Bobbi Keppel

About

Bobbi Keppel is an educator, activist, writer, and lover of folk music, who co-founded a Folk Song Society when she lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and in more recent years has belonged to a hospice choir singing to people in end-of-life care. Originally from Washington, D.C., Bobbi graduated from Oberlin College in 1955, but not before completing a year of study abroad at University College, London, where she became a lifetime member of the Debating Society. If you know Bobbi, you can attest to the fact that, even as she approaches her 90th year, she’s lost neither her skills nor her wit as a conversationalist or as a debater.

Like many women of her generation, Bobbi married and had two children. Like some women of her generation, she had her own career and worked as a social worker for more than thirty years. But like far fewer women of her generation, at age 43 Bobbi courageously came out as bisexual and became an influential educator and advocate for bisexual rights and for greater recognition of gender and sexual diversity. Her “coming out” essay in the widely-read anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out helped publicize the bisexual movement not only within the U.S., but in other countries, as well. In 1991, she co-founded the Unitarian Universalist Bisexual Network, which later merged into Interweave, the UUA’s queer network.

In another essay entitled “Swimming Upstream: Queer Families and Change,” Bobbi wrote this: “In my lifetime, I have been married and monogamous, married and non-monogamous (with men), married and non-monogamous (with women), widowed, single and monogamous with women, single and non-monogamous with married bisexual women, single and non-monogamous with married bisexual men. Some of these relationships have felt like family; others have not. So, what is family? These days, it can be whatever you understand it to be for you. You can even design your own. The one thing that is universal about families is change.”