Some People Say TV Brings Us Together
(We’re Those People)
The Fan Fest Society began as an unintentional, wildly purposeful community we didn’t know we needed. It sounds trite but it’s the most basic truth we could share when we decided to launch a nonprofit aimed at creating sincere bonds, unlikely friendships, pipe dream communities and new understandings about the world that resolve from common threads over fictional characters, settings and storylines.
The idea emerged from the thriving community that rallied behind the creators of the former “Gilmore Girls Fan Fest”. Gilmore Girls was simply the reason people began gathering in 2016, but it wasn’t what they all treasured from the event. The community was real, Stars Hollow didn’t exist but our parallel universe actually did. People were more than just characters, they became friends. Well-written story lines were fun to explore. Talking about TV provided joy. And we decided to live the mantra, “if it brings you joy, you keep it”.
Hence, The Fan Fest Society.
Now we’re here, the original GGFF founders plus the beautiful faces of a nonprofit board we’re lucky to serve. Jennie & Marcus Whitaker, just two fans of a TV show making sense of the tangible facets of a festival that created community around the world.
Once we fully understood what we all valued most from the former confines of the name “GGFF”, we realized there was more to create than the marvelous nostalgia of Stars Hollow*. After a year unlike any other (you know which one we’re talking about) we saw people come together from far corners of the Earth to support one another over social media and Zoom, but also through snail mail, actual phone calls where you pick up the phone and say “hello” and in the plans they made to see one another without dates finalized (and hug them even tighter than before we were torn apart).
Connections made from a few weekends of fandom grew far beyond anything we could have imagined. Our “fan fest friends” were held in the highest esteem. We connected virtually without skipping a beat when the world shut down. It was simple, because that’s how we talked to one another in between events. Then we realized the strength of our connections when our “real life” friendships didn’t thrive as well in a polarized world. Something about bonding over the fictional stories you love makes you closer. We can’t explain it, you’ll just have to trust us.
We came to immortalize the idea of “fan fest societies”, where people from different fandoms could come together over common interests to support one another, celebrate the cast & crew of the shows they loved and better understand their differences because of their shared interests.
The seismic shift, better known as the hiatus of 2020, that forced us to dig deeper, provided a chance to redefine things. So here we are, introducing an idea that we hope fosters intentional communities from unintended sources.
