Who Is Running New Anthrodam?

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A surprise came to New York City furs at the end of April when word spread of a new convention this November in their area that nobody had heard of: New Anthrodam. Without an official announcement, nor having been established in conjunction with the local furry organizations, people were left in the dark as to who was running it. New Anthrodam, to be held in downtown Brooklyn the weekend before Thanksgiving, caught even the organizers of local events off guard when knowledge of it went around.

On April 3rd, a Bluesky account bearing the name was created and made its first post: “Coming soon!” but no attention was given until awareness of it arrived suddenly on the 24th, during Furgeddaboutit. The website the account linked to—registered last August, according to a WHOIS query—consists of a logo, dates and venue, two social media links, a link to sign up to a mailing list, and a vector city skyline (with windows that light up randomly on each visit). No information on what it is about or how to register are provided for a convention less than six months out. So, who runs it?

Meeting Kloree Stripes

New Anthrodam is the work of Kloree Stripes, a Brooklyn fur who has dreamed of starting a furry convention in the Big Apple beginning around 2022 or 2023, when the furry scene wasn’t as established in the city. He’s staffed a dizzying number of conventions in the last two years, and had a stint as a board member of local organization NYFurs. He is far from a regular at the local events—he is an Orthodox Jew, practicing seriously enough to prevent him from attending Saturday meets—so his presence is not well-known.

I first learned of his intentions while writing about the FurWalks hosted by NYC Furmeets, back in March of last year, when I chatted some furs up after a group dinner. Joining us straight from Furnal Equinox, he had told me then that New York City had been a “brick wall” for furry conventions. Holding one here would be more of a challenge than most, and would need big donors and funding to bootstrap it, he said at the time. Times Square Furcon, abbreviated to TSF, was floated as the name, as he hoped it would be held in a hotel next to the iconic Manhattan landmark.

In early May, I saw him in person again, and he spoke more on his background, of hosting furry conventions, and his experience staffing conventions all around the continent. He told me that he had an informal agreement with an unnamed convention chair, where he would staff or volunteer at dozens of conventions in a year in exchange for financial backing. By then, he had already checked off a number of them, and for the remainder of the year would be flying out almost weekly to fulfil his end of the bargain.

Just a month later, I spoke with him further about his plans on hosting this convention. Originally targeted for that November, he said he wanted to push it to January 2026. For a fursuit parade to be in Times Square—which he foresaw happening on a Sunday—the convention would need permits from the Times Square Alliance, the nonprofit that helps manage the public space, he told me. No weekend or venue had been written into stone, though he said there were productive discussions with hotels and plans were being made.

I would bump into Kloree a few times at conventions from then on, but no real updates to the convention were given. In conversations with him, he would be passionately stubborn in making this happen, and he had a high confidence in his ability to do so. The agreement with the con chair fell through, he later told me, but staffing so many conventions gave him a great amount of experience and a network to pull from, a win in the end.

Can furries make it there after making it everywhere?

It is an ambitious goal to host a furcon in New York City. Though the most populous city in the United States, by a wide margin, and sporadic furry meetups held since before the turn of the millennium, its furry scene has only gotten a foothold in recent years. Even now, it could be bigger, he thinks. “So this is actually my hunch,” Kloree told Flayrah in an interview. There’s “a huge furry community in New York that is still untapped by” local organizations, and his convention could draw them from the woodwork. He also hopes to court furries from across the world, to make it an international convention.

Despite being started by a New York City fur, New Anthrodam hasn’t gotten the buy-in from the prominent groups in the area: New York Furs, NYC Furmeets, and the rave group Growl. (Disclosure: I write the monthly/bimonthly blog posts for NYC Furmeets, but I am not a staff member and I make no compromises in my reporting.)

The groups weren’t really asked to join or consult on the convention initially, leaving a sour taste in some organizers’ mouths. One senior organizer in the tri-state-area, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that “for the longest time a lot of the NYC Area groups (NYCFM, NYF, Growl) have been aware that [Kloree]’s been wanting to create a con”. Aki Fennec, a co-organizer for Growl, wrote in an email to me that “The main organizer of New Anthrodam reached out” to him “about a year ago”, but talks ended there. News of the convention’s name, venue, and dates surprised them all. Only after this spread did the convention engage with the local groups. These discussions, with a community liaison, have not yet borne fruit.

Adding on to the lack of outreach, the senior organizer also said that most of the staff are from the west coast, Canada, and Europe, and called it “a slap on the face” for not being “representative of the NYC area”. Responding to this criticism, Kloree told Flayrah that “we have several people in New York that staff [New Anthrodam] already.” “But most cons don’t have everyone from local” events, he added, and restricting hiring to the local scene would be undesirable.

Conventions are not completely run by people in the immediate area. The boards of directors of many conventions are varyingly spread out across the country. For instance, two of Furpocalypse’s six board members do not live in Connecticut, and three of Anthro New England’s seven board members reside outside Massachusetts, according to filings of those conventions. In addition, the three NYC Furmeets administrators don’t live in New York— two live in New Jersey, albeit across the Hudson River, and the third lives in Pennsylvania.

Rumors alight in the local scene

Being caught off guard, discussions among the groups on starting a spite con started, the senior organizer said, which would be jointly led by NYFurs, NYC Furmeets, and Growl. This move wasn’t unheard of: in the neighboring New Jersey, Furgeddaboutit was established to spite another convention, Garden State Fur The Weekend.

Growl’s Aki said he had no knowledge of such a plan, but noted that there had been previous talk between the three groups, ideating “about what a convention would look like in NYC and how we could make it feel representative and valuable for the local community” that had nothing to do with New Anthrodam. He also said that he was likewise caught off guard to learn the convention was happening, and that he was shocked to see development without Growl, despite him expressing interest in the past of Growl being involved.

Kloree told Flayrah that this was regrettably a result of people sharing the website and the Bluesky account before they were ready to announce. The hope was to make an announcement during Furry Weekend Atlanta (FWA), he added. The website and Bluesky account being live allowed the basic details to be shared, apparently disrupting these plans. There remains no introduction from the convention, weeks after FWA, nor has the website been updated.

Following the news of the convention, a few staff of at least two local organizations have shared false and misleading information about Kloree. These people came to believe that he has fraudulently posed as a staff member at conventions and been banned for it. Specifically at Furpocalypse 2025, he allegedly stole somebody’s staff badge and added his name on it, before being banned for doing so. These individuals had repeated this to me, citing unnamed people at Furpocalypse.

These claims are dubious. While Kloree was indeed not staffed at Furpocalypse, he held an obscure role called “super volunteer”, which is for people who missed the staff application deadline. The distinction between that and a staff position is minor, and Kloree denies ever making misrepresentations. His badge for that convention, which he showed to Flayrah, is a standard staff badge and lanyard with no signs of tampering. Kloree is not in the staff Telegram chat for Furpocalypse, but he is in the volunteer group chat. Furpocalypse declined to say if any person is banned, as a matter of policy. Anthrocon, the other convention named as him faking a staff position, declined to confirm if any person was on their staff roll.

Gamboiuwu, the founder of NYFurs, called Kloree a “snake oil seller” in a Furry TMZ thread about the convention. “Multiple conventions have outed him for impersonating con staff, and he has also obtained information about cons by doing so in disingenuous ways,” he wrote. He did not say what conventions these were, nor the ways in which Kloree was supposedly “outed”. NYFurs did not respond to a list of questions for this story. The organization hosts a monthly bar meet in Manhattan, and has hosted a large meetup in Brooklyn last November.

How these people came to think Kloree had swiped staff badges and been banned is unclear. NYC Furmeets, whose staff had also repeated the Furpocalypse claims, did not respond to a request for comment.

A report alleging impersonation to NYFurs was also partially why he is no longer part of it, according to Kloree. He said he was also “getting increasingly busy working with the different conventions that I’ve been working on the [convention] circuit, which was making it significantly harder for me to handle some of the local NYFurs things.” He described it as “more of a mutual split” between him and Gamboiuwu.

According to Kloree, the person who made a report to NYFurs realized it was in error, and made a personal apology to him. Flayrah could not confirm this account; Kloree declined to name this fur.

The push to engage more with the city

Following initial discomfort, conversations with the community liaison staffer from New Anthrodam smoothed some concerns out from local groups, the senior organizer said, and the ‘spite’ convention is reshaping to be something else much smaller, and aimed for next year. Discussions with New Anthrodam are ongoing. Aki, of Growl, told Flayrah that there is an open line of communication between the two groups.

In an interview about the convention, Kloree noted that a convention hosted by an already-existing legal entity risks contaminating the local events it runs should a legal or financial problem arise. Having a separate entity would shield the local events from disruption. This came up at the start of last year, he told me, in an internal NYFurs discussion about it hosting a convention.

More information will eventually be posted to the website, Kloree told Flayrah. The staff at New Anthrodam themselves were caught off guard, unprepared, by the sharing of the website. They didn’t intend for it to be publicized, hence the placeholder. This unplanned launch and an absence of communication with local organizations may have been the cause of friction. If the website wasn’t known about, the convention could have been reaching out to them before an announcement.

New Anthrodam is scheduled for November 19th to 22nd at The New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn. The venue is very accessible and simple to connect to for furs outside of the five boroughs. From Penn Station/Moynihan Train Hall, Amtrak riders can take the 2, 3, or A express trains to Brooklyn. Long Island Railroad riders transfer at Atlantic Terminal to Manhattan-bound 2, 3, 4, 5 or R trains. Metro North riders transfer at Grand Central Terminal to a Brooklyn-bound 4 or 5 train. Furs flying in to JFK should take the JFK AirTrain to Howard Beach–JFK, and then the Manhattan-bound A. Those flying in to LaGuardia will take the Q70 to an F train to Jay St–MetroTech.

Additional reporting by Kamen The Lycanroc