While some enjoy dressing up as their fursonas, others prefer making or consuming animal-inspired fan art, while others still simply enjoy the camaraderie inherent in the community. “We’re fans of each other here.”įurries are also unique in that they all approach the fandom from different vantage points. “Being a furry isn’t about being a fan of a person or a group of people,” says Berger, the media-relations lead for MFF. In the broader landscape of fan culture, furries are relatively unique: while Star Trek and Star Wars and brony (the term for male My Little Pony fans) cons are united by specific franchises or characters, that is not the case for furries, who largely devise their own characters, called fursonas. It’s easier to form an emotional connection to a piece of content, whereas before it was more passive.” “Now if you like a piece of art someone has done, you can speak to them, see how they act. “Before, people came across the fandom via things like Disney cartoons, and it was a type of media you could consume, versus one you could participate in,” says Hookaloof, 24, a bear. The advent of the internet - specifically furry-related message boards and IRC channels - brought more furs together. But the furry fandom as we know it has its roots in the early-to-mid-1980s, when a group of sci-fi con attendees who bonded over anthropomorphic animals organized room parties devoted to their mutual interest before splintering off to form their own event. In this sense, furries are “both one of the oldest fandoms and a relatively modern one as well,” says Alex Tang, an artist and designer who is also currently working on a book about the history of convention culture. One of the oldest known works of art, the Paleolithic Löwenmensch sculpture, depicts a human with the head of a lion the ancient Egyptians also worshipped half-man, half-animal deities and Aesop’s fables feature a panoply of animal characters imbued with human traits, from cunning to pride to sloth (the three-toed version of which derives its name from the term for laziness). Photograph by Lyndon French for Rolling StoneĪt its most fundamental level, the concept of anthropomorphized creatures has its tentacles deep in history, further back than furry cons or anime or even a certain relentlessly chipper, shirtless cartoon mouse. (Despite his posting a photo from check-in on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, Berger and MFF attendees said that as far as they know, he did not make good on his threat.)Ī dance party at Midwest FurFest. As a fox named Tiller told me upon check-in, “Everyone here is welcome - except Nazis.” This message was particularly salient this year, after far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolous made some highly public threats last September to gate-crash the convention. In so keeping with its increasingly family-friendly image, the fandom has become intent on promoting itself as a beacon of acceptance and inclusivity, and MFF is no exception. That’s in part due to the i ncreasing number of younger children and their families who are gravitating to furry culture - during my time at Midwest FurFest, I saw children as young as seven attending dance competitions and meet-and-greets accompanied by their parents, having stumbled on the fandom via YouTube or TikTok. MFF is widely touted as the biggest furry con in the world, and its attendance has increased exponentially in recent years: While the con saw only about 1,000 attendees in 2005, it reported more than 10,900 guests in 2018, and Matt Berger, media-relations lead for MFF, estimates that 12,000 were in attendance this year. As the voice-over to an intro presentation for FurFest sonorously boomed over a dubstep beat, “You know you are more than a human.… Now you are the beast that slept inside your mind.”
If you fall into any of these categories, then furries are your kind of people, and FurFest the place to unleash the human-size sergal (a fictional rabbit/shark/wolf amalgam) within. Maybe you’ve long thought it would be rad to buy a $10,000 curvy hippo costume and enter a breakdancing competition. Maybe you’ve always felt an inexplicable affinity with Tony the Tiger. Maybe you really liked drawing wolves during eighth-grade homeroom. While there is a contingent of furries who do derive sexual pleasure from the subculture, the fanbase is much more broad than that.
Like most subcultures, the furry fandom is a largely internet-driven phenomenon, providing a label for a pre-existing feeling that has always lived, dormant and unnamed, inside a select number of people. The mainstream media has historically painted furries as sex-crazed, socially maladjusted freaks who enjoy rubbing up against each other in giant bunny costumes.