Unleashed and Let Loose… The New Age of Furry

October, 1989… Joshua Quagmire sends a one-page wire to a budding convention manager who has requested his presence at a brand new type of gathering. Quagmire is a shy artist from West Los Angeles of small celebrity. He was considered slightly old for his particular artistic discipline—about 36 years old—which is a point of concern for the old sage when considering attendance. He has already cemented a regular yearly booking in the shadows of San Diego Comic Con with his magnum opus, Cutey Bunny, a comic book series about a furry superheroine which was equal parts humorous and sexually charged. He attends the conventions anonymously. There were funnier and freakier works in between Cutey Bunny’s serialization, like Bronco Bunny, but none made the sort of public splash as his most popular work.

Quagmire’s correspondent was another old weasel called Mark Merlino. Merlino, very much unlike Quagmire, loves to get around with other sci-fi cats at conventions and hash out his interest in an emerging genre of art: Funny Animals. Funny Animals are anthropomorphic bipedal characters that emulate human characteristics: Facial expressions, human language, body parts… the whole nine yards. Think Bugs Bunny or Barney the Dinosaur. Feverish sci-fi fans of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, like Merlino, were starting to latch onto and experiment with this medium out in public at the conventions. A new step up had begun to materialize on the sci-fi ziggurat, miles above Star Trek and Tron, nearest to the impressive twin peaks of eccentricity and awe. 

Merlino was a short, pasty Orange County man with a nice head of hair that only started growing at the back half of his skull. He wore wire glasses above a bulbous red nose and a faint blonde mustache that hid a frail top lip and a goofy smile. He was also the Moses of the Great Funny Animal group that emerged from the Red Sea of sci-fi. Since the 1970s, public interest in anthropomorphic animals had grown enough so that hobbyists and cosplayers could splinter off into their own “room parties” at conventions—art showings and music, for the most part. Merlino and a friend of his, Rod O’Riley, had arranged enough of these room parties by 1989 to tee up a full on convention for what were now called “Furries”: ConFurence Zero. 

But for 1989, a furry conference was still considered a far-out idea. There was a lot of interest, sure, but if sci-fi nerds were terrorized for their offshoot interests, it would take some real cojones to step-out in furry garb, regardless of facial anonymity. 

These days, Quagmire and Merlino are both considered the Great Pioneers of the furry community… Trailblazers… Legendary Members of the First Class… Renaissance Men… But in their day, they were still mostly seen as closeted freaks with weird animal kinks. Cutey Bunny was already a cult-comic success, so how much more could Quagmire hope for? And so to Merlino’s request, Quagmire responded: 

“Salutations Mark....

Just thought I'd type out a short note here.....

First off… I wanted to Thank you for Inviting me to your Con at the San Diego Comic Con... And so if Nothing else, just wanted to thank you for that... And after thinking about it,.. I still have to say, It Doesn't sound like a terribly good idea to me....

… 

Don't expect me to be wildly enthusiastic about "Furrys"... But then, what the Hey..?!? There's a Lot of Things in this life I don't particularly care for… (Like President George)... But I can live with 'em... (Don't have much choice)” 

So Till Later… HooHah…!

Merlino and Quagmire both died within the last couple of years, which means the first generation of formally inducted furries has begun to wane. Quagmire would end up attending about three ConFurences after ConfurenceZero proved itself as a successful formula for getting furries all into one place to celebrate.  A new, more learned generation of furries has emerged since the days of 1970s Funny Animal hobbying: One that wouldn’t flinch at the stones of judgement that kept Quagmire away from ConFurence Zero. Times have changed… Today is a brand new one. Things since then have gotten much… hairier…  

★★★

Long after rush hour, westbound on a dark stretch of the 10 freeway, we cruised at a steady pace—a healthy eighty miles an hour—towards Animal Jamz 2, a Los Angeles furry rave. We heard some whispers about the event along the digital grapevine… one of the performers who advertised the event just so happened to have matched on Hinge with an anonymous Bum Diary member many moons ago. Thank God for that unseemly connection… hints of summer’s heat began to sulk into the desert valleys during my brief visit home. An unholy laziness had taken hold of the place that drove me absolutely mad. I thought it would be freeing to experience the cooling mist of the Pacific with a more interesting class of people than to dry out at home. 

I was in my preteens when I first heard noise about the belittled furry subculture. The mid-2010s were already an ugly, ravenous time for online alternative expression, but furries bore the brunt of the public burden. People hated furries… On several online forums I could find from those years, participating in furry culture was described as “some sick fetish,” “zoophilia,” “sex-obsessed mania,” “degeneracy” and in many different words “weird.” Many in the furry community attributed this popular perception to misrepresentative media portrayals that cash in on the sexier parts of the anthropomorphic lifestyle—the yiffing”, furpullin’ parts. Others said it shouldn’t matter what furries get into, as long as the involved parties are human adults. Hatred persisted on sites like 4Chan for years––so much so that furries designated themselves to small corners of the internet in small online communes. Inadvertently, this persecution led to more coordinated in-person gatherings where furries could thrive in relative peace, according to the online furry commentator Felix the Panther. 

But that was neither here nor there… There was a rave on the road ahead of me and some questions that I wanted answered about this elusive breed of man. I’ve always felt, like those furries afraid of being accused as sexpest, that anthropomorphites never got a fair shot at good faith coverage. In their airheaded ways, even goodhearted reporters I read inevitably got themselves caught in the otherization of furry hobbyists… Zoom in shots on low-budget fursuits… Interviews with socially inept sideliners… Suggestive questioning that delved into the more delinquent side of furry… I, on the other hand, wanted to know what really got these people going. What made them get out of bed in the morning and decide that a fursuit is better than a blazer? How did furry culture go from niche sci-fi offshoot art shows to queer rave subculture? To answer these questions, I went right to where the soldiers were fighting the good fight…  

We landed somewhere on a dirty street near an old schoolyard in East Los Angeles to arrive at Animal Jamz 2. The venue was Don Quixote, a seventies-type nightclub with indoor balconies, a tacky disco ball setup and chrome poles for crotch-grinding scattered around… Apparently, the place was remodeled in 2019, but this was not at all obvious to the naked eye. It was nowhere near ugly, but dated would be a good word for it. Nevertheless, it had an obscuring appeal for anonymous types… a place where you could slip away after a risky trick into an artificial maze of lights and disappear up the steps and over the balcony up near the disco ball to see the fallout from your sick actions from above the smog of body heat and dysfunctional smoke machines. 

If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought Animal Jamz 2 had a mandatory dress code. Head to toe, at least eighty percent of attendees were loyal to the cause. These were not your half-baked, cute ears-and-tail combo enhancements you see with second class furries. No, not at all… This was the cream of the crop, outfitted with suits costing figures north of $5,000, elaborately constructed with synthetic hair, foams and plastics. Everyone I asked about suit prices seemed to shrug the question off, as if the steep cost was clearly stated in the pre-membership packet. 

Shoulder to furry shoulder, the crowd gyrated around a center point under the disco ball, drowned by chemical smoke. Servals, foxes and wolves were easy to spot from inside the hot mist on the rave floor, but other imitations were a little less clear… Some mammalian designs came with wings… bird-types sometimes had no beaks… I saw someone as a mermaid, too, but I’m not sure that counts as anthropomorphic or grim body-horror. Bullet trails of polychromatic light inverted the fursuits so that for a brief moment you could only see the animated eyes, and those were mostly the same across the board. There was a man in a blue, fishlike scaled suit near the bar who told me his fursona came from a “a passion for marine biology,” and the suit “combines shark, lionfish and dolphin… Whichever you see first.” 

Fursona determination was not as uniform as I had first assumed… Some said they went with what they felt closest to, and others said they went the route of “original creation,” only partially pulling from zoological source material. Johnathan Vair Duncan, the furry community’s Leonardo DaVinci—artist, speaker, furlosipher—conveniently classified three distinct and neat fursona categories in an article some years ago that helps to clear up the fursona-choosing methodology: The “Ideal,” the “Paradigm,” and the “Avatar.” 

1. The “Ideal” Fursona 

This fursona is geared towards personal wish fulfillment. The fursona is an “ideal” goal to work towards even if traits are exaggerated or unattainable. These are many of your classic furries. 

2. The “Paradigm” Fursona 

This fursona is based on abstract ideas. The fursona is meant to represent  expressions of emotion or social positionality. This is where you’ll see the more out-there character designs. Think big, colorful, or impossibly tight bodied fursuits.  

3. The “Avatar” Fursona 

This fursona has minor differences between the individual and the suit, and they tend to be a reflection of the individual with minor additions to the character. This is where you get your ear-wearers and tail-waggers. 

Regardless of their classification, every furry looked happy to be there, as far as I could tell behind their static facial expressions. Bodies were moving wildly in mass house trance. A confused mix of runway voguing and punk show moshing was gathering under the disco ball’s gravity. Many shook their heads “no” furiously, but said “yes, God, absolutely!” with their movements—a kind of divine denial. Solicitous hands moved down fursuits and some couples lifted their masks to share midnight kisses, like some Cinderella role reversal where the mice had all the fun. At one point, a red demon-elf without a nose approached me with advances, to see if I'd be willing to broaden my horizons into the realm of man-beasts…I was flattered, but couldn’t see past the olfactory deficiency. 

The rave was marvelous… a real hoot for someone on the outside looking in. Tails shook, bodies bumped, heads fell off. I noticed that in a rare moment, I didn’t care at all about whether or not people were looking at me while I danced; I couldn’t deduce whether this had been a symptom of the anonymity of the partygoers, or the fact I didn’t see many blinking, human eyes that night. I fell too deep into thought and festivity to even do my job properly…. My only formal interview was outside of Don Quixote with Jazz, a blue-white-black striped wolfish character who told me that, as a queer furry—in a rare community where queer is the majority—this was the only place they felt genuinely welcome. “This is what I want to be,” Jazz said. “This is who I wish I could be outside. I’m most of this outside, but I’m not 100% of this outside.” 

I asked Jazz if they felt Animal Jamz and raves like it were the only chance furries had at unadulterated, free expression for themselves in the world. Jazz told me yes, places like Animal Jamz 2, were the only kind of place where furries could “fully let loose…”

And let loose they did… Almost as if every person in the joint had spent their whole lives in a crooked tower like Rapunzel, waiting to let down their hair for a DJ who promised one night’s salvation. 

★★★

The verdant fields of UCLA’s Sculpture Garden shone brilliantly at the tip of each blade of grass under the receding golden light of the setting sun. The human body is admired in every sculpture across the yard, sometimes in plain form and other times abstracted… human, nonetheless. Sat in front of me on a hill were Jamie and Elevenn. Elevenn, president of the UCLA Furry club, graciously privileged me by wearing his fursona’s head and tail that were modelled after a Sergal, a fictitious race of shark-headed aliens from the Vilous universe created by Japanese artists Mick Ono and Kiki-UMA, according to WikiFur. The suit was a shallow-eared, blue-eyed furshark with an impressive moving jaw mechanism that attached itself to Elevenn’s real jaw and mimicked his speech. Jamie, outreach director of UCLA Furry Club, on the other hand, gave no physical indication whatsoever that he was a furry. He wore a brown-orange plaid shirt with wild ginger curls that ordered themselves into a semi-combover—a very unassuming character. His fursona, for which he has yet to buy a suit, is an alligator; motivated by his affections for the mobile game Where’s My Water? as a youngster, among other crocodilian inspirations… 

I decided to speak with Elevenn and Jamie after I realized I only got a few words of note from my time at Animal Jamz 2. Yes, I got to see firsthand, in a small dose, what furry party culture looked like and what it had meant to the growing community. But this effort felt insufficient. A tad ingen-u-ine… There was so much color my eyes had yet to register. 

Before our conversation, I held a short preliminary with Elevenn and Jamie where I dug for the basics before we got into the weeds. I found out that both Elevenn and Jamie are queer: Elevenn bisexual and Jamie gay. And though it was harder to tell with the furry buckets and rave lights on, I also noticed a high queer population at Animal Jamz 2—I chalked the fact up to Los Angeles happenstance, and gave it little thought afterward. BL… GL… TL… Every kind of love Japanese artists could conjure up was present. According to FurScience, a part of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, 80% of furries self-identify as queer—the lowest number I could find in other sources was 65%... This trend of complete sexual reversal started far back in the Funny Animal days, a nomenclature that now seems more ironic and on-the-nose than before. Those pioneers I mentioned earlier—Mark Merlino, the de facto founder of Furry and that “friend of his” Rod O’Reilley—were a bisexual MLM couple. 

“I had more trouble coming out to my parents as a furry than I did telling them I was gay,” Elevenn told me. “I’m bisexual, but I call myself a Gay Furry more than a bisexual. I came into both of those things at the same time. It’s hard to imagine myself being gay without being a furry, or being a furry without being bisexual… The two are inextricably tied together.” 

I asked if the furry identity itself could be considered a queer label, given the almost gender-defying theatrics of it all, but Elevenn and Jamie quickly put my ignorances in check. “Every furry is different. Some might say yes, but I don’t know… It’s a part of my identity as a gay man but there are some straight furries who might think differently,” Jamie told me. 

Someone I spoke to at Animal Jamz 2 sang a different tune in passing conversation at the bar… “If you get dressed up like this, you are gay. The call is coming from inside the house. It’s gay to be here! Are you gay?” 

Hazel Zaman, one of few legitimate furry scholars in higher education, made a compelling comparison between furries and drag queens that I believe helps to clarify furry positionality in the queer sphere. The act of personalizing a fursona, much like drag, allows individuals to embody desirable bodily and character traits for both internal personal fulfillment and external validation of the identity. The bells and whistles of furry—six foot tall suits, colorful furs, body modifications that enhance the bust and waist, complete obfuscation of birth identity—are RuPaul’s wet dream. However, while drag is undeniably a sport that caters to the gays, it is not inherently a gay sport. Drag and furry, according to Zaman, can better be considered extensions of performance art. 

I think that when we see furry as drag or performance art, we can rummage through all the ugly preconceptions and stereotypes to truly understand the intent behind furry escapism. That is what I sought to do, after all. Elevenn, for example, took great pains to explain to me clearly that furries are NOT the kinfolk of zoophiles—genuine animal attraction is when the lifestyle becomes something distinct from furry altogether. Like any community, Elevenn admitted that furries have a fair share of “bad apples,” but asserted that a majority of furries use the hobby as a vehicle of personal exploration and fulfillment. 

“A lot of the preconceived notions regarding furry are misinformed. They’re such surface level hyperdiffusion, connections. It’s like, ‘This thing looks like this thing therefore they must be the same”... I don’t know what to tell you.” Sergals are meant to have “simple, optimistic outlooks” according to WikiFur, but Elevenn had some profundity to him. “I’m not gonna sit here and pretend people don’t have sex in these things, of course they do. Almost like any subculture, what people do in the bedroom is up to them, as long as it’s not illegal.” 

At what point did Furry transform from a sci-fi subculture into an ultra-queer ravers safe haven? Seeing that the founders decided they needed their own manicured gatherings with like-minded proto-drag expressionists, it can almost be said it started as the latter. When I asked Jamie, who isn’t much of a raver himself, when this split happened, he told me “(Furry) still lies in that sci-fi context and fantasy context in general… There’s a lot of furries who don’t necessarily do the rave scene, but it's a big aspect of it.” 

“If you’re looking at Dungeons and Dragons or you’re looking at Magic the Gathering, you’re gonna see a lot of anthropomorphic animals in that,” Jamie went on. “Dragonborn? Hello? If you’re always a Dragonborne, if you’re always a Lizardfolk, Aarakocra, Tabaxi, do some google searches.”

What I’ve always misunderstood about furries is their core motivation for getting out there. I always saw it as weirdness for weirdness’ sake—like disguise work for anonymous dealings— which I never had any gripe with. Let the people be, I say… But being a furry is an entirely different gig. Every furry is different, sat uniquely on an infinitely ongoing spectrum of sexual, gender, and personal expression… For many, it is no disguise: For Merlino, it was all about community; For Jazz, it’s all about letting loose; For Duncan and Zaman, it’s all about scholarly exploration; For Jamie and Elevenn, it’s all about identity. There is a lot of humanity in those beasts. 

“I found a community (where) I feel accepted and welcome for who I am, being able to feel like I’m seen for the first time and accepted without the fear of judgment… I get to go be a gay dog at a convention for three days and feel like I’m being myself.”