnson
WHEEL APPEAL Holly Richardson tells you why you should be skating this spring. LIP SERVICE REVIEW Onomé Okwuosa reviews
Season 2 of Lip Service. Keep an eye out for updates in future issues!
FASHION Sophie Cohen takes a look at two of the newest fashion trends this spring: bralets and nail wraps
NEWSFLASH The week’s best news stories! VIRAGO Do we really need female publishing company Virago in the 20th century? TATTOOS: FOR LIFE OR A FASHION ACCESSORY? Sophie Cohen takes a look at what’s
motivating people to get tats today.
NEWSFLASH
LIP SERVICE STAR HEATHER PEACE IS SOON TO RELEASE HER LONG-AWAITED DEBUT ALBUM. Fairytales, a collection of “gorgeous piano melodies, lush string arrangements and raw, personal self-penned lyrics delivered by Heather’s heart-stopping, soaring vocals”, is out on May 21st. The first single, Better Than You, is out on April 30th but you can watch the video now:
AN AUTHOR WHO HAS WRITTEN AN UNOFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF POP STAR JESSIE J HAS CLAIMED THAT THE STAR IS A LESBIAN BUT THAT SHE WAS ADVISED TO HIDE IT FROM HER FANS. The star is openly bisexual and is very vocal about liking men and women but author Chloe Govan says that she is actually a lesbian and that record label bosses advised her not to let her fans know because it might alienate them, especially male fans. Govan writes “She was advised not to come out, though. Certain people thought being bi was trendy, exotic and a fashion statement. It would increase her allure.” The book, Jessie J: Who’s Laughing Now, claims that Jessie was initially very angry but went along with it in order to keep her record deal.
URBAN OUTFITTERS- ONE MILLION MOMS, THE US ORGANISATION WHICH CALLED FOR A BOYCOTT OF JCPENNEY AFTER IT CHOSE LESBIAN ELLEN DEGENERES TO BE THEIR SPOKESPERSON, HAS NOW TAKEN OFFENSE to a new Urban Outfitters new advertising campaign. A photograph which appeared in the April catalogue for the clothing store features two female models, kissing. That is apparently unacceptable and it has caused the group to call for moms to trash their teenager’s copies of the catalogue. The group said “The content is offensive and inappropriate for a teen who is the company’s target customer.” The organisation claims to be working towards stopping the exploitation of children in the media.
CHAZ BONO, CHER’S TRANSGENDER SON, HAS BEEN HONOURED WITH TWO AWARDS AT THE GLAAD (GAY AND LESBIAN ALLIANCE AGAINST DEFAMATION) AWARDS WHICH WERE HELD IN LA LAST NIGHT. He won the outstanding documentery prize for Becoming Chaz and also the Stephen F Kolzak Award which is given to an LGBT member of the entertainment community.
THE BIG PICTURE
THE LONDON MARATHON took place today. The 26 mile run passed through Greenwich and we were on hand to see what costumes we could spot. These three runners caught our eye!
WHEEL APPEAL HOLLY RICHARDSON WANTS EVERYONE TO GET THEIR SKATES ON!
WITH SPRING IN FULL SWING and summer approaching those of us in the UK are looking forward to hopefully being able to enjoy more time outdoors. I for one am sick and tired of the cold, grey, rainy weather and I’m excited by thoughts of picnics in the park and barbeques on the balcony. I like being outside in the fresh air and I recently took up running for the first time in my life since being forced to do cross country runs at primary school. I realised that I actually quite enjoyed running when I got into it, and another form of exercise which I am a huge fan of is roller skating. I have been skating for as long as I can remember, I had the same Barbie quad skates as Bliss does in the movie Whip It when I was young and as my feet grew I was forced to buy pair after pair until they stopped at a rather large size 8. Every day after school I’d tear off my uniform, pull on my jeans, grab my skates and head over to my friend’s houses to see who wanted to go blading. Blading has always been my favourite type of skating, I prefer it to roller skating because I can go faster and it’s easier for me to master tricks when my wheels are in a line. My girlfriend has just taken up skating too; an afternoon at Decathlon last month resulted in her purchasing a pretty cool pair of red and black quads (and a big pack of knee and elbow pads). We now spend our afternoons skating around Greenwich Park and chatting with other friendly skaters. So, if you have never tried or considered skating why not try it out? It’s fun, cheap once you have purchased a pair of wheels and a great way to get some exercise and enjoy the fresh air. There are many places to skate and here is a quick lowdown of where to head to if you live in the capital and where to buy a set of wheels.
SKATE SHOPPING The French sports store Decathlon stocks a large selection of skates for beginners and advanced skaters, http://www.decathlon.co.uk/. On the internet why not see if anything on Skate Sale (http:// www.skatesale.co.uk/) or Skate Hut (http://www.skatehut.co.uk/) takes your fancy.
WHERE TO SKATE
THE PARKS: London parks are a great place to skate. Greenwich is my local but Hyde Park and Regents Park are also worth a visit. http://www.royalparks.org.uk/ SKATE PARKS: If you want to learn some tricks and test out a half pipe or a ramp there are a number of skate parks in London. Skaters can always be found on the Southbank and are something of a tourist attraction but for novices who don’t want tourists taking photos I would recommend going to a larger skate park such as the one at Stockwell. http://www.londonstreetriders.co.uk/index. cfm?fa=contentGeneric.ykqsezybbpclzblb&pageId=139377 ROLLER DISCOS: If quad skating indoors with music and bars serving drinks is your thing then get to The Renaissance Rooms in Vauxhall. Hire skates or bring your own and, for a small fee, you can attend the biggest weekly roller disco in London. Check out the website for more information http://www.rollerdisco.com/
Do we really need Virago any more? Caitlin Carmichael-Davis looks at the Female publishing company and asks whether, in the 21st century, we really need it any more
LAST YEAR HILARY MANTEL HELD THE MAN BOOKER Prize for fiction. Carol Ann Duffy is our Poet Laureate. Is it time to sit back and congratulate ourselves on how far we have come since women wrote under male pseudonyms? Is it finally time to wave goodbye to those controversial literary landmarks – the all female Orange Prize for Fiction and the specialist women’s publishing company, Virago?
Virago was established in 1973, a very different time. In the four years since the foundation of the Man Booker Prize, 77% of the authors short listed had been men and a woman was yet to win. But women were seeking to change the literary landscape and place themselves at the centre of it. Virago’s founder, Carmen Callil, referred to an exciting feeling of possibility. One of the central aims of the company would be to publish serious, literary novels by female writers. In Virago Modern Classics, the founders aimed to bring back into print those early 20th century writers who, undeservedly, lay unread and unpublished while their male counterparts were heaped with praise. Antonia White, Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Taylor’s quiet masterpieces had been forgotten. But Virago revived them and created an alternative pantheon of modern classics – those written by women. Thirty-six years later, Carol Anne Duffy was announced as Poet Laureate, and shortly afterwards the evenly split Booker Prize shortlist was announced; the eventual winner being Hilary Mantel. All at once, it seemed women had gained the literary respect they yearned after. But although this is what Virago had always aimed for, these women’s success has made the company’s separatist position more difficult to justify. For many argue that it is surely better to promote women’s literature in the same, universal, way as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Published by Fourth Estate, winner of the
Booker prize, it stands on its own two feet as a literary masterpiece. In contrast, Home by Marilynn Robinson is published by Virago and winner of the all female Orange Prize. It exists separately to the mainstream and receives negligible publicity when compared to Wolf Hall. By being published and lauded in areas only available to women, Robinson is vulnerable to the charge that she cannot compete against male authors, though this is a charge any reader would refute. For although the world has changed, Virago’s alternate classics hardly roll of the tongue with the familiarity of their male contemporaries; Steinbeck, Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald. This may be because Virago, by its very nature, separates off its novels as female and different. The company has never achieved the male readership Carmen Callil naively called for when she spoke of the involvement of “both genders”. This was, perhaps, fatal to the very aim Virago wished to achieve. Women’s books were published but they were by no means made more mainstream. Perhaps in acknowledgement of this, and the changing and increasingly post feminist world in which we live, the new owners of Virago have set about making the company mainstream, accessible and, perhaps, a little bland. Whilst the early Viragos proclaimed their distinctiveness and literary identity with serious, dark green covers, the new designs appear to aim for invisibility. Whilst Callil’s replacement, Lennie Goodings, defensively describes this as “modernisation”, it very clearly demonstrates a crisis of confidence for the publisher. They evidently feel that the company’s position has become difficult in an age where many women refuse to identify themselves as feminist and are not seeking out women authors, still less women publishers. But this crisis of confidence is misplaced. Virago still has an important, if more subtle, role to play in promoting women’s fiction. The success of women over the previous twelve months is by no means representative; over the past ten years, women have been outnumbered by men in seven of the
ten Booker shortlists. But even more importantly, those novels labelled as ‘great’ by the literary establishment are still written by men. When John Updike died, Ian McEwan lamented his passing as the "end of the golden age of the American novel", tellingly ignoring the upsurge in female literary talent. Whilst Salinger and Updike may have gone, they are being replaced with wonderful writers such as Marilynn Robinson, Anne Tyler and Toni Morrison. But these women remain ignored by the literary establishment. While a new novel by Roth is an event, a new Tyler slips quietly under the radar. In its list of the best novels of the past 25 years, the Observer only managed to include one woman in its top ten. It is the issues women write about that leads to this literary disrespect. Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke of a “damned mob of scribbling women” whose bestselling, sentimental trash kept him and other serious male artists from finding readers and buyers. Worryingly, this attitude persists. It is perceived that women cannot write the great novels because they do no choose the great subjects. Their novels are seen as slight, domestic and trivial. But human relationships are far from trivial and the best female domestic writers can grasp the truth in a way few male authors can. Criticizing a work of fiction as being domestic is a political rather than a literary judgement. Jonathan Coe, worries that for women, “the indefinable sense of being taken seriously still dangles tantalisingly out of reach”. He is right. Perhaps the real difference between Wolf Hall and Home is not their publisher or their prize, but their subject matter. Whilst Mantel tackles a swathe of Tudor Britain, Robinson writes about a woman watching her father die. It is no longer simply gender which is holding women back but the subject matter of their novels. To truly achieve equality in the literary world, domestic writing must be established as a form of the ‘great’ novel. Virago, with its specialist knowledge and literary ambitions, is the company to achieve this.
Tattoos: For life or a fashion accessory? This week, Sophie Cohen looks at the growing trend where tattoos are nothing more than a fashion accessory I BELIEVE THERE ARE THREE TYPES OF PEOPLE WHEN it comes to the subject of tattoos: those who are disgusted and generally don’t like or agree with them; those who don’t mind or even quite like tattoos but would never get one themselves; and then there are those people like me – who absolutely LOVE them. So to what degree have tattoos become that of a fashion? Is it true that nowadays most people will have a few stars scattered across their body or a heart behind their ear because a friend (who might not be their friend forever) is getting it done; or even a drunken tattoo of a holiday destination on their behind, rather than thinking carefully and planning out a meaningful piece of art that will be on your body for the rest of your life? Personally, I have five tattoos (not that I expect anyone to be impressed by that – especially my grandparents) I have an Owl on a branch on my left hip, a straight line on one of my fingers on my right hand, an anchor and a swallow on my left foot, the letter J on my bra line and a red jigsaw piece on my ankle. All of my tattoos have meanings and I had thought about them for years before I even decided that I wanted to get them permanently placed on my body, but can the same be said for everyone else? For instance on a drinking holiday to Faliraki, Rhodes last year with a friend we had ended up in a tattoo parlour on our first night out. We had been dragged there by two of the girls who were also staying at our hotel and had decided they wanted ‘Faliraki 2011’ where nobody else could see it. I however decided that having ‘tattoo’ written on my arm was surely a better idea. Thankfully my friend (who doesn’t actually have any tattoos – she is in category 2) suggested we continue on to the next bar and not waste our money on ink. Could you imagine living the rest of your life with a mistake? Sure for the next year or two, it might have been a funny story to tell people, especially when I was just off to university and about to meet a whole new group of friends. But in years to come that blotchy ink patch on my skin that was too cheap to be true might start to annoy me and generally ruin my skin and appearance. Let’s look at tattoos in terms of the media and what we as a country are exposed to. Cheryl Cole: maybe your kind of thing, definitely not mine. She is doing the best for herself as a solo artist after the breakup of girls aloud and her appearances on The X Factor and across our tabloid nation have made her a true star in the last few years, so would we class her as a fashion icon? Well she won the cosmopolitan award for best dressed in 2011 but does that include her tattoos? Her little tribal splodge on her right hand has caused a sensational amount of follow ups – if a tattoo artist had a pound coin for every time... never mind. Let’s just say a lot of 18 year old girls around the country have very similar tattoos on the hands now. If we stay in the media, even one of Cheryl’s X Factor contestants has fallen into the tattoo on the hand ‘trend’. Cher Lloyd has ‘Daddy’ written on one hand and a music note on the other. It is not a question of class or money, or even that the tattoos have lost all meaning, but with so many people getting similar tattoos are we reaching the point of trending tattoos? Should we just get rid of Twitter and create Tattooer so that everyone can post what tattoos we should go out and get this month? Obviously not, but you must be able to understand my concern for the amount of tattoos that are being inked onto people bodes right now just because a celebrity has it. How about ‘Shhh...’ on the finger, Rhianna, Lindsey Lohan and Lily Allen all have it, Avril Lavigne and Victoria Beckham both have star tattoos and Eva Longoria and Angelina Jolie support the roman numerals look. I guess some designs are popular no matter what year it is, what nationality you are, which type of music you like, what football team you support and when you were born, I just can’t help seeing the loss in originality and ideas.
W E I V E R Onomé Okwuosa Takes a look at the new season of Lip Service Warning: SPOILERS
After a lengthy wait it’s finally arrived and it appears that Lip Service season 2 is all about the ups and downs of real life as it pertains to lesbian living and love in Glasgow. Tess and Frankie’s uber glossy apartment has been ditched in favour of one more more akin to their pay scale or lack thereof should I say. Thankfully there are plenty of things that have remained the same; Tess is the same ditzy actress that we met and grew to love in season 1, only now it seems she’s fixed one area of her life in that she’s got a job and has landed the lead in a local play. She’s 2 months into her blissful albeit questionable relationship with her electrician girlfriend, she’s dubious over their compatibility but hey if her lover is attentive and the sex is good, does she really need to look much further into it? Lager ladette that her other half is; Tess is doing her best to absorb the footie lifestyle and support her missus even though she’s really not the sport loving type. By the time sexy Lexy walks onto the scene, looking to rent the spare room in her and Frankie’s apartment I’m left wondering, will she be ditching her beer swigging lass in favour of a more stylish sister? Poor Cat is stuck between a rock and a hard place, she can’t shake the love and lust she has for Frankie even though she’s got an awesome missis in the way of detective sergeant Sam, not even a month long vacation of sun, sea and sex seems enough to shake the lingering lust that exists between the two of them. The formerly straight laced lassie seems to be slipping off the rails somewhat, squash that she’s jumped clean over the barrier and is getting down and dirty - smoking the reefer at work like a deviant delinquent and public fumblings with Frankie have me eager to see just how far down the rabbit hole our Cat’s going to tumble. Educational as well, I now know that exercising the 3 C’s will always bag me the Betty; being “cocky, confident and charming” are the only attributes I need and after seeing Frankie in action I think she’s onto something! I hate to love that it seems to take a lil coke snorting to release the gay within Ed, one of the few non-lesbian characters in the show; throughout the whole of the first season I was sure he was a man-lover and after his performance on the dance-floor I’m eager to see if his sexuality gets a little deviant as the show unfolds. I’m also curious to see how Frankie’s life story will turn out, will her mum finally accept her with open arms or will she do even more damage to an already chipped frame by continuing to have her sidle out of side entrances and denying her very existence? I can’t wait to see what the rest of the season has in stock for the characters, their ups and downs.
Sophie Cohen looks at the new trends on the high street
Trend – Bralet What is the bralet? Is it underwear? Do you wear underwear with it? All we can tell from the sudden outburst of them this season is that they are in fashion and whoever is wearing one is certainly drawing some attention to themselves. Perfect for showing off those slender arms, enhancing your cleavage and wear them with low cut jeans or trousers to really show off your midriff. A lot of the bralet tops available online or in your favourite shops have tailored detailing so they fit to the body smoothly and have adjustable straps, as if they weren’t handy enough. Team with jeans, patterned trousers or high-waisted skirts for a flattering daytime look or a sexy evening outfit.
Trend – Nail Wraps I think high street shops are just starting to recognise the fact that most women these days either don’t paint their nails because they never have time to or like me, attempt to paint their nails and then they end up smudging or chipping by the end of the day. It is not even as if I am in a manual labour job, I don’t lug bricks around or chop down trees...I write; and to be honest rarely with a pen these days everything is always typed. It seems that nail wraps are going to be my new answer to poorly applied nail varnish. There are pretty much every pattern out there as well; from plain to animal print. So you can have plain clean coats, or make yourself look like you’re a nail pro with some funky patterns. Perfect for everyday and there are some really nice wraps for special nights out. Said to last up to a week on fingernails and up to four weeks on toe nails! Check out http://www.trendynailwraps.com/ for some great deals! Above - Topshop £38 Miss Selfridge £18 New Look £16.99; Below – New Look £5.99 Topshop £7.00 Superdrug £4.99 www.feelunique.com £7.99
B.I.D ZINE Issue 14
With Thanks To: Holly Richardson Lotte Murphy-Johnson SOPHIE Cohen Caitlin Carmichael-Davis Lili Murphy-Johnson OnomĂŠ Okwuosa