October | 2015 | Laurie Toby Edison

Debbie says:

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Lani Ka’ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins published Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out in 1990. Since then, this landmark book …

has helped spark at least ten other books (many by its own contributors), was named one of Lambda Book Review’s Top 100 GLBT Books of the 20th century, … been reprinted 3 times since 1991, was translated and published in Taiwan in June 2007 and has over 40,000 copies in circulation.

The 2015 edition, e-book and print, has a new introduction and the same glorious list of contributors. In this period, when so much is written and said about lack of diversity in feminist and LGBTQ circles, the table of contents reads like a banquet of variety; if you’re young enough, this is your mother’s book of bisexuality, but your mother invited everyone to the table and made sure they all had time to speak.

Jonathan Alexander, co-author of Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies says;

To say that Bi Any Other Name is a “classic” in the field of sexuality studies is, in many ways, to miss its true importance. It was — and in many ways still is – a “classic,” but also “the only one of its kind.” While academic studies of bisexuality have slowly been making their appearances in print, Bi Any Other Name remains one of the only texts that situates bisexuals *speaking for themselves*within a rich intellectual context. It models an approach to bisexuality in particular, and sexuality in general, that has few antecedents and fewer rivals. It is, quite simply, an indispensable text.

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Lani Ka’ahumanu is not only co-editor of this book, she also appears in three of the photographs in Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes. Here’s one of Laurie’s photos of Lani:

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Carol Queen, who has an essay in Bi Any Other Name was in Washington D.C. in September, along with other bi activists, in honor of Bisexual Awareness Week. This year was the 16th anniversary of Bisexual Awareness Week. Think we’d have it at all if Lani Ka’ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins hadn’t been around nine years earlier laying the groundwork? I don’t think so.

Buy your copy now. If you have an old copy, replace it, and give that one to a friend, or a library.

Laurie says:

My friends Tracy Schmidt and Mano Marks have a beautiful collection of African masks. I did an installation of some of them on walls in their apartment last week. I loved handling them and working with them. There is a textural exquisiteness that you can’t appreciate any other way. It was a complex project balancing shapes, colors and shadings and their three dimensional aspects. Vera Sepulveda was a great help in hanging the masks and thinking about the balances.

They purchased some of them individually but the majority came from someone whose aunt had lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1930’s. Because of the way they acquired them, they don’t have much information about them individually.

Quote is from an excellent article in Wikipedia on traditional African masks:

Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa. While the specific implications associated to ritual masks widely vary in different cultures, some traits are common to most African cultures. For instance, masks usually have a spiritual and religious meaning and they are used in ritual dances and social and religious events, and a special status is attributed to the artists that create masks and to those that wear them in ceremonies. In most cases, mask-making is an art that is passed on from father to son, along with the knowledge of the symbolic meanings conveyed by such masks.

Most of the masks in her collection come from the Congo, Zaire or Zimbabwe.