Saturday, October 22, 2016

Day 6 At Fantasia Fair

Aranu'tiq a Yup'ik word meaning “man-woman” assigned male at birth

I always wonder what that word meant and yesterday I found out during the keynote talk, it was by Nick Teich is the founder and CEO of Harbor Camps which run Camp Aranu'tiq a summer camp for gender non-conforming children. Founded in 2009 they had 40 children attend the weeklong overnight summer camp and this summer they had over 500 attendees and they went from renting a camp for a week in Connecticut to owning their own camp in New Hampshire. They have since branched out to also having weeklong overnight summer camp called Camp Seneb for youth with skeletal dysplasia & their siblings.

It was a fascinating talk and the question that I asked was where did the name of the camp come from and that is when I found out it was native Alaskan name meaning two-spirit.

After the keynote I went to a workshop by Dallas Denny “Gender Transgression in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras” it was a very fascinating talk. We sometimes think that being trans is something new but we have been around for a very long time. In her talk she pointed out Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park (I wrote about them here) who were arrested for crossdressing.

For dinner I went with some friends to George’s Pizza where we have somewhat made it a tradition to go to in Friday nights. Afterwards some went to the follies but I didn’t attend because after a dozen or so times seeing the follies it becomes old hat. From what I have been told they had some new people in the show and I hear that the show was three hours long with intermission.

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