Packing For FF

While I’m packing for Fantasia Fair this week some random thoughts…

This will be something like my tenth fair, now it is more like a class reunion than a conference. I don’t go now for the workshops but more to see people that I have known since the first time that I went up to P’town. I go for the noon time keynote talks. I go for the photographs; the cape is very photogenic just about everywhere you go there is a picture to be taken.

This year I am giving a workshop on “Effective Lobbying” and one of the thing I want to talk about is the inside/outside strategy. Both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Saul Alinsky knew the value of the inside/outside strategies.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said,

”The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

In an article in the Huffington Post Peter Dreier wrote,

The insiders, elected officials and lobbyists, see their job as pushing through changes in law that can alter the living conditions, incomes, and access to opportunity and environment of our citizens. Legislating involves the “art of compromise” that requires the skills of brokering deals, negotiating, and forging consensus.

Outsiders — community activists, street protestors and radicals — need different skills. They often view compromise as “selling out” by politicians tied to corporate and elite interests. Activists believe that the influence of campaign contributions, and the trade-offs required by legislative give-and-take, make most elected officials undependable allies.

Both the inside and outside are equal parts in the strategies to bring about change, they are Yen and Yan and my workshop at FF will be on the inside game, lobbying your legislators.

What is going to be different this year is that I have an appointment with a real estate broker to see about buying a three season cottage with my half from the sale of our New Hampshire cottage.

---

Before I transitioned I hated going shopping for clothes, after I transitioned I hate going shopping for clothes. At least now I like the clothes that I’m buying.

Fall is banquet season and I have several banquets that I will be attending along with my fiftieth high school reunion which I am nervous about, it will be the first time as Diana.

---

Speaking of banquets, I will once again be going to One Big Event and it is big! It is pricey, but it is for a good cause and the price isn’t that far out of line with other banquets and the food is very good considering it is a small intimate dinner for 600.

The event is for the Hartford Gay and Lesbian Health Collective where I volunteer two days a week as their “Trans Advocate.” With the drying up of Ryan White funding…

In his FY 2018 budget, President Trump proposed deep reductions in several key HIV programs including eliminating funding for Ryan White AIDS Education and Training Centers, Ryan White Special Projects of National Significance, and the HHS Secretary’s Minority AIDS Initiative Fund. President Trump also proposed cutting nearly $150 million from HIV prevention programs supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and $26 million from Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA). He also proposed a $22 million cut in funding for STD prevention programs at the CDC.

So the Health Collective needs to look for other funding to stay open and one of those sources were through Husky insurance (CT version of Medicaid) but now that is also in question with the latest Trump edict.

---

I plan on daily reports from Fan Fair and I hope to have a lot of photos to show you and maybe some to enter in the local fair next year.

Well I’m off…