beetiger

Overall, the con was a lot of fun, smaller than last year, with the same friendly diverse interesting activist core of people, but a lot fewer drop-ins, probably due to the more remote location and the increased price, which may have driven away some of the poor student and activist types, and didn't actually succeed in keeping the organization that ran the thing from ending up with about 3K in debt at the end of it all.

The con was on “queer standard time” (why do all fringe communities seem to have a constitutional inability to respect each others' time?), which meant a late start, but they actually did okay in shortening the opening plenary accordingly. Robin Ochs, the organizer of lots and lots of bi women's stuff in the Boston area, said this and that and sent us on our merry ways. There was lots of great programming planned - two or three sessions I'd happily have attended per slot. First choice ended up being Raven Kaldera's session on Trans-Spirituality. I was impressed with Raven when I met him last year, for his ability as a storyteller, his success in running a family-tribe of significant size and logistics, and his rewrite of “Dancing with Bears” as a gay clubbing anthem at last year's con. He's written a book relevant to the topic, Hermaphrodeities, which I'm hoping to review as part of the new BBI gig, as I want to encourage more books for the advanced pagan to exist.

After the worst squashed sandwich, stale cookies, and underripe fruit lunch ever was a session called “Be the Bomb that You Throw”, on out-there personal activism, run by Sister Phyllis Stein, one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who was dressed in full nun-garb. It reminded me of my own style: I look “normal” enough that people are forced to reevaluate when I'm not quite what they were expecting. But I am also working on being more out about most of my life on a day to day basis, and reminding myself that that sort of thing can be more societally useful than just pure vanity is a good thing.

The furry panel we ran was not hugely attended, but the small group there had a good time. Each of the panelists fell into what are probably typical roles for us all:

lediva attracting interest and being excited about things (she earned her furry toaster for recruiting by the end of the con, by dressing all weekend and continuing to talk about furry to every one who was interested, but not quite interested enough to choose the panel out of the overabundant programming schedule),

postvixen trying to make qer way through the mass of ideas that qe'd been putting together for the few days before, tangent to wonderful tangent, and me playing panel mom, trying to make sure all of the attendees got heard, trying to keep responses short and encouraging and relevant.

The expected Sunday morning poly panel, which I'd decided to do out of laziness rather than stretching my boundaries more, turned out to have been replaced by a screening of the documentary “When Two Won't Do”. The film has been getting mixed reviews in the poly community, the filmmakers being called either “brave and honest” or “people who are setting back the work of the poly community twenty years”. It's a personal documentary of the life and times of a geeky filmmaker couple exploring polyamory, with one of the two partners being relatively resistant. Their story's not pretty, and in particular the suicide of one of the people in their web of relationships part way through was very disturbing. If nothing else, the film showed that large amounts of self-analysis and exploration don't necessarily guarantee any real communication. I haven't yet decided whether showing something this conflicted when we don't have something more optimistic available is good or bad, but it makes me want to add making a somewhat sunnier piece to my imaginary project list.

The last session I attended was a presentation of a medical/psych literature review of the work on the relationship between transsexuality and mental illness. The brief result: the trans community looks overall like the rest of the population in terms of other mental problems, though there is also a lot of faulty research which makes some pretty bad assumptions out there, especially when you look at racial and economic minorities. The presenter was one of the people who had caught my eye last year, though I'll insist watching him talk was not the only reason I went. I need to brush up my dabbler's knowledge of psych stuff a bit again, though.

Fine people, fine Chinese food (with the fortune-cookies-that-must-be-obeyed), a collection of contact info I may actually get organized enough to use this year, and a determination to get myself some vistaprint business cards closed the event for me. I'll be back next year.