Stephen Getman

Stephen Getman became an activist while an undergraduate at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, in response to local sexual assaults.

Stephen Getman Living and working in his largely Black and poor South Memphis neighborhood after graduation, he got involved as a volunteer with regional social-justice movements for racial and gender equality, safer-sex education, queer rights and sex worker rights, and continued his anti-sexual-assault work.

He made the leap from local to national progressive organizing - after beginning graduate studies in anthropology in Washington, DC - through his work with PFLAG and the Mid-Atlantic bisexual network, eventually rising to the national board of BiNet USA. He’s served as national Operations Director of LGBT Catholic organization Dignity USA, national Field Director for The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and organizer for the National Black Religious Summit on Sexuality.

Stephen performed as a street activist with the DC Radical Faeries, co-founded a sacred-sex working group called Sacred Flame and originated the role of bisexual civil-rights attorney Justin Moore on television’s first Queer soap opera, Inside/Outside the Beltway.

His current academic work focuses on: 1) utilizing discourse analysis and other linguistic and ethnographic tools to understand LGBTQ identity formation and change, and 2) exploring the origins and characteristics of the ‘Bi+ gaze’, that is, a specifically non-monosexual way of seeing, interpreting, and interacting with the world.

He’s also continued his organizing work with nonprofits in Portland, including Bi Brigade, which represents and serves Portland’s Bi+ (Bi, Pan, Fluid, Ace, etc.) community. A Core Organizer for the past 5 years, Stephen has helped Bi Brigade grow. He’s expanded the organization’s roster of monthly and annual events, building and sustaining collaboratively created safe spaces where Bi+ folks can be fully themselves, and from which they can return to the larger community with renewed confidence and security.