Now this came up over on YouTube, where I have mentioned in a couple of videos that I was, way back in the day, part of furry fandom in the early days. I have no idea what it’s like today because I pay it absolutely no mind. I do keep up with a couple of furries from the old days, but I have no interest in the fandom itself. Hopefully it’s gotten better, but I really don’t know and the way some people I see who are currently involved talk… I’m not really holding my breath.

Anyhow, I was there at the very beginning, I was friends with most of the people who started it and I was on the con committee of the very first furry convention, ConFurence 0.

And back then, it wasn’t the shit show it would later turn into. It was a bunch of people with a common interest in anthropomorphic characters that just wanted to hang out together and draw furries. That was it. In fact, a major feature of ConFurence 0 was a restaurant breakfast nook where artists could hang out and draw together and people could go and ask for artwork. That was a big draw for a lot of people. It was fun and there wasn’t, as I recall it, all that much overtly sexual going on at the first couple of conventions. But as the years went on, all of that changed.

Most of my involvement at these conventions was getting them to run right. These were fan-run conventions, often by people who had never been responsible for setting up a convention before. I was an old hand, having run quite a few conventions in the past, so I used to show up on Thursday night or Friday morning, whenever the con was getting started, and pitch in, often taking over entire departments and revamping the rules at a moment’s notice because whoever was responsible had no idea what they were doing. The art show was typically where a lot of the problems started, so in the scramble to get all of the art boards up and the artwork hung, I had to retrain all of the workers on new procedures. I also had to do that with security a lot of times because mostly, nobody understood what they were supposed to do. This was a particular problem when they ran Fur le Dance, an increasingly adult cabaret dance and the security force didn’t understand that children couldn’t be admitted. That was a potential legal disaster averted.

All of this was in addition to the work I was doing for the convention in the first place, I was running video rooms and anime rooms and publishing the daily newsletter and all of that as well. One year, I even offered, at the first post-con meeting, to run the art show. They said thanks… and that was the last thing I heard from the convention all year long. So I assumed they had found someone else to do it and when the con rolled around, they were expecting me to have it all done. I put the art show together in about a half hour. It was the kind of thing that happened back in the day of fan-run conventions unfortunately.

Back in the day, things were generally PG-13 in the fandom. The biggest fanzines like Rowrbrazzle and Furversion, were very tame things, even though the latter doesn’t sound like it. If you wanted adult stuff, you had to go to APAs like Q, which existed in a kind of shadow realm within the fandom. Convention dealer’s rooms were also very tame and if they were selling adult material, it was all under plastic where minors couldn’t get at it.

Unfortunately that didn’t last and I can identify the exact point at which the line had been crossed. ConFurence started advertising for the convention in alternative lifestyle magazines. Now I guess you can make a case that, because a lot of the people in the early furry fandom were gay, that more people might be found in gay-sex and gay-hookup magazines, but the results were, at least IMO, disastrous. The convention was immediately flooded with people who were trolling for sex, who didn’t care about anthropomorphics and who just wanted to get laid. Those people adopted the tropes of the furry fandom, but not whatever class the fandom started off with. I think when I saw the first fursuit with a functional dick on the front, I knew it was the beginning of the end.

That’s about the time I started to slowly back my way out of the fandom. And in retrospect, it has a lot in common with Atheism+, the idea that you couldn’t be a furry unless you were a pervert, where the norms started to swing toward the hard-core and if you said anything against these trends, you were a bigot. It was also the time where movements like the Burned Furs arose in the fandom and while I was never a member, not being a joiner and all, I could certainly sympathize with their concerns.

Now I have no clue what it’s like in the fandom today and I really don’t care, but from the few contacts that I have and things I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound like things have gotten any better. It sounds like it’s regressive leftist bigot hell. It’s not anything I’d ever want to be involved with, but I’m normal and far too many furries, again by reports, just aren’t. So it started off as a cool place to hang your hat and turned into a microcosm of regressive politics and postmodernist garbage. Sad how often that kind of thing happens.

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