This week I am flying to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, as I have done for the past three years, to attend AnthroCon, the world’s largest furry convention. The trip is partly business: I have a dealer’s table where I sell pictures, prints, comic books, and commissions. But it is also for pleasure: I have a lot of internet friends who I only get to see in person when we all convene in Pittsburgh for a weekend in June, and AnthroCon boasts perhaps the best evening party programming of any con I’ve ever attended.
When I tell people where I’m going, they usually react in one of three ways.
Option one: Confusion.
“Oh, that’s nice… it’s a what kind of convention?”
Option two: Thinly veiled revulsion further veiling their extreme interest.
“FURRIES? Aren’t they those… you know, fetish people?”
And, rarest of all, option three: Excitement.
“A Furry con? That sounds awesome!”
Options one and two are by far the most common. It seems that the general population either doesn’t know what furry is, or has got the wrong idea of it.
So I thought now would be a good time to lay out a nice clean explanation, so when I come back in a week to write about it you won’t be confused when I talking about “fursuiting” and “headless lounges” and “fursonas” and the like.
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I’ve written this much, and I don’t know where to start.
This is because there are as many definitions of “furry” as there are self-identified furries to explain it to you. Everyone you ask will have a different answer, but I think it is safe to say that they will all include these basic principles:
1. Furries are humans (it is important to remember that) who like animals.
2. No, not in that way. We have a word for that, it is called bestiality, and it is something that furries look at with about the same amount of disgust as a pediatrician looks at pedophilia.
Beyond this, the interpretations are flung to the four winds. To some people “furry” is a hobby. They buy the cereal with the tiger on it, they have old “Bugs Bunny” tapes that they still watch. To others it’s a way of life: “fur houses” are not uncommon, as furries tend to stick to one another (insert your own favorite joke about personal hygiene here), and their entire social life inhabits a world made up of other furries. To some people it’s a pursuit: there are a great many artists in the Fandom (as it is called), from painters to writers, musicians and sculptors. Most famously there are the fursuiters; those brave men and women who don thick, faux-fur suits with big-eyed smiling faces and dance around for the enjoyment of others.
Since the fursuiters are the most visible (they are incredibly photogenic), they are often considered the face of the Fandom, but not all furries are fursuiters (though most fursuiters are furries). The fursuit (colloquially spelled as one word) has been the source of some colorful rumors that have taken hold of the public imagination, and when used as a component of a sexual fetish it is what a lot of people think of when they hear the term “furry.”
I used to try my best to debunk this, because of all the furries I have met (and I count myself among them), none of them have had any interest in using their $3,000 dry-clean-only suit in sex play, and they are a little touchy about people taking what, to them, is a perfectly wholesome, innocent, friendly activity, and casting it in a “dirty” light.
I am not entirely comfortable with this either, since I’m sure there are people who have fursuit fetishes, and I don’t think it’s right or fair to shame them. Also, Dan Savage has started using the term “furry” to refer to this fursuit fetish, and after what he did to that poor Santorum fellow I’ve decided it’s best not to fight him. (Please note, links likely NSFW.)
And it’s not as if furries on the whole are particularly puritan bunch. In fact, they are probably the opposite. I want to stress that this is because they are human, not because they are furry.
So nowadays I sort of shrug and say “they are people who like to fantasize about anthropomorphic animals.” If a person is intelligent enough to get past the word “anthropomorphic” they are usually smart enough to grasp the nuances of the Fandom. If not, they at least know well enough to smile and nod.
But in this venue, where I have you at the mercy of my words, so to speak, I can afford to go into a little more detail. I mean to describe here, without judgement, my own personal observations from living, talking, and partying with furries.
Imagine a world where geeks rule. All kinds of geeks. Start chanting “3.14159…” and by the “9” you should have at least five people chanting along with you, and two of them will continue on several more digits. Similarly, you could start singing the end credit song for either of the Portal games and by the second verse you should have a full chorus. Bronies abound here, as do all kinds of gamers, coders, and fantasy and sci-fi nerds. All sorts of fandoms are united by their common interest in the magic of talking animals, under the umbrella of furry.
You get a lot of, if not quite atheists, then alternate spiritual beliefs. The Furry Fandom is perhaps one of the few places in the world where a practicing mainstream Christian orMuslim has to carry themselves with the same sort of care that Wiccans and agnostics have to everywhere else.
There are also a lot of gays. Reason for this being that, whatever perceived discrimination exists for furries, it is an anthill compared to the mountain of Coming Out, and the LGBT division, when ranks are combined, so far outnumber the straights that a heterosexual man must broadcast his straightness the way most gay men broadcast their gayness… everywhere else.
Of course, the straight men who feel comfortable wandering into the jungle of the fandom naturally self-select to be the laid-back variety who take getting hit on by a gay man as a compliment.
There are perverts. There are furries into BDSM, and some very interesting fursuits come out after 10:00 PM. There is some of the weirdest porn you’ll ever find on the internet. And you’ll find it right next to the cutest picture of a bunny with a butterfly on its nose that you ever did see.
The fandom, being defined and redefined by the roiling masses of its members, is a kaleidoscope of lifestyles, opinions, and levels of personal hygiene.
They are some of the friendliest people you will ever have the pleasure to meet. And I don’t mean that in the “teeth on edge,” “toe the social line,” forced kind of friendly. With furries you get the confident, relaxed congeniality of weird people who know that, however weird they are, there are people in this hotel who are weirder, so why worry? You’re here, you’re furry (or at least furry-friendly); that means you’re family. You are wearing a spiked dog-collar and a blue mohawk, he has a puppet tentacle on one arm and the 4th Doctor’s scarf, and the man over there in the fishnet shirt with a six-foot long dragon tail has a game of Apples to Apples, let’s have fun!
(Yes, these are all real people I have met. And we played Apples to Apples. And it was fun.)
Furries will teach you to look past the weirdness. They will spoil you with their openness, and their pretty much universal acceptance of whatever oddities you possess. (Unless you’re a Twilight fan, in which case you’d better bring a riot shield.)
Furries carry a kind of magic about with them, a sort of “Anything I can dream of, I can try to do it!” I’ve been to ComicCon, and I’ve been to World Fantasy, and I’ve never seen such a high concentration of actively creative people as I have in one hallway lounge at a fur con. These people are not waiting for agents or publishers or producers to come along and buy them, they are actively making their comic, their costume, their short film—whatever. They have bypassed the waiter and gone straight into the kitchen.
They are also generous. They appreciate art and the artists who play such a vital role in illustrating the purely imaginary characters that, in these peoples’ imaginations, are more real than the humdrum of everyday existence.
You can find within the Fandom both the most noble aspirations of the human soul, and some of the most head-banging stupidity of rumor-mongering drama queens.
In short, furries are people. They are imaginative, slightly weird people who like to pretend they are animals, but that is just the thing: they know it is pretend. They are not crazy or deluded; by understanding that their imaginary world is just that—imaginary—they are probably more sane than the rest of us.
Them. You. Whatever. I seem to have been adopted by the Fandom, in more ways than one. I call myself a furry, and to other furries this seems perfectly logical, though a lot of my non-furry friends seem a little confused that I hang out with the same group the suit-wearing victims from “that CSI show” belonged to.
But by now, you shouldn’t be. Because I have already told you that the furry fandom includes all sorts of different people. So it should not be too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that it also includes me.
If you want to go to a furry convention, I highly recommend it. You don’t have to be a furry or have a fursona (an animal character you associate with yourself). I told you, furries are friendly, they know how to party, and they love it when regulars show an interest in them that is not thinly-veiled-disgust-veiling-extreme-fascination. Aside from AnthroCon, there are many smaller furry cons across the North American continent at all times of the year. In Europe there is Eurofurence, currently held in Magdeburg, Germany, and Australia has MiDFur, held every December in Melbourne.
Finally, I’d like to end this with a video that shows, better than anything I could say, what furries are like. It is the conclusion to the saga of a little sandwich café in downtown Pittsburgh that was going to go out of business because of the recession. This café has been a favorite of AnthoCon-goers for years, and when news got out that we were going to lose Fernando’s, it was decided we should do something about it.
My personal financial contribution was quite small, but I take some pride in the fact that the badge design I made for donors became the official badge of FurnandoCon 2012, and can be seen as such in the following video.
The man in the white lab coat doing most of the talking is Dr. Samuel Conway, CEO and chairman of AnthroCon, Inc. The somewhat harried young man in the blue shirt and the scar over his right eye is Fernando DeCarvalho, owner of the café. He got that scar defending his furry customers from a homeless delinquent.
And that’s furries.
Goldeen Ogawa has been active in the furry fandom since 2008, where she is better known by her furry handle, Agent Elrond. Her fursona is a chimera, and she keeps an active art blog on her FurAffinity page. If you have any specific questions about furries or the furry fandom, you can send Goldeen an email at goldeenogawa@gmail.com or peck at her on Twitter @GrimbyTweets.
