On Tuesday, March 27, LGBT Activist and self-proclaimed "professional bisexual" Robyn Ochs presented two workshops on gender, sex and sexuality, attempting to dispel the common misconception of how each is an either/or situation, concerning male and female, masculine and feminine and gay and straight.
Ochs hoped to share her experiences as a woman who is bisexual and hoped to create a better understanding of the androgynous, the in-between and the overall gray that is so often misunderstood.
The event was organized in Lankford Student Union Ballroom with a workshop focused on sexuality at 3:30 p.m. and a workshop focused on gender roles at 7:30 p.m.
PRIDE, Longwood's LGBT activist organization, hosted Ochs. The event was also sponsored by PRIDE in conjunction with the Women's & Gender Studies department.
Ochs helped found the Boston Bisexual Network in 1983 and the Bisexual Resource Center in 1985, is the editor of the Bisexual Resource Guide and the 42-country anthology "Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World."
Ochs said, "I spent the last 36 years trying to create the resources I wish I had had." She said she had felt alone in her sexual identity until she formed a support group for bisexual women called BiVocals. Even then, though, the population of bisexual women still seemed small and unspoken.
With the advent of Google, more information is prevalent on how pervasive the LGBT community is nationally and internationally. Even so, Ochs commented, "I'm sorry to say that there's still a whole lot of misunderstanding and ignorance around bisexual identity and actually about all sexual identities."
"To talk about any sexual orientation out of context as a thing all by itself as though it were something I could package into my carry-on luggage ... I realized that my bisexual identity isn't actually an identity that exists all by itself. It's a social identity, and it's one of many sexual identities," said Ochs, later adding, "Identities don't exist all by themselves. Sexual identity orientations take their meaning from their position relative to other identities ... In fact, they exist in a social landscape."
Concerning the multiplicity of identities (e.g., sexual, race, gender, religious, political, etc.), Ochs said, "All these identities affect all these other identities."
Concerning each identity and how there is a certain role to fill for each, Ochs said, "Other people try to impose their ideas of what it means." Ochs taught that rather than there being a role to fill with each identity, each can be defined differently by each person.
PRIDE President John Berry Jr. said he made it his mission to bring Ochs to Longwood after learning of her skills and reputation from Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Dr. Naomi Johnson.
Berry said, "We instantly learned that Ochs has a wide range of experiences in work shopping and presenting on issues of gender, sexuality and various identities." Berry added that PRIDE's hopes of Ochs being a positive presence were realized.
"My hope for the event was to help promote a greater knowledge of acceptance and diversity among the attendees and to help people to understand that there are no limits on the identities we can experience or present. Robyn did an excellent job of explaining how to move beyond the binary way of thinking, which includes a very male/female and straight/gay perspective," said Berry.
Berry further stated, "As we learned, there are far more identities and orientations in between those extreme ends. Recognizing those factors and understanding them is a major step in becoming more inclusive and accepting in our diverse and changing society."
