Fantasia Fair

rdf:langString Fantasia Fair

rdf:langString Fantasia Fair (also known as FanFair) is a week-long conference for cross-dressers, transgender and people held every October in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a small Portuguese fishing village and largely gay and lesbian tourist village on the very tip of Cape Cod. This annual event is the longest-running transgender conference in the United States and it provides a week for attendees to experiment with gender-role identities and presentations in a safe and affirming community. The goal of the conference is to create a safe space in which crossdressers, transgender and transsexual people, and nonbinary-gendered people are accepted without judgement, can interact with their peers, and can advocate for their rights. In November, 1980 the event was featured in an article by D. Keith Mano in Playboy magazine and has in ensuing years has continued to generate publicity. At its inception in 1975, Fantasia Fair was ten days long and considered an event for heterosexual cross-dressers. Most of the programs focused on personal presentation, and the registration fee, which included housing, was expensive. By the 1990s, however, the nature of the attendees had more diverse, including trans men and trans women, cross-dressers, and genderqueer people of every sexual orientation. Fantasia Fair's parent organization was the Outreach Institute for Gender Studies (originally the Human Outreach and Achievement Institute), founded in 1975. Since 2000 the parent organization has been Real Life Experiences, a nonprofit corporation which makes annual awards to transgender pioneers at a banquet held during the Fair. Many Fantasia Fair events are open to the public for free or at low cost. These include six daily keynote addresses, a dinner with entertainment, and the Fantasia Fair Fashion and Follies shows. A number of scholarships are awarded annually. Many documents regarding Fantasia Fair, from its inception until current day, are archived in the Rikki Swin Collection in the University of Victoria Transgender Archives, in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and online at the Digital Transgender Archive.