Robyn Ochs is an Americanbisexual 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, Bi Women Quarterly, and the anthology . 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.
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. She has taught the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johnson State College, and Tufts University. Ochs worked as an administrator at Harvard University from 1983 until she retired in 2009. While there, she co-founded and co-chaired the LGBT Faculty and Staff Group, co-founded and facilitated the LBTQ 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.
Work as a bisexual activist
Ochs helped found the Boston Bisexual Network in 1983, and the Bisexual Resource Center in 1985. In 1987, The East Coast Bisexual Network established the first Bisexual History Archives with Ochs' initial collection; archivist Clare Morton hosted researchers. The group became the Bisexual Resource Center in 1993. In 2002 she delivered the first bi-focused keynote during the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Addiction Professionals. 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, since 2004. 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.
Awards and recognitions
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." Also in 2009, Ochs received the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus's Lifetime Achievement Award for advocacy on the Harvard University Campus. Ochs received the 2011 Brenda Howard Award at the Queens NYC PFLAG chapter's annual awards luncheon on February 5, 2012. 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.
Personal life
On May 17, 2004, the first day it was legal for same-sex couples to marry anywhere in the United States, Ochs and her long-time partner Peg Preble, were among the first same-sex couples to legally marry. 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. She is the niece of folk singerPhil Ochs.
Selected bibliography
Books
, co-edited with Sarah E. Rowley
co-edited with H. Sharif "Herukhuti" Williams
Anthologies (as a contributor)
"From the Closet to the Stage", in
"Bisexuality, Feminism, Men and Me," in
"Moving Beyond Binary Thinking," in
"Biphobia," in
"What's in a Name? Why Women Embrace or Resist Bisexual Identity"
