Robyn Ochs | |
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Born | San Antonio, Texas, U.S. | October 5, 1958
Organization(s) | Boston Bisexual Women's Network, Bisexual Resource Center, BiNet USA, MassEquality, Bi Women Quarterly, Inc. |
Movement | LGBT rights/bisexual rights |
Spouse | Peg Preble |
Mother | Sonny Ochs |
Relatives |
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Awards | Campus Pride's Voice & Action National Leadership Award (2017); PFLAG's Brenda Howard Award (2011); Susan J. Hyde Activism Award (2009); Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus's Lifetime Achievement Award for advocacy on the Harvard University Campus (2009); Reinaldo dos Santos Memorial Award for Bisexual Activism (1997) |
Robyn Ochs (born 1958) is an American bisexual activist, professional speaker, and workshop leader. Her primary fields of interest are gender, sexuality, identity, and coalition building. She is the editor of the Bisexual Resource Guide (published annually from 1990 to 2002), Bi Women Quarterly , and the anthology Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World. Ochs, along with Professor Herukhuti, co-edited the anthology Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men.
Ochs has appeared on a number of television talk shows, including Donahue , Rolanda, Maury Povich , Women Aloud, Real Personal, Hour Magazine and The Shirley Show, to discuss issues relating to bisexuality. She has also been in Seventeen and Newsweek .
She describes herself as Jewish, but not religious. [1]
Ochs has a Bachelor of Arts in Language and Culture, Latin American Studies from the State University of New York, Purchase. [2] Additionally, she has a Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management and a Masters of Education from Harvard University. [3]
Ochs teaches courses on topics including LGBT history & politics in the United States, the politics of sexual orientation, and the experiences of those who transgress the binary categories of gay/straight, masculine/feminine, black/white and/or male/female. [4] She has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johnson State College, and Tufts University. [5]
Ochs worked as an administrator at Harvard University from 1983 until she retired in 2009. [6] While there, she co-founded and co-chaired the LGBT Faculty and Staff Group, co-founded and facilitated the LGBTQ Lunches, a monthly lunch series for lesbian, bi, queer and trans women faculty and staff, and served as the faculty advisor for QSA, Harvard's undergraduate student LGBTQ organization. [7]
Ochs helped found the Boston Bisexual Network in 1983, and the Bisexual Resource Center in 1985. [8] In 1987, The East Coast Bisexual Network established the first Bisexual History Archives with Ochs' initial collection; archivist Clare Morton hosted researchers. [9] The group became the Bisexual Resource Center in 1993. [10]
In 2002 she delivered the first bi-focused keynote during the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Addiction Professionals. [11] In 2004 and in 2007, she keynoted the Midwest Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Campus Conference, the largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender student conference in the United States.
Ochs has served on the Board of Directors of MassEquality, Massachusetts's statewide equality organization, from 2004 to 2016.
She has written frequently on bisexuality and LGBT rights and her writings have been published in numerous bisexual, women's studies, multicultural and LGBT anthologies. [12]
In 1997, she received the Reinaldo dos Santos Memorial Award for Bisexual Activism.
In 2009 at the Creating Change Conference, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force awarded Ochs the Susan J. Hyde Activism Award for Longevity in the Movement. As she presented the award Creating Change Director Sue Hyde told Ochs: "We hear your clear voice, we see your staunch advocacy and we respond to your loving insistence that our movement includes all of us." [13]
Also in 2009, Ochs received the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus's Lifetime Achievement Award for advocacy on the Harvard University Campus. [14]
Ochs received the 2011 Brenda Howard Award at the Queens NYC PFLAG chapter's annual awards luncheon on February 5, 2012. [15]
On June 13, 2015, Ochs received the City of Cambridge's GLBT Commission's annual recognition award for her work as an educator and activist. [16]
On July 22, 2017, Ochs received Campus Pride’s Voice & Action National Leadership Award. [17]
On May 17, 2004, the first day it became legal for same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts, Ochs and her long-time partner Peg Preble (a self-identified lesbian), were among the first same-sex couples to legally marry. [18] When early news reports spoke of the marriage as a "lesbian wedding", Ochs objected strongly to being classified as a lesbian rather than a bisexual. In follow-up news coverage, Ochs publicly denounced this as an example of exactly the type of bisexual erasure she has been calling attention to for much of her life. [19]
She is the daughter of music producer and radio host Sonny Ochs [20] and niece of folk singer Phil Ochs. [21]
Biphobia is aversion toward bisexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being bisexual. Similarly to homophobia, it refers to hatred and prejudice specifically against those identified or perceived as being in the bisexual community. It can take the form of denial that bisexuality is a genuine sexual orientation, or of negative stereotypes about people who are bisexual. Other forms of biphobia include bisexual erasure. Biphobia may also avert towards other sexualities attracted to multiple genders such as pansexuality or polysexuality, as the idea of being attracted to multiple genders is generally the cause of stigma towards bisexuality.
The bisexual flag, also called the bisexual pride flag, is a pride flag representing bisexuality, bisexual individuals and the bisexual community. According to Michael Page, the designer of the flag, the pink stripe represents attraction to the same sex, while the blue stripe represents attraction to the opposite sex. The purple stripe, the resulting "overlap" of the blue and pink stripes, represents attraction to both sexes.
BiNet USA was an American national nonprofit bisexual community whose mission was to "facilitate the development of a cohesive network of bisexual communities, promote bisexual visibility, and collect and distribute educational information regarding bisexuality. Until 2020, BiNet USA provided a national network for bisexual organizations and individuals across the United States, and encouraged participation and organizing on local and national levels." They claimed to be the oldest national bisexuality organization in the United States. In 2020, all of the content on BiNet USA's website was replaced with a statement that the BiNet USA president, Faith Cheltenham, now identified as Christian conservative and was walking away from progressive politics entirely.
LGBTQ culture is a culture shared by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. It is sometimes referred to as queer culture, LGBT culture, and LGBTQIA culture, while the term gay culture may be used to mean either "LGBT culture" or homosexual culture specifically.
Brenda Howard was an American bisexual rights activist and sex-positive feminist. The Brenda Howard Memorial Award is named for her.
New York Area Bisexual Network (NYABN) is a central communications network for bisexual and bi-friendly groups and resources in the five boroughs of New York City and the surrounding Tri-State area. The mission of the New York Area Bisexual Network is to facilitate the development of a cohesive bisexual community in the New York Area. The network promotes bisexual visibility, works to protect the bisexual community from discrimination and biphobia and assists and empowers the individual community members, their families and friends to live full, rich, safe and happy lives.
The Bisexual Resource Center (BRC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, that has served the bisexual community since 1985. Originally known as The East Coast Bisexual Network, it incorporated in 1989 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and changed its name to the Bisexual Resource Center in 1993.
Tom Limoncelli is an American system administrator, author, and speaker. A system administrator and network engineer since 1987, he speaks at conferences around the world on topics ranging from firewall security to time management. He is the author of Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly; along with Christine Hogan, co-author of the book The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley, which won the 2005 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2007 with Peter H. Salus he has published a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF entitled The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs.
The bisexual community, also known as the bi+, m-spec, bisexual/pansexual, or bi/pan/fluid community, includes members of the LGBTQ community who identify as bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual and sexually fluid. As opposed to hetero- or homosexual people, people in the bisexual community experience attraction to more than one gender.
Sheela Lambert (1956-2024), a native and lifelong resident of New York City, was an American bisexual activist and writer.
Bisexual erasure, also called bisexual invisibility, is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or re-explain evidence of bisexuality in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources.
The Brenda Howard Memorial Award is an award for activism created in 2005 by the Queens Chapter of PFLAG and named after Brenda Howard. It was the first award by a major American LGBT organization to be named after an openly bisexual person. The award, which is given annually, recognizes an individual whose work on behalf of the bisexual community and the greater LGBT community best exemplifies the vision, principles, and community service exemplified by Howard, and who serves as a positive and visible role model for the entire LGBT community.
Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World is an English anthology edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley. It is an important book in the history of the modern bisexual rights movement and appears on numerous bisexual and general LGBT reading lists.
Paula Claire Rodriguez Rust is an American sociologist who studies sexual orientation, especially bisexuality. Rust is editor of Bisexuality in the United States and author of Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution.
The first English-language use of the word "bisexual" to refer to sexual orientation occurred in 1892.
Hameed Sharif "Herukhuti" Williams is an American cultural studies scholar whose work focuses on sex research and education. He is also a systems theorist, culture and interdisciplinary social scientist, journalist and public speaker who has written about and lectured on bisexuality particularly among people of African descent.
Rev. Trinity Ordoña is a lesbian Filipino-American college teacher, activist, community organizer, and ordained minister currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is notable for her grassroots work on intersectional social justice. Her activism includes issues of voice and visibility for Asian/Pacific gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals and their families, Lesbians of color, and survivors of sexual abuse. Her works include her dissertation Coming Out Together: an ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander queer women's and transgendered people's movement of San Francisco, as well as various interviews and articles published in anthologies like Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity and Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology. She co-founded Asian and Pacific Islander Family Pride (APIFP), which "[sustains] support networks for API families with members who are LGBTQ," founded Healing for Change, "a CCSF student organization that sponsors campus-community healing events directed to survivors of violence and abuse," and is currently an instructor in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.
Bisexual literature is a subgenre of LGBTQ literature that includes literary works and authors that address the topic of bisexuality or biromanticism. This includes characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying bisexual behavior in both men and women.
The history of bisexuality concerns the history of the bisexual sexual orientation. Ancient and medieval history of bisexuality, when the term did not exist as such, consists of anecdotes of sexual behaviour and relationships between people of the same and different sexes. A modern definition of bisexuality began to take shape in the mid-19th century within three interconnected domains of knowledge: biology, psychology and sexuality. In modern Western culture, the term bisexual was first defined in a binary approach as a person with romantic or sexual attraction to both men and women. The term bisexual is defined later in the 20th century as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to both males and females, or as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to people regardless of sex or gender identity, which is sometimes termed pansexuality.