Last year, she came across Facebook posts of people claiming they would bring guns to Anthrocon, the world’s largest furry convention, and personally alerted FBI.įor Samuel Conway, a professional research scientist and chairman of Anthrocon, the skewed image of the furry world is explained by its defiantly personal/introvert nature: whereas all other fandoms are consumers of properties put out by studios, authors and networks, furries invent their own idols. She recalls last year’s suspected hate crime at Midwest Furfest in Chicago, which was evacuated after chlorine gas was leaked into the conference venue. “And I think it’s because people are afraid of things they don’t understand.” “I do think ‘fursectution’ is real,” says Gerbasi (who does not identify as a furry), using a portmanteau term referring to perceived persecution of the fandom from outside elements. “And I still have questions.”Įven today, Dee, who quit her advertising job in Denver in 2012 for full-time fursuit making, doesn’t use her real name for business. “Even I had some preconceived notions of like, ‘Gosh, furries are a bunch of deviants kind of weird,’” Dee remembers, laughing. When Dee made her first costume – a bear, out of couch cushions – eight years ago, she was reluctant to be associated with the community, even as an artist. As a result, fur fandom have become far more stigmatized than other similar nerd niches, such as anime and cosplay. In her experience, people have either never heard of furries or they have a wildly distorted idea of it. “Because it really doesn’t represent the reality we see in the fandom.” “We researchers are horrified by that stuff,” says Kathleen Gerbasi, a social psychologist who has researched the furry community extensively. The show Entourage presented a pink bunny fursuit as a sexual prop, and in CSI-episode Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas, furries are portrayed as fetishists mainly in it for the “yiff” – furry porn or sex. A 2001 Vanity Fair article brought up both bestiality and plushophilia (sexual attraction to stuffed animals), and defined furry fandom as “sex, religion and a whole new way of life”. S tereotyped as less innocent than they look by mainstream media, furries tend to get a bad rap. With more than 40 creations lined up, 2016 is already fully booked. No two creations are alike, though most can be machine-washed and kept shiny with a few strokes with a pet brush. New costume makers enter the market every week and fursuits gets ever more advanced: at an additional cost, jaws can move, tails wag and eyes light up with LED-lights. Dogs and big cats never go out of style, though hybrids like “folves” (fox + wolf) and “drynx” (dragon + lynx) are catching on. To not have to conform to what people think being an adult is like.”Ī spirit animal of sorts, the fursona can be just about any real or mythological creature the individual feels connected to.
“It’s fun to just be silly, to use your imagination. “What draws people in is that they can create this character which is a better version of themselves,” she explains. To this day, Dee has brought more than 300 “fursonas” (furry personas) to life – including Baltoro the Fox, realistic with taxidermy eyes, hand-molded silicon paws and muzzle and digitigrade hind legs Zeke the Hyena, cartoonish with hand-stitched stripes and airbrushed abs and Blaze, a vixen with flirty eyelashes and curvaceously padded chest.