At the start of 2000, the Dutch team who had wanted to run the sixth International BiCon in 2000 thought that they weren't sufficiently prepared to do it properly, so the team who were planning the 18th UK BiCon became the 6th International one as well.
As such had many more international participants than usual. 265 people attended; over £500 was raised for the national bisexual phone helpline; around 100 workshops, keynote speeches, seminars and networking sessions were held; and a four day programme of entertainments from punk rock to performance poetry to an adult size bouncy castle ran smoothly. The organisers were Jenni, Kate and others.
(The Dutch team went on to run the very good First EuroBiCon in Rotterdam in 2001.)
Chronicles of BiCon
(contributed by Felicity Cade – 24/8/2000)
In the beginning was the Bicon. And it was without form and void and darkness gathered upon the face of the earth. And in the midst of darkness, voices were heard, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and the legendary Norwich they said. We remember and we hope for the future.
And bisexuals did gather from the four corners of the globe, and their allies also, unto Manchester did they come. Great was the rejoicing of the organisers, they looked and saw that it was good. It was the evening and the morning of the first day.
And then the voices of the organisers were raised at the closing plenary and many thanks were made to them all and their handmaidens, who had toiled so hard to bring about the Bicon.
Next year they said, next year unto Rotterdam, Coventry and even unto Sydney in the year after that, shall we come.
So they parted, each to their homeland and great was the jubilation of the organisers, for they too could go home. And they looked around, and behold it had been good. And they vowed, never again will we host a Bicon, not until the memory of it has faded from our hearts, our feet, our heads and even our purses. And it was so.
Archive materials
A composite version of the website, originally hosted at bi.org, is at 2000.bicon.org.uk.
One 'feature' was its use of the printed programme cover image. Unfortunately, the actual printed cover didn't arrive until sometime after BiCon had started (they were given out individually to wrap around the b/w parts of the programme!) and the website's version was much larger than the HTML of the pages told the user's web browser to display. So several hundred thousand bytes were downloaded, possibly on each visit, in order to display an image that could have fitted in about 45,000 bytes. In the days of dial-up modems able to download up to an incredible 4,000 bytes per second, and many users paying for internet access – and the phone call! – by the minute, this profligacy didn't go down very well…
Even though graphics of several hundred thousand bytes size are common now, a smaller version of the printed programme cover is now displayed. If you want the original large file, just click on the smaller one.
