It can feel a kind of madness when the memory of the world has moved on without you and you are left unsmothered. It is not madness, however. The feeling is called injustice, and what I aim to show in this account of events, beginning in May of 2020 and ending with Megaplex of 2021, is that this injustice is a cultural issue in furry, produced from west coast to east by figures as disparate as Samuel Conway, the Megaplex convention board, and the British Columbia Anthropomorphic Events Association (BCAEA). I take these as case studies because they involve prolific figures, because they are current, or—with the BCAEA—because they are well-known to me even if they are not well known in general.

I could have chosen other case studies. There’s no scarcity of them—every few months there is a new bad story about a furry-run community group, a fursuit maker, a popular furry personality, or, most recently, a furry convention. This account, in its intention, is both to attempt a brief history of furry spaces since May of 2020 and to explain them as a part of a larger, overarching, and cultural issue. I do this in part because when there is a bad story every few months—one which often involves trauma of some kind—and numerous smaller pains arrive in the weeks in between, it can feel as though you have walked into a numbing fog.

The details become fuzzy and their dates more distant in memory, although they may have only happened months or weeks ago. For others, however, those bad stories aren’t just stories—they are real things that happened to a person and the numbing fog is not always so kind to them. It can feel a kind of madness, and historicizing them, putting them into context and connecting them with other, similar events, is my choice of remedy.

I grew up a nerdy theatre kid who wanted to be a punk. It taught me that I loathe the spotlight (I was compelled by an editor to add this section on myself). I get stage fright, with only the shakiest of legs, and, while I have an excellent memory—as this account may demonstrate—my perpetually flat affect made me unsuitable for serious acting. After that, I turned to writing, first stage plays, then later and with much more enjoyment, fanfiction. Furry as a subculture was a short leap away. While doing what amounts to queer/feminist studies at university, I joined a small poetry community on FurAffinity in 2016, and, unexpectedly, encountered a few poets who were upset whenever my poems mentioned punching Nazis.

My furry experience has continued in that general fashion ever since.

On io9, Ron Miller posted a gallery of his photos of Cosplayers from 1970's science fiction conventions. (NSFW)

This subculture spun off Furries, and it made me wonder if any proto-furry costumes were included. The closest I saw were a bird-woman and insect characters, who could be described as anthropomorphic, but not "furry".

What are the earliest records of organized furry activities? I'd guess these are somewhat underexposed and could be better documented [Yarf #46 (Jan 1997)].

The following article is a review of Shawn Keller's new comic book Shawn Keller's Horrifying Look at the Furries, released at San Diego Comic Con this weekend. The comic has something of a companion web site, located at www.furryfans.com. Read on for the review, which was submitted by an anonymous author.

Peter Bower, known in the furry fandom as Krypto1701, has been charged with animal cruelty after he allegedly had sex with a dog he adopted last month.

In mid-May, the dog warden of Richmond County, Ohio, received an e-mail tip on Bower, including links to bestiality-themed websites. Investigators found photos of Bower with multiple animals, including several dogs and possibly a horse.