Just a few of my closest friends.
The Great Furry Litterbox Panic of 2022 made its way onto the NY Times Opinion pages in early April. Actually, ithe “F” word was only used in the piece’s title, the story itself was a rumination on why people fall for this kind of stuff. However I felt the Times’ readers deserved to know what Furry is actually about, from the guy who wrote the book on it. I submitted the following piece as a potential Guest Essay—which they chose not to run, so I’m sharing it with you folks instead...
“I heard they found a litterbox in the hotel room.”
The speaker isn’t a Nebraskan state senator or a concerned midwestern mother; it’s my adult nephew, a Pittsburgh corrections officer filling me in on a supposed find in a recently vacated hotel room. It’s 2016 by the way, not 2022, and I’m in town with close to 7,500 of my fellow furries for the annual Anthrocon convention.
Look, up in the sky!
They love us in Pittsburgh and look forward to our arrival every summer; banners welcoming us to town hang from the lampposts, parents bring their kids downtown to pose for pictures with the colorful fursuiters and crowd the sidewalks to watch the outdoor fursuit parade.
Look, down from the sky!
Other than my nephew, no one is talking about litterboxes. That rumor, accompanied by snide comments about students “identifying as a cat” resurfaced early this year, courtesy of right-wing propagandists. It’s been making the media rounds for several weeks now; it even aired on Rupert Murdoch’s Australian Sky News (the down under equivalent of Fox News), allegedly taking place at an “elite Brisbane school.” (Almost every YouTube comment accepted the bogus story as fact and another imaginary example of liberal thinking run amuck.)
The rumor’s actual target: young transexual and gay people, a sizeable presence in our community who feel an acceptance among us often hard to find elsewhere.
Special edition
It’s not the first time Furry has been the subject of almost comically inaccurate media coverage. A cover blurb on a 2001 issue of Vanity Fair promised to take readers “INSIDE THE BIZARRE SEX-FETISH WORLD OF ‘PLUSHIES’ AND ‘FURRIES,’” while TV Guide described a 2003 CSI episode’s victim of the week as “part of a weird group that believes in acting on animal instinct.” Although decades old by now, Vanity Fair, CSI (and an equally sensationalistic MTV Sex2K “Plushies and Furries” documentary) created a skewed view of the furry community we’re still trying to set straight.
CSI: The gift that keeps on giving...furries grief.
In reality, furries (or furs as we sometimes call ourselves) are simply people fascinated by anthropomorphic animal characters: animals with human qualities. They might be the rabbits of Watership Down, natural in every way but endowed with sapience, speech and a mythological hero…animated cartoon characters (thousands of Gen-X’ers point to Disney's foxy Robin Hood as their gateway to furrydom)…storybook animals like Beatrix Potter's bunnies, or mythical unicorns and talking dragons.
Furs are a relatively recent addition to the pop culture multiverse; we’ve been around since the mid-1980s when a handful of science fiction, animation and “funny animal” comic book nerds discovered one another at sci-fi conventions where we bonded over our mutual appreciation of those imaginary critters.
As it turned out there were more of us than we ever imagined. We kept our anthropomorphic inclinations to ourselves because we believed no one could possibly share or understand our fascination with characters who embodied the best of both the human and animal worlds. (The most gratifying experience of writing Furry Nation was hearing from furs who said my book helped them shed self-imposed feelings of guilt or shame over their furriness.)
Too sexy for my tunic
Once we began discovering one another (invariably accompanied by an “I’m not the only one!” moment of joy) our community started growing; today there are tens of thousands of us across the planet and well over a hundred furry conventions held every year—and our numbers keep increasing. Ten years ago it was the very rare youngster or teen who would admit to being a fur; today furry clubs can be found (sans litterboxes) at any number of schools and colleges.
There’s a major differenc
Too sexy for my tux
e between us and other fan communities (superheroes, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc.): rather than dress up or roleplay as pop culture celebrities, we create our own characters. Most furs have a "fursona," an animal alter-ego to represent themselves within the furry community. (In my case, “Komos,” a suave, tuxedo-wearing Komodo dragon.) We draw or commission furry artists to bring them to life; if our finances allow we might build or engage a talented artisan to construct a fursuit, a sophisticated work of art in its own right we don to temporarily become our other selves. [FUN FACT: Only about 20-25% of furs wear fursuits.]
We’re really nothing new, truth be told; people who don’t merely appreciate anthropomorphic animals but made them part of their lives have been around for millennia. The oldest piece of art in existence is the “Löwenmensch” a 40,000 year-old ivory sculpture of a two-legged lion man. Almost every culture in its past had such beings—gods, tricksters and demons—central to their belief systems and rituals. It’s all but hard-wired into our minds: the desire to imagine human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom (which we often forget we’re part of) on a more equal footing. Furries are simply people who have rediscovered and
Too sexy for my Ice Age (Doesn’t look a day over 20,000)
deeply feel this primal connection.
In our modern, civilized and sophisticated world, these beings have lost their spiritual resonance; they’ve been neutered into cartoon characters and sports or product mascots. Even so, their presence persists in animated shows like BoJack Horseman, set in a world where humans and anthropomorphic animals mingle as equals, competition series like The Masked Singer or the “reality” dating show Sexy Beasts that transform their participants into animals.
Why has this ancient atavistic desire manifested itself so strongly in the 21st century? Why are people around the world responding in increasing numbers to the call of the wild? Perhaps it’s a visceral, instinctive reaction to the utter mess we seem to be making of our one and only planet; things were going fine until human beings came along and knocked a system that had been happily sustaining itself for eons out of alignment. The beasts of the land, sea and air knew better; perhaps we all should be paying more attention to our inner animal.
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![Trevor (Justin Huertas, center) debates leaving his apartment with encouragement from Siren (Kirsten "Kiki" deLohr Helland, left) and Cary (William A. Williams) in TheatreWorks' "Lizard Boy."](https://images.dailykos.com/images/1197741/story_image/Y_LB_TWSV_EggShaker_Y.jpg?1686446254 "Trevor (Justin Huertas, center) debates leaving his apartment with encouragement from Siren (Kirsten "Kiki" deLohr Helland, left) and Cary (William A. Williams) in TheatreWorks' \"Lizard Boy.\"")
