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♪
(eerie whistling)
- [Rod] There's this weird thing that humans do.
We take animals and we put our words into their mouths
to talk back to us, usually about us.
It's a very strange thing,
but we've done it for centuries.
We learned to read from anthropomorphic animals.
We learn right from wrong from anthropomorphic animals.
But most people don't notice it.
Furry fans are the people who notice that we do this,
and think that there's something
really special about that.
- Well, like the dictionary definition you get
is furry is a community of people
that enjoy anthropomorphic art, right?
- [Nonstoppup] I feel like it's way more than that.
It's a social space that is largely queer,
and gravitates around, using art as the vehicle
to explore identity.
- I sucked at drawing people,
so I would draw animals and everything.
- I sort of anthropomorphized my own dog
in a lot of my drawings, stuff like that.
- I was a part of a Lion King archive online,
and everybody role plays as lions.
And I remember just thinking, guys, the lions are great,
but what if we were wolves?
And they're like, ew, furry.
And I was like, furry? (laughs)
- I had my first word to get to this feeling that I had.
- Yes, yeah, I did your shirt.
I was initially into cosplay.
I cosplayed a lot of anime characters.
- I'm not alone.
There are other people out there that are into this.
I didn't come out fully, 'cause furry was taboo back then.
It's something weird, something odd.
It doesn't help that media never really had
a positive point of view to begin with.
- But I'm always grateful
for the friends that I've made
and the people that I've met along the way.
It's just a fundamental part of who I am.
- So I'm not super familiar
with the history of the fandom.
I know, I think it originated
out of a sci-fi convention in the 80s,
and I want to say probably California.
(cups clattering)
(wind chime clinks)
- I was already known as the science fiction geek
of the family.
The movie geek and the Disney geek.
I've been all of these things since I was a kid.
- I've been interested IN science fiction fandom
since the 1970s, when I went to
my first Star Trek convention.
I was a Navy brat.
Our family would go to the movie theater
at the Air Navy base in St. Louis and watch films.
- [Rod] One of the first times I've ever been to a theater,
my dad hated them.
He much preferred drive-ins,
but somehow we talked him into going
to a sit down theater to see "Robin Hood."
- [Mark] And I would fuss and cry and squirm always,
except in the movie "Bambi."
- [Rod] I was immediately hooked.
I was into that cartoon.
- [Mark] I just loved animation.
What it looked like and also how it was done.
- [Rod] I'm into it in a way that my school friends aren't.
I'm into it in a way that my parents aren't.
So what do I do?
I was looking for fandom.
A bunch of people getting together
and geeking out with each other about media.
- [Mark] We traveled across the country
and ended up moving to California in 1958.
- [Rod] I live in Southern California, close to Hollywood,
the media capital of the world,
or at least it was at the time.
- [Director] Background places, please.
- This is lovely. - Oh, it's lovely.
- [Man] Turn around, let's see your back.
- [Camerawoman] You had a nice pose, want to try it again?
- [Rod] LosCon 1980.
The local Southern California science fiction convention.
That was the first convention that I'd ever been to
that had an art show.
And it was beautiful.
A lot of it was princesses in flowing gowns,
star fields that you'd see on the side of someone's van.
And a lot of it was just absolutely amazing.
But then here are these pictures
of these semi-anthropomorphic weasel characters
with antennas like bugs.
A friend of mine said, Rodney, you gotta see these,
'cause they knew I wouldn't shut up
about my enjoyment of mustelid characters.
In school, I was considered very weird for that.
So I asked them at the art show, who does this art?
- [Mark] I had a video room at LosCon seven
showing some anime, some science fiction TV shows.
And this tall guy comes up and goes...
- Why do your pine martens have antennas?
- Oh my, this person recognizes
the kind of animals I'm drawing.
Most people thought they were cats.
And I said, well, sit down and I'll explain it to you.
We loved Japanese animation
and nobody knew about it except for the few shows
By 1977, myself and four other people,
some of whom were animators in the business,
actually TV animators.
We decided more people should see this stuff
and started a club.
And it was the first anime club.
- The very first anime fan club in America.
- A lot of the people that came to the meetings
were also into animal characters.
Which is why the mascot of the club
became one of my Skiltaire,
which are sort of an alien mammal based on weasels.
Rodney would come to the screenings
and we'd hang out and talk.
And we saw each other more and more and more after that.
Here were two people
who came from very different backgrounds,
but we were paralleling each other
amazingly on interests and passions.
Movies, animation, novels, comics.
And a few years later, we decided to become a couple.
- Rod and Mark are effectively,
the grandparents in the furry fandom.
I consider them the parents of the furry fandom,
but I've also been in the furry fandom
for 20 years at this point.
The Prancing Skiltaire household is like a museum
and library of furry things.
They had figurines all over the place.
They have bookcases and bookshelves of furry comics,
of anime comics, of sci-fi.
- [Rod] So this is San Diego Comic Con one year.
This is Don Bluth and Douglas Adams.
Me.
- [Rod] Remember they had
the live action muppet? - The live action muppet show.
- [Rod] There was lots and lots and lots
of science fiction conventions.
- [Attendee] Ah yeah!
- We saw the birth of the comic book shop.
- In the 70s, it was a time when
the Comics Code was still heavily enforced,
and so comic books all had to be black and white,
good and evil, superhero comics basically.
But there were these groups of artists
who were just chomping at the bit to do something different,
to do something, not superheroes,
to do something Funny Animal.
- [Rod] Funny Animal does not mean animals that are funny.
It means animals that are in the funnies.
- A lot of people think Funny Animal
and think that it all has to go to kids,
but a lot of it was being consumed by adults as well,
especially in the underground comic scene.
- Their sense of mischief, their sense of uninhibitedness.
I was sort of in a family where
I don't think there was a lot of elbow room
for my exuberance, my imagination.
And I think I projected a lot of that into these stories,
into these characters.
And I think a good deal of identification
developed from that.
- [Mark] Funny Animal comics used to be very popular
before superheroes took off.
- And they had their own fandom.
It was very spread and had a lot of difficulty
talking to each other in the old pre-internet days.
- [Mark] Now they've been lost to obscurity.
- The fandom started... pretty much-
Old folk tend to disagree
on where exactly it began,
but the commonly accepted starting point
was a painting done by the artist Steve Gallacci.
He had created a character, a furry character,
a pilot in a futuristic spaceship.
This piece was hanging up in an art show
at an east coast science fiction convention.
Now what you have to understand is
that hadn't been done before.
A furry, an anthropomorphic character,
was limited to a coyote hitting the bottom of a cliff,
standing up dusting himself off
and going to the Acme catalog.
- [Summercat] He also published one of the very first
furry anthology comics, "Albedo."
Steve had a whole world
about these anthropomorphic animals in outer space
and their politics, and war between different groups.
It really caught people's imaginations.
- It was from discussion of his work
that led to the very first furry party,
directly led to the very first furry party, actually.
Cause they moved to discussion
from in front of his art panel
to a private room to continue the discussion.
- It started out as gatherings of people
in room parties at science fiction conventions.
(people laughing)
- [Joe] His fans would show up and he discuss
this universe he'd created.
- And that was the beginning.
That was around 1980 or there about.
- [Joe] These room parties somehow
got the name of furry parties.
- The term 'furry' had got around and stuck enough
that when we had another party
at Westercon 1986 in San Diego,
we decided to call it a furry party.
All of these artists were amazed
that there were other people out there
drawing quote, unquote, Funny Animals
in the way that they did.
- Someone would walk into our party,
pull out a sketchbook and say,
I was the only one I thought that was drawing
this kind of stuff.
And that just kept happening again and again.
- They had this same revelation as I did.
I'm not the only one.
I always thought I was weird.
I always thought no one else would understand.
And here are people who are just like me.
- (TV plays cartoon)
- It was like a quest to find more people
who like the same thing we liked.
And it became the most important thing in our lives.
- I wanted to jump up on the Empire State Building
and singing an aria about it.
I thought we had stumbled across something just so cool.
Well, this is a classic Merlino.
This is the AvantGarden Gallery in downtown Santa Ana.
It's part of their arts district.
Mark and I have been hosting
what we call the art of furry fandom,
where we gather furry artists together
and have them put their stuff on display
along with all of this quote, unquote regular art
- Here was our art show and our sponsor lounge,
couple of panel rooms here, and a mini fursuit lounge.
And then here was our game room.
Hi, I'm Bubbles, I'm 25.
I'm the convention chair for
five different furry conventions,
including DenFur here in Denver, Colorado.
The hotel will give us this whole space
and we choose how we use it.
A little meet-and-greet area.
Some board-gaming and then our big, main events room.
(crowd chattering)
We have had hotels that are like,
so I looked up this stuff and what the heck is this?
I mean, DenFur is like
a celebration of the anthropomorphic arts.
Well, I found furry probably, oh,
probably junior high-ish.
I didn't know what furry was yet.
That was back in the days of Neopets on the internet.
I found all those message boards,
and I'm like, these are my people.
I guess I'm here.
My parents, they always thought it was
some weird kinky thing that like,
what is my daughter doing?
The fandom growing up was kind of a hobby,
especially working as a medic.
It was a side thing that I could do
and enjoy outside of work.
Now I run conventions.
I mean, my life is the fandom,
and I don't know where I would be now without it.
(crowd chattering)
- [Mark] We had the creators, the people that made art.
They were fans of comic strips.
They were fans of comic books
and they were all aiming to be in that business.
- Reed Waller started an APA-zine called "Vootie."
It had Funny Animals in it,
but it was more of an underground influence.
- APA, A-P-A, amateur press association.
- All the members of this APA-zine
would make photocopies of their artwork
and send it into the editor,
who would compile the entire book together,
and then send a copy out to all the members.
- And then you would get back,
here's my work and 25 or 30 other works.
- This is how a lot of people
over a large geographical area got a chance to get feedback
from other artists, authors, and creators.
- There was literally this giant culture
of people who were talking to each other
by writing into the letters columns
of their favorite magazines.
It was like the internet in slow motion.
We were a very strange fandom.
We didn't fully grasp how strange we were going in,
but we were not a fandom of a property,
nor were we a fandom of a genre.
Other fandoms would look at us and get extremely confused.
What are you about?
WHO are you about?
All of those specificities don't matter.
It's the overarching: animals-doing-things-
that-animals-don't-do, thing,
that binds this all together.
Beyond that, it can be anything.
- Probably the earliest furry work I would talk about
is a Omaha the Cat Dancer,
which exists because Taral Wayne who was fairly influential
in the early furry fandom wrote a letter to "Vootie."
(crowd laughs)
- In response, Kate Worley and Reed Waller
came up with Omaha the cat dancer,
which is about a exotic pole-dancing feline
and her boyfriend and sometimes girlfriend.
It gets a complicated storyline sometimes.
It was story with drama,
it was a story with realistic action,
with character motivations.
Omaha was widely acclaimed
as a great pro-feminist comic as well
because it showed a female main character
in control of her own destiny,
and she didn't let society decide what she wanted.
- We had all quietly discovered
that part of what brought us to furry characters,
anthropomorphic characters,
was that we thought they could be sexy.
It seemed kind of obvious
when you saw some of these characters
and how they were designed
that they were intended to be sexy.
(crowd cheers)
We felt we were just kind of
jumping on a big existing bandwagon.
The very first conventions I ever went to,
there were erotic material of every fandom.
So of course, furry is full of sexuality
because furry is full of human beings
who are alive and thinking and feeling.
- [Mark] Ken Sample quite often would draw
this little cougar guy that looked an awful lot like Ken.
We started calling that character Ken Cougar.
We thought, hey, we should have our own character too
that's actually us.
This was a big shift in the fandom.
We went from fans of animal people to being animal people.
♪
- [Mark] This created an explosion in art demand.
(crowd chattering)
- A fursona is someone's character that represents them.
That may be how they see themselves.
It may be an aspirational character,
what they wish they were or would like to become.
As an artist, it involves kind of
getting inside their head and figuring out
what is it that their fursona is saying?
Who is this person,
and what part of this human is this furry character,
this fursona that you're designing?
When you can figure that out and you show them
the final piece of art and they're like,
oh my gosh, that's perfect.
That's just like the greatest thing in the world.
- Because a lot of people,
their furry character is the better version of them.
This would be me if I didn't have these problems
or these things, this is the best of me.
Cause everyone likes to think of animals
as being more pure and more innocent and stuff like that,
'cause humans can do some pretty dark things.
Granted, so do animals in the real world.
But we're not getting into that, this is fantasy.
At least that's how I always interpreted it.
That, and I think some people just thought
certain animals are cute.
- [Mark] Everybody wanted pictures of their fursonas.
- [Rod] We started getting together discussion groups.
What is your fursona?
- My earliest character was a kangaroo
named White Death because I was 13
and I was super edgy.
- I chose a husky.
They were always my favorite dog,
and the personality wise of a husky is basically me.
- I really like border collies cause they're super smart,
and then I was like, but I need to be ferocious like a wolf.
It is a border Collie wolf character.
His name was Kiguel, and I had stolen the name
from an exchange student that was at my school.
- I think people join furry because of how encouraging
it is of exploring yourself, understanding yourself
and expressing it.
- I've been drawing for as long as I can remember.
I just picked it up as a kid and didn't really stop.
I'd say I identify a lot with birds.
I'm pretty quiet, and a little bit shy or flighty.
I deal with social anxiety and things like that.
I feel like I have one foot in the furry fandom
and one foot in fantasy illustration.
There's a humanness that you can impart to animals
or dragons or anything like that,
where there's that ability to relate to what you're seeing,
even though what you're seeing is fantastical.
I think that's really powerful.
I started doing conventions
to go and sell my work and show it.
I love it a lot more than just doing
like a mainstream comic convention
where it's all people celebrating
other intellectual properties
that are technically corporate.
- [Attendee] I can't wait to do that talk
with you tonight at 10:00 PM.
- One of the things I really love
about the fandom is how many people find it
to be their path out of their shell.
- I started looking at all the different suits and stuff
on Google search and they just looked so unique
and just fascinated me.
And I was like, I can do that.
I really wanna to do that.
And this is another creative outlet that I can use.
And I wanted to make my own character come to life
and be one of those fursuits.
I remember wearing my Luna suit for the first time.
I ran into so many people
that wanted to take pictures with me.
And it was just really exciting to like go around
and have fun in fursuit with other people in fursuit.
- [Attendee] Ta-da!
- You can look at their character
and learn things about them in that very moment.
Like what their species choice is,
what sort of colors they're using, what their name is.
That's all broadcasting a lot of things
that they want you to know about them.
And they might not even realize
what they're sending out subconsciously.
- Usually when I go to make a suit,
everything from gender to height
plays a role in creating these characters for people.
And it's actually really fun to help them explore
this whole new character that they're creating.
- [Cameraman] I think you're in... I think you're in focus.
- We had been going to BayCon,
and the anime fans were taking over the convention.
The people running the convention
kind of politely said could you guys maybe
get your own convention because
this is science fiction and it's becoming all anime.
Rodney and I said, gee.
Maybe we could have a furry convention just for furries.
So we started looking around for a hotel local to us.
We weren't coming in there with a corporate credit card
laying it down and say this pays for everything.
If I signed the contract with the hotel,
I was liable to pay the hotel.
- I will admit I was young and had kind of stars in my eyes.
I think we had a crew of like, five,
counting Mark and myself for running everything.
- We'd been tossing names around.
And I had the idea, how about conference
except put a U of an E?
ConFurence.
That's the name we picked.
We numbered the first convention 'zero'.
- Because we weren't certain it was going to work.
So we said to ourselves, let's get crazy.
If we're going to put on our own conventions,
let's try and do some things differently.
(crowd cheering)
One of the big things that you will always find
in the history of science fiction conventions
is the Saturday night masquerade.
- [Mark] It was the big event.
They weren't professionally lit in any way, shape, or form.
All of us myopic fans with their glasses could see
these glowing blobs sauntering down the stage.
- Yeah, I guess that looks pretty.
- We thought it'd be great
if people could actually see the costumes.
Maybe even close up.
- Is this a little better?
Is this is a little better?
- Yeah. - All right, okay.
Okay, we'll begin with
the first.
(audience claps)
Back then, art show was the biggest thing.
The art shows were always popular
and always made a lot of money for the artists.
(crowd chatters)
- We wanted to make furry conventions smart and fun.
You wanted to come to learn stuff,
you could learn stuff.
If you wanted to come to hang and be friends,
you could hang and be friends.
(crowd chatters)
- January of '91, a friend of mine and I
drove 44 hours straight from Tampa to SoCal
to ConFurence 2 in Anaheim.
It was a completely new experience.
My first trip out of the time zone.
Seeing hills for the first time,
then mountains for the first time, and then snow.
Just a completely new thing,
throwing me completely out of my element.
Just sheltered shy college kid, and next thing you know,
I'm in California amongst several hundred furries.
These comic artists that I'd seen in fanzines
and black and white comics,
they're right there in front of me.
And they're just, they're just people.
I was learning art myself and drawing from time to time
and next thing you know,
I'm a writing for the first six issues
of a magazine called "Yarf!"
- There's been some footage floating around
that's just adorable.
Terrible 80s hair, the 80s fashion.
And it was very clear that these people were having fun.
- [Panelist] Shop around for your material.
There are places out there that will sell you,
charge you a fortune.
- They've found a place to start exploring who they were
at a time and a place that
they never had been able to before.
It was very inclusive and very welcoming
and became sex-positive.
Not that it was about sex, but that when sex happened,
it was generally viewed favorably.
It wasn't dirty, wasn't wrong.
It was just sex.
And people have sex and that's fine.
- [Announcer] It's the Rod O'Reilly master mix
at ConFurence Zero.
- We were fully prepared for it to fall flat on its face
and cost us a bunch of money.
And then say, well, that was a great idea.
Let's try something else.
But it worked.
- [Mark] It gave me a feeling of accomplishment.
- We were onto something and we said,
let's take this football and run with it.
And we did.
- Can you test it, see if it sounds okay?
The con chair is always the one in the spotlight.
People think we're the only one making the decision.
This whole team of 60 to 100 people
put in months and months of work to put on this show.
We can't run it with five people.
It wouldn't happen, there's no way.
- Boiler to Truffle.
- The thing that I didn't know was
how many small moving parts there are.
What time things open, what time things close,
when things finally get locked down.
And how many people it takes to put on something like this.
(crew chatters)
- Usually set up starts right after the last one ended.
We start putting things in place.
We started listening to feedback.
We started approving things.
It's a very, very complex machine.
- This is A1 corgi to A1... uh,
whatever your species is, Bubbles.
There's a ton of different departments.
We have a business director, events director,
operations director, marketing, and public relations.
Theming, our HR managers.
IT and AV work, so all the sound and lighting that you see.
- [Boiler] Things like dealer's den,
which is a vendor space,
requires hand-choosing the dealers.
And we go through 400 applications every single year.
- There's only two female convention chairs
in the entire fandom.
And we have one and we're proud of that.
- I graduated as an EMT and from high school
at the same time and worked my butt off
to get to paramedic school as soon as I could.
The president of that program sat me down in an office
and said, look, you're going to be the only woman
in this class.
I think you should leave.
Just being able to overcome that in that profession,
also coming to furry has made a big difference
'cause in the convention leadership world,
there's not a lot of women.
It is still extremely male dominated.
A lot of people in the 9-1-1 first responder profession
hurt their back.
And that's unfortunately what happened to me.
I wasn't allowed to do that job anymore.
I do miss medicine,
but I get a lot of the same gratification out of this.
- Okay, yeah, so there's the con store stuff...
so I can get the GoH...
(radio muffles)
- The computer, the network,
the mass communication revolution
is what made furry fandom take off.
A whole lot of people who are furries are in IT.
- [Rod] But it was the realm of the military and colleges
that were the only people who knew about it.
Eventually the college peoples went home
and took a lot of the computer stuff with them.
- And then along came ARPANET, FidoNet, bulletin boards,
the proto internet.
A bulletin board service.
You had to dial in to this central network
and you could post text, pictures.
The pictures was the painful part
because it would take about 30 minutes to download it.
And you would see the cursor rendering across the screen,
every line of pixels.
- It was only a week until you got a reply to your post
instead of a month.
Hey, life improves.
- People today take it for granted.
Back then, this was new.
This was unheard of.
This was Star Trek stuff.
- It gave people a chance
to do role play as their characters.
- When I was just coming out of college
and I was starting to work,
the internet was a very small place.
We think of it as this big thing of global data,
but really, there wasn't as much out there
as people think there was,
and there weren't the browsers.
So we were using things like Gopher and Mosaic
and all kinds of weird technology
that doesn't exist anymore.
- [Rod] A bunch of people would get together
on a computer system,
form characters and go on an adventure together.
They started calling these things
multi-user dungeons, MUDs.
It would say you are now in a room
that is this big, it's colored red, it's made of brick,
and there is a dragon sitting there
that's going to eat your face.
- Other gathering started that were entirely social.
They didn't want to continue using the word MUD
because that still had that dungeon connotation.
So they started calling them MUCKS.
- With the online communities,
particularly Furry MUCK that started in 1990,
people were getting to know each other
and they would go to conventions to meet each other.
- [Joe Strike] Excuse me, are you THE Karno?
- Yes.
- [Joe Strike] Hi, I'm THE Joe Strike.
- Hey, hiya, Joe.
- [Joe Strike] Oh yeah, shake right there you go.
- I'm Mutie on Furry MUCK.
This is Chirik, who also is on furry MUCK.
- And it became more about meeting each other
and having this sense of community
beyond just people centered around creators.
That's how I first found that there was
an organized furry fandom.
The community was, was my solace, my salvation.
I was not very happy where I was.
The South side of Chicago at the time.
I spent a very, very long year there.
- [Cameraman] There we go, we got furries.
- And somebody mentioned
that there was a convention coming up
in Southern California called ConFurence.
Maybe you should go.
I said, I'm a postdoc at this point, I don't have any money.
I called my dear and sainted mother.
Kids, never lie to your mom.
I told my mom the truth.
I'd like to go to a conference in California,
but the professor won't pay for it.
That's a true statement.
So she sent me the money to go to the conference.
And that was my first furry convention.
Now, I had been going to science fiction conventions
for 10 years.
I've been volunteering at them.
I was a convention goer.
But this was the first time
that it was a convention that was entirely
of interest to me.
And started going to furry conventions
every year after that.
- Uncle Kage.
- Uncle Kage slash Sam Conway.
- He's very charismatic.
- He's very funny.
- He had this sort of mad scientist kind of persona,
- [Joe Strike] So you're gonna create,
you're gonna create real furries?
- I am, as a matter of fact.
- [Joe Strike] And how are you gonna do that?
- Well, it's quite simple.
You see the a, you take the,
Oh yeah.
I was sitting in the lobby,
and I was telling somebody a story.
It's in my nature
- As Mary Shelley said,
if you make the creature a gigantic statue,
you have a much easier time
in dealing with the parts, you see.
- And they simply said,
would you come back next year
and do that as an event?
What?
Complain about my job?
And they said, yeah.
I said, oh, I can do that, sure.
So I stood up in the lobby
and complained about my job for an hour.
- [Mark] Well, he was kind of doing standup
that was slice of life.
People loved his stories.
- He was already getting a reputation for his performances.
And we were just thrilled to have him at our show.
And that was 25 or so years ago.
And people still fly me all over the world
to get up on stage and talk.
That's all I do.
I don't understand it.
I just do it and they keep inviting me back,
so I must be doing something right.
- After Furry MUCK,
almost all the furries were college students.
This tripled our attendance.
Since we had all of the role players coming in,
all the college students coming into the fandom,
the gender of the content began to shift.
You had a lot more males,
you had a lot more lesbian couples and gay couples.
- People don't realize it.
But back in the 60s and 70s,
there wasn't that much of a gay community.
- Where could you go for companionship?
Some place where you had an equal chance
of getting your teeth kicked in or getting arrested.
- [Rod] Right about the time that furry fandom was hitting
was right about the time that the AIDS crisis hit.
♪
(crowd chattering fades)
- I know people who lost dozens of friends.
An awful lot of people had to come out of the closet
and get active for their own survival.
There was in fact, an LGBT contingent in the furries.
We're going to celebrate both of those at once.
- I still remember how I felt when I joined the fandom,
like when I was like a teenager
and I had no idea if I was queer or not.
And I thought I was really scared to talk about it.
And I couldn't tell my friends.
- High school was rough.
High school was rough.
I was pretty socially isolated, I was nerdy, I was bullied.
- The community around me at the time
was not queer friendly, or even art friendly.
- Doing art's really vulnerable.
Like if you put something on the page,
then you probably did that for a reason.
About midway through college,
I started questioning my gender
and eventually transitioned.
And that was a very powerful time of my life,
where I got to really re-sort my identity
as this purpose-driven person.
- When I started to transition,
I actually explored the identity first with my character
to see, I guess, if it felt right
to become more masculine.
It was no longer Luna.
It was now the masculine Nate.
And it's really helped me explore
what parts of myself I wanted to be
as more trans masculine versus, you know,
the meek female. I used to be.
A safe place to explore the transition
without transitioning myself first.
Trans experiences are just human experiences.
Ultimately, furry is also about human experiences.
- Once I discovered the fandom,
I could chat with people online.
I could express my creativity.
I could make friends.
- Well, I can actually talk about
being queer without being worried
that people make fun of me.
- What better place is there
to put yourself out there and say,
hey, this is how, I'd like to be seen or treated.
And people will meet you on your own terms
in a way that you just don't get anywhere else.
♪
- The dealer room closes at eight,
they could just be right closing up.
- [Rod] The first three ConFurences,
everyone who showed up
was someone that I knew personally by name.
- [Attendee] Very nice, keep it up.
- [Rod] We realized that the con
had gotten so large that we didn't know everyone by name.
- Pull like that, pull the mask down
against your cheeks.
- [Cameraman] This'll be interesting to watch some day.
(crowd laughing)
- If you asked who we were and could you point at us,
they wouldn't know.
And that was perfectly fine.
But it was always about this thing.
It was not about us.
We never wanted to be celebrities.
So they were very, very few fursuiters.
There was only, I think, maybe one or two
at the earliest furry conventions.
- The suiting was almost nonexistent.
People would just paint their bodies.
And that was it.
- [Mark] One of them is Hilda the Bambioid,
created and performed by Robert Hill.
- [Cameraman] I see we have a bambioid there.
- [Attendee] Hello, bambioid.
- You could pretty much say
that it was the original fursuit.
- Oopsie, hello, how you doing?
I was part of the burgeoning fursuiting community.
You can make your own mascot.
That was mind blowing.
- [Announcer] For your consideration for ConFurence eight
favorite costume is...
(audience cheers)
- The convention ConFurence grew
to be the largest convention in its day,
over a thousand people,
which was huge for the time.
But then there was negative publicity about it.
And I'm not sure how much detail
you want to get into about that.
(group cheering)
- [Attendee] Da da da da da da.
- [Mark] We did have some incidents at conventions
where there were people getting completely drunk
coming out into the convention and causing trouble.
Or in some cases getting stoned out of their mind
and having to be taken off the property.
In the very early days,
a furry convention was, an unintentional pun,
a rather wild and untamed unfair.
- [Crowd Member] Yeah!
- There was not a lot of attention paid to public decorum,
and people are out there to have fun.
They were letting themselves go.
Let's just be crazy.
That's fun and that's fine,
if you keep in mind that you're still in a public venue.
Folks tended to forget that.
- Rod. (group screaming)
- [Attendee] Oh my god,
it's the psychedelic Cousin Itt!
- [Announcer] The bidding starts at $20.
(vacuum buzzing)
- Well, let's see now.
Should I talk about the semen in the elevator?
No, I don't know if there's any truth to that.
I think there were people
who wanted to give the furs a bad reputation,
and I think a lot of this misinformation was spread.
But there might've been people
who felt a little too liberated.
- This caused us to have to do something
we didn't think was necessary.
We had to put rules of conduct in our program book.
And we were criticized.
Why didn't you have rules of conduct
from the very beginning?
Because we didn't think people were that stupid.
- [Director] Okay, Here we go.
- And when we had 200, 300, 400 people, we'd have problems.
Their twist on it was yeah,
Mark and Rodney allow that kind of stuff at conventions.
- I remember when I was working at Disney television
in the mid 90s.
The executives at Disney and at the other studios
knew about furries,
but they did not particularly like the furries.
- Some furry artists have been turned away
because of the people that are interviewing
that heard about these furry conventions.
- And interestingly, it wasn't
just because of the adult material.
It was also because they saw people
trading art back and forth freely.
And they did not like the idea
of property being freely exchanged like that.
It was kind of a professional hazard
to let anyone know that you were involved
with the furry fandom.
I had snuck away to go to ConFurence for the weekend.
And two of my coworkers had apparently shadowed the con
and seen me there.
As soon as I came into work,
they popped in my cubicle and started going
furry, furry.
And I was like, oh my god.
I mean, they've been there themselves,
So what could they say?
- [Cameraman] You guys here for a convention of your own?
- Yeah.
- Computers? - Marketing.
- [Cameraman] Whoa, even better.
- There was a large fandom out here in California,
And there was also one back east,
kind of around New York.
- There had been an attempt to start up
an east coast furry convention,
'cause in the United States, there was ConFurence
in Southern California, and that was it.
So in 1997, they started Albany Anthrocon.
I went because it was only four hours away
from Philadelphia.
I could drive there instead of flying across the country.
It was obviously a first year con, kind of cute.
As I said, I had been volunteering
at science fiction conventions for years.
And I was approached by one of their committee members
who said, would you be our guest of honor next year?
As the convention was coming up,
they had an email list for staff members.
A longstanding problem that I have is
I have a tendency to stick my nose in
whether it's wanted or not.
Things were coming across the mailing list
and I'm going, hmm.
And I would hesitantly type out
are you guys really sure you want to do that?
You see Philcon tried this in, in 1984,
and here, here, this, this list of terrible things happened
and they swore high and low they'd never do that again.
If you do this, that would get around those problems.
Then they started asking my advice.
Well, how would you run this?
What would you do here?
How should we do the following?
They're honest questions, so I answered honestly.
As the convention date was approaching,
there was a concern over the finances.
The chairman of the convention realized
that we are probably going to completely lose our shirts.
We're going to have to shut this down.
Some of the staff members came to me and said,
would you take over?
And I said, this is all kind of happening awful fast, folks.
First off, I'm your guest of honor.
It looks kind of bad if I'm also your chairman that year.
Okay, I'm willing to do it because I want to help out.
It's a good little convention.
You guys are really gung ho.
I'm happy to do it.
But it's gonna have to be done differently.
You can't run it like a bunch of college kids
having a party anymore.
If you want this to succeed and have another year,
you're going to have to run it as a business.
- [Cameraman] Tell us all about Albany Anthrocon.
- Albany Anthrocon no longer exists.
- [Cameraman] It's now become?
- It's simply become Anthrocon, the Furry Revolution.
We moved to the place that it all began.
The Hilton Valley Forge.
That's where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
- Actually in the Hilton? - In the Hilton.
- Signed in the Hilton? - Signed in the Hilton.
- Will you turn that off already?
So these people don't know.
- Finally, in 1999, I attended
my very first furry convention, which was Anthrocon.
That was one of the first major things
I'd ever traveled to by myself.
There were probably all of 30 events for the entire weekend.
But for me, that was a lot to do.
And this guy just came down.
He said, you look troubled my friend, what's wrong?
And I was like, well, I just don't know what to
make of all this.
He put his arm around me and he said,
I want you to take a look around the lobby.
This is a moment you will remember
for the rest of your life.
- [Cameraman] He's doing it again.
(fan whirring)
- And that was the moment that I really realized
I found a group of people that I not only related to,
but they made me feel good about myself.
My personality had a place in the world.
And the person that told me that was Uncle Kage.
- I got us a great hotel, it's perfect.
We can be there forever
because it's got more space than we could ever possibly use.
First year, bam, full.
The next year we filled it and two hotels down the road,
We're going to need bigger space.
I looked around in Philadelphia, got the problem solved.
The Adam's Mark has gotten more space
than we could ever possibly need.
Bam, full that very first year.
- 1,457 furries are in the room.
- That was 1,457 in case you didn't hear that.
How many of us are there?
When I was negotiating with Pittsburgh,
I said, okay guys, it's perfect.
We got more space there,
and they said, shhhh, stop, don't say it.
I'm still not allowed to say that phrase
in regards to this city.
It just got more space than we ever possibly need.
- Every convention has a hook.
The hook for Anthrocon is Pittsburgh itself.
It's the city.
The downtown area is vibrant and alive,
and people are coming down to watch the fursuit parade.
We were recently told that Anthrocon
is the third most valuable convention
to the city of Pittsburgh itself.
We have become a Pittsburgh institution.
We're not just an event that happens.
We are now part of the city's art scene.
I don't think any other convention anywhere
has that sort of distinction.
(drums banging)
- [Bubbles] I hate going on stage.
I get stage-fright hardcore.
And people are like, you're the con chair.
You have to be extroverted.
You have to be willing to talk to anybody
and talk about anything.
And I'm not.
The suit definitely helps with that.
I love being in a costume and being able to act
like something else, 'cause in high school,
I was the school mascot.
I'm more open and comfortable with myself.
- Since I was like three years old,
I was trying to take a feather duster
and put it in my shorts.
And then I have a tail.
If you found a mask with feathers on it,
possibilities were endless.
So I was just trying to make the perfect costume.
And I found furries where
we're all trying to get the perfect costume.
I had just gotten out of high school
and I was starting to go to college,
and I'm making a fursuit for some reason,
I called a friend up and I was like,
take me to PetSmart.
I need to buy a collar in my costume.
As we're driving back home, there's this carwash.
And we just see this guy hopping around,
struggling to get people to come to the carwash.
And I was like, he needs my help.
I jumped in, I was doing jumping jacks
and just helping to get a bunch of people to pull over.
And it was a success.
People were like, where did you get that?
And then when they'd find out I made it,
they were like, can you make me one?
And I was like, oh, well, I don't know.
- I was obsessed with "The Lion King,"
obsessed with pretty much any animal movie.
So I built my first suit at 17
and I wore it for Halloween at my high school.
I went to college, got my degree
in something completely unrelated
and was just doing it on the side.
And then it just kind of accidentally became a business.
And now I'm doing this full time.
- I would see the suits being built and I'm like,
I want to do that.
I could get involved.
And I didn't really feel very much technology
was really being used in building these things.
It was a challenge for me.
I wanted to figure out how to do it my way.
- My whole life, I struggled with anxiety and depression,
and a few years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar as well.
It's really hard and it just tears you down,
and I would come home from work everyday crying.
Nowadays, I feel like I've done something good.
I'm creating something for someone to enjoy.
I'm much more stable mentally, and it feels really good.
- I had worked really hard to have a nice house,
a nice car, typical American dream,
but I found it was really empty.
And I found that it was, this is, you know,
it was not fulfilling at the end of the day.
And I've been having more fun in doing this
than I think I've ever had with anything in my entire life.
- [Lucky Coyote] I teamed up with Scuff,
'cause Scuff was starting to build
pieces and parts on his own.
- Not only do you want a fursuit to look good,
it needs to feel good.
Every fur suit we build is custom,
but that's your fursuit.
It should feel like your fursuit when you put it on.
- I think we've made over 600 fursuits.
I've kind of lost track.
(crowd chattering)
- [Announcer] If you can see the camera,
you're in the picture.
All right, let's see those paws up.
- It's not just about the animal characters.
It's about the people and it's about the, you know,
the atmosphere of it.
You've got writers, artists, animators,
performers, musicians that all collide
into this one massive group.
And that's what makes it interesting.
There's always something new.
My daughter was in the fursuit parade.
People complimented her on her suit,
thought she was adorable.
You want your child to have as many of those moments
as they can, 'cause in the adult world,
you know, you can't guarantee that for them.
- [Interviewer] The talent, he's a, whoa.
We don't know nearly enough about furries.
We're trying to learn.
Excellent.
- Get in touch with Mark Merlino.
- [Interviewer] He's the man, he the man, yeah.
- The earliest media coverage that I can remember
was in 1993.
The crew from Sci-Fi channel called Sci-Fi Buzz
wound up going to one of the early ConFurences.
And they did a very positive piece.
We weren't as careful as people are these days,
so if people got it wrong,
I quite often would just let it slide.
I sometimes regret that.
- [Mark] This is 2001.
If you look through it,
you'll see a lot of photos of furries
enjoying themselves in fur meets,
and people are talking about their own take on furry.
Interspersed with other articles
talking about poly groups and orgies and stuff like that.
That's not what furry fandom was all about.
- I was approached in 99 by a guy
claiming to be a film student.
I thought, you know, I'd help him with this film project.
So I just answered a few questions
and ended up at on MTV in a rather unsavory show.
- What was even worse was the CSI episode in 2003.
They actually had locals on the show as consultants
who say that the show decided to
ignore everything they said,
- Unfortunately, that was the image that was now given.
This is what the world was seeing.
A boss would see at a clip somewhere on the news.
Oh, you're one of those weird freaky people
I heard about.
Some folk lost jobs, lost relationships.
- I had people at Disney telling me that I had to leave
in order to focus on my career or you know,
or else I wouldn't have a career in animation.
And so I had to make a decision and that decision
was to leave the fandom to focus on a career.
- You don't tell your family, you don't tell your work,
you don't tell other people.
- That definitely made for a insular environment,
especially in the early 2000s.
- And you, you need to sell your magazine or something.
You want people to pick that thing up and read it.
Well, you can talk to this person for 45 minutes
about, oh, I made this fursuit and it took me this long,
and here's how I stitched it, and this is the.
You can talk to this guy over here.
Well, yeah, I'm a writer, I write stories.
And then my stories are all about furries,
and I put furries in the stories and I write.
Or you get the guy who says yeah,
I like to have sex in my fursuit.
That's what's gonna sell.
Damned if I'm going to stand around
and let you put this TV show on
that's going to make them embarrassed
to be a part of this remarkable thing
that we have created together.
So I fought back.
Here is the problem we face.
The media wants to do stories on furry fandom.
Very, very often, they are going to be asking questions.
Does that sort of thing go on at your convention?
Look, I run the thing.
If that sort of thing was going on in my convention,
number one, I would like to think I know about it.
Number two, why am I not invited?
Yeah, you're all laughing.
Ha ha, it's a joke.
You notice I didn't say no?
Never lie.
But you can minimize it.
- Anthrocon is not just for people in costume.
It's for artists, cartoonists, performers,
and we have writers, artists, puppeteers,
and there'll be wandering about.
If you see a large raccoon on the streets of Pittsburgh,
Don't be alarmed, it's just us.
If they're gonna have their misconceptions,
the only thing we can do is stand back and say, here we are.
- [Michele Light] Kage is always is out there talking
about the money we bring to the city
and the good will we bring to the city.
- He knew how to make furry
appealing to the public at large.
And it is just so gratifying and rewarding
to come to a place where you're welcome and embraced.
- Yes. Welcome to opening ceremonies
of what looks to continue to be
the largest and furriest convention in the world.
- Everybody's scared of saying it.
It's fine, sex is fine.
And sometimes we have it.
It's not what defines the community,
but it's part of the community.
And for a lot of people,
this community helped them discover what that means.
How could you just try to say it doesn't exist?
That's insane.
- I've been accused of whitewashing the fandom.
I've been accused of, oh, he's trying to control the media.
Well, you know what?
You try it someday.
You know, let's get you in front of a camera
and have them say, okay,
so what's it like to have sex in a fursuit?
Let's have you answer that question.
Especially if you know that your grandmom's watching.
Or your mom or your dad or your future spouse.
(audience claps)
When furry fandom first began,
it was organized by some fellows who,
as enthusiastic as they were,
really did not pay much mind to the sort of public image
they were giving to this burgeoning fandom.
Let's face it.
I was there.
Kind of looked like pride fest on an acid trip.
(fireworks booming)
I have worked very, very,
very hard to foster good relationships with the local media
and with the city of Pittsburgh.
I want to keep it that way.
- [Panelist] I've heard at least one opinion up there
that the physical aspect seems more prevalent,
the sexual aspect.
- Why do you think, where do you think it originated from?
- If you're going to put all your effort
into one little piece, you want to make sure it sells,
and the one that's sure to sell is that hot steamy one.
- On the internet, it's horrible,
'cause like you cannot find any good, normal furry art.
- You go into the ConFurence art show,
and even in the general audience section,
there's stuff that I wouldn't show a child.
Or my mother or any of my friends
outside furry fandom.
- I mean, sex sells everywhere.
You look in any subculture, mainstream subculture,
goth, furry, anywhere.
- Not to the extreme extent
that it is portrayed and pushed and produced
in furry fandom.
- Next, please.
- We started getting problems with people
trying to sabotage the convention pretty early on.
You had to chalk this up to the fact
that people didn't like Rodney and I,
especially because we were a couple.
They naturally assumed our main interest
was have gathering of like-minded people for sex.
And a lot of these rumors were strung on for years.
- And then a Bay Area, furry convention
was gonna to happen in January.
This same time ours had happened for nearly 10 years.
So we decided to change our dates.
A lot of the fans from San Diego said,
how about the Town and Country?
We've been having science fiction conventions
there for years.
So I went and talked to the hotel
and I cut a deal with them.
But we tried have our planning meetings in San Diego.
The staff from up here would not come.
They wouldn't drive it.
And more and more of the responsibility
fell on me and Rodney.
And it was taking all my time.
- [Radio] ...by all the flood water.
- As the nail in the coffin,
we had the worst April weather
they've ever had in San Diego in 20 years.
It was actually hailing in San Diego.
Attendance was down by at least 200 people.
When I had the staff meeting at the end of the convention,
I said, okay, I have worked with Rodney,
ran this convention from zero to 10.
I am stepping down.
People looked around for someone to replace me
and the gentleman who had been doing our daily newsletter,
stood up and said, I will take it over.
And everyone said great.
I guess it was in 2003.
He basically stood up at the closing ceremonies and said,
I am officially closing ConFurence forever.
He had told us that he had trademarked the name
and that nobody else could ever have
a convention called ConFurence.
- I feel strange saying this,
but I expected it to get bigger.
I just had this dream in my head
of everything kind of coming together,
but we're going into an era
where people are more about breaking apart communities
rather than coming together into big communities.
And unfortunately, there's furry, too.
- Conventions were kind of viewed
by their host hotels and their host cities
as, what is this stuff?
Some folk got together.
They called themselves the Burned Furs
having been burned by this image that was being projected.
The Burned Furs were out to clean up the fandom,
get rid of all of that sex related stuff.
Now, I kind of agreed in principle with that concept.
We okay, we can have fun,
but can we do it over there, where people aren't looking?
- And I thought, hey, this seems like a good idea.
Clean up fandom, why not?
But it was to the extreme.
- I've seen this fandom to generate from a very nice thing
into a endless parade of human debris.
Thank you very much.
- This is Limbaugh. (panelists clap)
- The Burned Furs felt that there were people
in fur fandom that they did not like
who should be somehow pushed out of the fandom.
- Particularly people who like Rodney and I,
who were gay or bi and demonstratively so at conventions.
Hanging out with their boyfriend,
cuddling on the couch or something.
What if, what if a underage person sees that?
- So this group wanted to do something about it
and they had a manifesto of cleaning up the fandom.
No one was complaining
when all of the art was female pinups
and heterosexual couples.
It was okay.
- And ultimately the pushback against porn and adult content
in furry is an attempt to push LGBT furs out of furry.
- Somehow Mark and I were at fault
for the appearance of LGBT people in among furry fandom,
which if we wanted to, we wouldn't have known how.
Furry fandom has attracted every stripe
of the political spectrum.
Although we could all sit around and discuss Donald Duck,
if we got into talking about whether or not
there should be gay marriage allowed,
there would be bottles being thrown.
- It's interesting how this entire thing got sidetracked,
essentially got completely sidetracked.
- The current alt-right problem
in furry fandom is the current alt-right problem
in the United States,
which is the current alt-right problem.
In Western civilization,
- You are seeing more politics
than you've ever seen before get in.
I think once you've got the Trump administration in,
you saw a lot of furries become
much more politically active,
and that's made it more difficult for convention organizers
to know what they should and shouldn't respond to.
- We have a pocket of individuals here,
intertwining with the larger online community
of the alt-right.
Entangled with people that represent
a hate message towards marginalized individuals.
- Different conventions have had politics take them down.
- For the furry community, that's pretty bad
'cause a lot of us are LGBTIA.
I don't think that I would have been
the person that I am today
if I didn't have furry cons.
No doubt.
- Thank you for this year.
Thank you for everything up to this year.
And we'll see you tomorrow.
We'll see you next year and good evening.
(audience claps)
- [Attendee] Hi mom.
- Well, early on I had encountered people
who said I came to the convention
and I walked into the lobby and I felt I'm home.
I'm finally home.
They found their family, they found their people,
they found their culture, and that aspect has not changed.
(crowd chattering)
- Once I'm committed to something,
I don't want to let it go.
I can't let it go until the dies.
We've all grown as a community together,
but we want to make sure that
what we're doing now is what the community wants now.
And I know if we lose these conventions,
we'll lose a lot of our community.
We have younger people coming into the fandom
and they see how open everybody is and they deserve that.
They deserve the opportunities that we have
or that we didn't have when we were younger.
- We can create environments where people are safe,
where we don't overreact, where we're not dramatic
and just try to be in the best interest
of our attendees overall, and let them have
the environment they can to be they wanna be.
- A lot of the negativity
comes from these big voices online.
And when you take it into perspective,
there's a thousand other people
that are having a good time.
I couldn't let it go.
I would, I would feel so guilty.
I think this year went really well.
2,700 attendees.
We raised $15,000 for charity.
- For Denver, we have Freedom Service Dogs,
where last year we raised $15,000.
So they can have an awning for the dogs
when they go outside so it didn't burn
their paw pads.
When they're going from the indoor training facilities
to the outdoor kennels,
- [Bubbles] We raise as much money as we can
for the charity we choose.
We try to pick them locally
and they're usually animal related.
- I really feel like I owe a lot to the community
just because it's taught me so much.
It's made me become much more
of a open and understanding person.
- And we are, I think, outgrowing those stereotypes.
I think we're becoming appreciated for ourselves.
- Artists are really like the backbone
of so much of what happens
because that's how we're representing
these characters at all.
- I remember at the first few conventions,
no, nobody's ever gonna make a living off of doing this.
You're crazy to think that, and here we are today
and there's probably hundreds of artists
making some or all of their living off of this.
- I think the fandom has made my life better.
- I probably wouldn't even have
a quarter of the life that I do now.
- I'd have a different career.
I don't know if I'd be happy.
- I'd be just a nobody in a crowd.
- I would never have met my husband.
I would never have met my best friends.
- Every single one of my closest friends is a furry.
- Just thinking about not having that experience is hard.
- Not having that, I don't know what I do.
- I don't really want to think about
because it seems like it would be
a very, very dark road to go down.
- We have our typical story we have about fandom.
- What is furry fandom?
On, it's a bunch of guys who like sitting around drawing.
- And a lot of the films were really popular.
- That was the first convention.
(crowd chatters)
- [Mark] Our fandom is based on a concept,
and that concept isn't going away.
- 1 go around to conventions
and I look at the fur suit parade.
I look at the dances.
I look at the dealers' rooms and how big they've gotten
and I'll admit it.
I sometimes will walk around kind of going.
Yeah, yeah.
I was involved with starting this, yeah.
- We're still in it.
And we're probably not going to get out of it.
I don't intend to ever get out of it.
I think the fandom is something
I'm the most proud of in my life.
- When people are having fun at a convention,
at a meetup, online, or just two people
who never would have met one another
who discover a mutual love of furry
and they get married.
(crowd whooping)
Yeah, that's what we're about.