I didn’t really know what to expect. I briefly considered finding some animal ears of my own, or throwing on the City Paper pigeon mask lying in the back of my car — an attempt at “blending in” — but decided against it on the grounds that no matter what I did, there was no way I could pass for a true Anthrocon-attending furry. They’d see through me in a heartbeat.
Maybe that’s why the initial appeal of going was the same as what leads us to take psychedelics or drive very fast or stay out all night — that nagging desire we all have to run our thumb over the edge of experience. It’s what we do when we want to find out answers to questions like: what is too risky for us? Too painful? Too dangerous? Or, in this case: too weird?
Hanging out with a bunch of people steaming themselves in complicated and expensive costumes seemed like as good an option as any for trying to discern my own limitations. I imagined myself as a kind of Goldilocks, testing myself on the altar of three fursuited bears to figure out what was just right.
And — more callowly, I suppose — I thought it would be good material. A good story.
So ready or not, I showed up at the Westin hotel adjoining the convention center with sleep still lingering at the corners of my eyes. We were there for a special brunch for Anthrocon’s super and ultra sponsor attendees; these were the people who paid extra to support the convention, albeit in return for perks like this brunch with this year’s special guest.
(Later in the day, I identified one of the $1000 ultra sponsors in line for the Anthrocon talent show: a portly gentleman with cameras strapped to his head and shoulders, presumably live streaming. Someone standing near me commented that she saw him doing that at every convention she’s been to. When doors opened, an Anthrocon staffer ushered him through shouting: “Excuse me! There’s a rich guy coming through — make way!”)
But this year’s guest of honor? The city of Pittsburgh itself, of which my media colleagues and I were pointed to as representatives. Anthrocon chairman Dr. Samuel Conway (known at the convention as doctor. or Uncle Kage) explained in his distinctive cartoon-mad-scientist voice that the point was to honor Pittsburgh for “making significant contributions to the field of anthropomorphics.”
But there was a catch: we would have to sing for our supper. In exchange for the free breakfast (relatively luxe by hotel breakfast standards — real scrambled eggs and a berry-heavy fruit salad), we were told that we would be given the microphone and the opportunity to ask the room of 150 or 200 people questions. Looking around, I counted a Trib reporter cleaning his laptop with spit, some people from Pitt News, and one member of the Associated French Press. The photographers — disinclined to interviewing — began to sweat. I — disinclined to this kind of interviewing — began to sweat too.
Chris Mays, the kind volunteer assigned to wrangle press reassured us, and — probably as a distraction — began to tell us about how he got involved with Anthrocon. Mays served in the U.S.Navy, and only attended his first furry convention in 2008 after returning from active duty; he discovered furries by researching a term paper on them in college which led to him meeting Anthrocon’s Director of Programming John Cole (AKA K.P., or Kuddlepup) during the “dark ages of Instant Messenger.”
When they finally met at Anthrocon, a year later, Cole told him that he had been surreptitiously interviewing him all the while. Next year, Mays says, “I came back and I was on staff.”
Being a furry, Mays explained, was a way of expressing the sides of himself he felt compelled to hide in his daily life.
“I’m in the military, so sometimes I have to put on that harder persona,” he says.
His fursona — Osee, what most other people at the convention called him — is a dalmatian.
“My family raised dalmatians, and when I discovered the furry fandom it was a no-brainer,” he says. “The uniqueness of a dalmatian — they’re high-energy, they’re happy — that’s what I wanted to express. Not so much that I want to be a dog.”
Before I could ask anything else, the plates were cleared and Dr. Conway called the room to attention only to direct it squarely at us. As the eyes of 200 of the convention’s most elite furries rested on our table, it flashed through my head that this might have been a rebalancing of the scales. An eye for an eye: if you want to come here and gawk at us, it’s only fair we get to do the same. And so our rapid-fire round of questions began.
The questions themselves, and their answers, only revealed one thing to me. It was clear — as one furry elder said — that they wanted to be seen as “one big happy furry family.” This was brought home when I lamely asked the room to tell me what they wished the media would ask them.
An attendee hailing from Glenshaw, Pa., who went by Adam stood up to respond.
“One thing I wish the media would ask the furries is what makes us such a tight community? What brings us all together?”
And then, answering his own question: “Just the general common interest in anthropomorphic animals. There’s all that stuff on the outside world, all that political drama, all that strife, who’s what… It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, LGBT, it doesn’t matter. We can all come together to just have a good time and make friends, new and old.”
The relentless emphasis on the idea of the furry community returned again, and again, and again throughout the day. It certainly didn’t take long for it to come up when I found myself later that day at a table with three friends, all of whom were first-time Anthrocon attendees. They were shy and soft-spoken, but open to the questions I presented. I learned that they were all artists, which is how they’d met, and that this was their first time seeing each other in person.
Danni, a furry from New Jersey, told me that she had “experienced a great community by accident.”
“I think this is going to be the case for a vast majority, but my first experience was finding the Saturday morning cartoons and then going, ‘Wow, I love this show, let’s see what the internet is doing. I would love to find out more things about Sonic the Hedgehog.’ And wouldn’t that be a rabbit hole to fall down?”
I laughed — thinking of how easy it was as a kid to end up in weirder corners of the Internet — and she continued.
“It helped me meet some wonderful people that helped me learn some things about myself. And I met communities that were willing to accept me when I was very much an introvert.”
After talking for a while, Danni pulled me aside to show me a photo on her phone. “Without furries,” she told me, “I would still be this.” It’s recognizably an image of the same person, but clearly pre-transition and looking uncomfortable in an oversized dress shirt and pants.
She tells me it’s from three years ago, and says, “Danni was originally what I drew when I was that person. And then I decided I wanted to be closer to Danni because Danni felt like who was really me. Not that I never thought I’m a rabbit, I’m not that deep, thank you very much … but I did go further in looking at what actual steps do I need to take to at least live better, be better? I’ve had the surgeries, I’ve done the weight loss. I’ve worked on the voice, I’ve learned the techniques, did the hair. It’s a lot of work, but it was so worth it.”
Her friend Daydream — who came to Anthrocon from Texas — nodded. The fursona pictured on the badge hanging around their neck had — for lack of a better way of phrasing it — enormous breasts, and I noticed the trans lives matter bracelet around their wrist. She was carrying around a big fursuit head, the only one of the three stepping out in the fursuit parade later.
“As someone who has been wanting to transition for a while now, it helps me to get into the body that I want to be in without actually having to take too much of those steps right now,” she explains. “Because I can’t take them in the area I live in.”
It was impossible not to be moved speaking to them, recalling the reasons Chris/Osee gave for becoming a part of the furry community — the desire to express something they couldn’t otherwise. By finding a way out of their bodies, they also found a way out of lives they didn’t want or felt unable to truly live. They were able to give voice to the vulnerable, strange, uncomfortable parts of themselves.
I kept coming back to that throughout the course of the day as K.P. led us on an exhaustive tour of the site. Sure, I spoke to the people behind Rabbit Wranglers, the charity Anthrocon had picked to raise money for this year (“I’m so overwhelmed, it’s been wonderful” — the convention raised $52,000 for them over the course of the weekend); I spoke to a fursuit maker from Germany (when asked about gender in the furry world — “It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, if you’re an artist or just an attendee, we are all furries”). But those things didn’t stick with me half as much as when I asked K.P. about his fursonas and he rattled them all off faster than I could write notes on them, explaining how each one represented a different side of him: his inner child, his parental side, his paranoia, his arrogance, his love.
And I thought about it again when we ended up actually in the fursuit parade, running next to the barriers snapping photos of the endless procession of fursuiters. I couldn’t see anyone’s faces, of course, but I could see the faces they had made for themselves out of fur and wire and plastic. My favorite was a starry-eyed moth with fuzzy ears and a pale lavender skirt, who waved demurely from a wheelchair decked out with purple LEDs. I walked by them later without the head on in the dealers room, and felt momentarily like I was seeing their internal organs – how could that be what they look like on the inside?
I even got a little conflicted about the body pillow covers sold by two separate vendors in the dealer’s room. Though I was instinctively repulsed by the cartoony drawings of human-ish animals twisted into come-hither poses, presumably ready to be taken home and humped, I also felt it was an inevitable extension of the freedom from repression and to expression everyone kept telling me about. Asking one of the guys running the booth about it, he shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “I’m a part of a lot of fandoms. Star Trek, a lot of other things and… you know, everything has an adult side to it.”
Exhausted and bleary-eyed at the end of the day, I didn’t know what to make of anything. I was slumped in the Anthrocon Talent Show, watching a bluegrass duo sing about how it’s “too bad we’ve forgotten the animals we are.” One person came up on stage in a full fursuit and started doing stand-up — their shuddering breath audible as they cracked jokes about litterboxes in schools. They closed with a joke about their mother finding out they were a furry, assuring us at first that “she loves the community. She loves everything.” Someone started singing in Japanese. I gave up.
Everyone I encountered, all day, seemed so intensely vulnerable. It was like looking straight at the sun — you might find yourself warmed by it, but you’ll also end up with spots burned in your vision. In hindsight, I identified it as a kind of preteen earnestness that rarely remains beyond adolescence — something you only can have before you’ve learned through humiliation’s simple instruction that only so much of life is possible.
It was too late for me. I’d already learned my lesson. But it wasn’t too late for the furries — they’d found a way of narrowly escaping that knowledge, or, at the very least, momentarily forgetting that they’d learned it at all.
I remembered that Zeros, another of the three friends I talked to, said something similar to me. “The idea that, you know, when you were a kid, you could be whatever you want, wasn’t exactly true. But you could make it true in a sort of way. You could make it whatever you want, when you have that impetus to do that. And why not? Why not see where it goes?”
Well: we’re all animals in the end, aren’t we?
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2023.
