Bi sexual day

How it works

The date is fixed: 23 September every year. It does not float to a Monday. Schools and banks follow ordinary hours unless a local body has proclaimed the date as a civic recognition. Most places have not. The day is kept by people, groups, and some city halls, not by a national closing list.

The English names stack. Celebrate Bisexuality Day is the older international label from 1999. Bisexual Pride Day, Bi Day, and Bisexuality+ Day appear in later use. Bi Visibility Day is the wording that spread from the United Kingdom, associated with Jen Yockney, written as three words so the word bi is not hyphenated away. The plus sign, when people add it, is a writing choice to include pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, and other identities under a bi+ umbrella. The calendar square is still 23 September.

The day is not Pride Month, not a wedding anniversary, and not a coming-out deadline. It is one annual mark for bisexual and biromantic people, their families, and anyone who will say the word in public without treating it as a pit stop between gay and straight. If someone asks “how it works,” the honest machine is: pick 23 September, say bisexual on purpose, and do not let a couple’s current partner rewrite their history.

Why 23 September

Three U.S. activists set the date in 1999: Wendy Curry of Maine, Michael Page of Florida, and Gigi Raven Wilbur of Texas. Michael Page also designed the bisexual pride flag, the pink, purple, and blue stripe flag that buildings sometimes light on this date. The first official observance is tied to the International Lesbian and Gay Association conference in Johannesburg that year. Curry later described the choice: they wanted a September party, they liked that it could fall on a weekend, and the 23rd was Gigi Raven Wilbur’s birthday.

A precursor sits on another square. In 1990, during the first National Bisexual Conference in San Francisco, the mayor issued a proclamation naming 23 June 1990 Bisexual Pride Day. That June date did not become the annual international day. 23 September did. Do not merge them. June Pride events can include bisexual contingents. This page is the September appointment.

Later civic paper exists in pieces. In 2012 the Berkeley, California, city council declared 23 September Bisexual Pride and Bi Visibility Day. In 2013 the White House held a closed-door meeting with bisexual advocates on the date, the first bi-specific event of that kind there. In 2013 the U.K. minister for women and equalities, Jo Swinson, issued a welcome for Bi Visibility Day. In 2021 Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf issued a state recognition. In 2022 Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, passed local legislation recognising the day. Those acts are local. They do not make 23 September a federal holiday in the United States or a feriado nacional in Brazil.

23 September: Celebrate Bisexuality Day / Bi Visibility Day, every year since 1999. 23 June 1990: a San Francisco Bisexual Pride Day proclamation, a different date. Week around the 23rd: Bisexual+ Awareness Week, declared by BiNet USA in 2014, often counted from 16 September to the day itself.

Public holiday: no, unless a specific city or workplace wrote its own rule. If a couple looks “straight” or “gay” at a glance, that glance is doing the hiding this date was built to interrupt.

Visibility is the work, not a costume hour

The day answers erasure: the habit of reading a bisexual person as straight or gay depending on who is standing next to them. Teach-ins, readings, concerts, picnics, flag lightings, and ordinary speech are the usual forms. There is no required outfit. The bisexual flag is a tool, not a uniform. A quiet correction in a meeting counts. A public event counts. Silence until next June does not keep the date.

Do not treat 23 September as a medical quiz or a demand that someone date two people at once. Bisexual describes attraction; it does not describe a schedule. Do not use the day to debate whether the identity is “real.” That debate is the problem the date named. If you need a calendar reminder, lock 23 September. If you need the surrounding week, follow that year’s Bi+ Awareness Week listings. If you need a legal holiday, look elsewhere. This is a visibility day. The work is to remain visible after the 24th.