One of the first conferences that I went to was First Event that is held every year around this time in the Boston area. The first time I went there was a sense of wonderment and belonging. A sense of community. I went to workshops all day long and the gala that was held at night. I went to workshops on make-up, voice, workshops in coming out to family, and workshops on coming out at work. There were dozens of workshops. There were all type of vendors at the conference selling wigs, breast forms, lingerie, insurance, size 14 shoes with six inch heels, you name it and someone was trying to sell it. The small business people found out “there’s gold in them there trannies”.
There was a regular circuit… January, First Event; March, COS Banquet and October, Fantasia Fair. But over time First Event got to be boring, there are only so many times that you can go to a workshop on make-up. So instead of going for the full three day, I started to go only to the Saturday event and this year I didn’t even go at all. The three-day conference was held in one hotel, you never left it. You met your friends for breakfast and met over lunch and then again at the banquet for dinner. All in the company of around a couple hundred trans-people. I always wondered what straight people who booked the hotel for that weekend thought about the conference.
The first couple of years I attended the banquet and then afterwards we all met down at the bar in our evening gowns. When I stopped going to the banquet at night, I usually went down to the bar in my jeans, a turtleneck and sneakers, had supper there, and waited for the banquet to get out. The locals had a field day watching all the trans-people trying to guest who was trans and who was not. Who had the best gown and who had the worst gown.
Fantasia Fair is a lot better, for one thing, it is spread out over Provincetown and it is a weeklong event. You could go to a different restaurant every night and bar hopping. However, you could have warm Indian summer nights or blustery cold winter weather; you placed your money down and took your chances. The weather ran wide range of extremes. I remember the first time that I walked back to my room in the rain and felt rain on my stocking, it was something that I have never felt before in my fifty some years. Other times I fought gale force winds. However, even that became boring. Now I just go back to visit friends and I also want to give a couple of workshops this year. I also bring my camera and wander around town taking photos.
Conferences have run the spectrum from wondrous adventures, to boring sameness. But I think that I will always have a fondness in my heart for them, they were where I first explored my gender.
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