It just walked right up to me, the bow-tied beast, and gave me a big bear hug

The inside of the convention center has the curved roof and naked support beam look that one associates with airplane hangars, and the color scheme employed by the architects — grey on grey — didn’t make the main room any less depressing. At the very least, someone could have run a vacuum over the industrial carpeting in the hallway.

The main room was outfitted with folding tables, where vendors sold everything from commissioned artwork (“Can you draw me as a skunk with a skateboard and a long furry tail and human breasts? And maybe I stand upright like a human and I have a guitar strapped to my back?”) to role playing game supplies, comic books, chain mail bras and corsets for the ladies, fox ears, and squirrel tails. The crowd seemed especially diverse: it was easy to find all your various races, sexual orientations, and genders — including a fair amount of transgender furries. It certainly seemed like a place where everyone was welcome, and it was here that I first began to understand the charm of the Furry lifestyle.

And then it hit me: well, more accurately, it hugged me. A large — well, I’m not sure what it was, exactly. I have passed the photo around to a few people: Was it a fox? A gopher? What’s with the blue ears and purple bow tie? It just walked right up to me, the bow-tied beast, and gave me a big bear hug.

The thing with the fursuits, and especially the masks, is that every one is a little different — but very few allow the wearer to express themselves in any meaningful way while engaging in conversation. There are few if any facial expressions available, for instance, and talking is a chore. This means that the fursuiter is left to resort to sweeping, comical gestures and hollow-eyed stares if it wishes to communicate at all. It’s really quite unsettling — almost violent, the effect of a huge masked creature bumrushing you and imposing its blank-eyed embrace.

My first attempt at integrating into furry society ending in failure after about ten minutes, I went to The Saloon on Liberty Avenue to regroup.

There was once a fanzine with the improbable name of Yarf! The Journal of Applied Anthropomorphics. In the February 2, 1999 issue you’ll find an article written by Fred Patten called "A Chronology Of Furry Fandom." According to Patten, it was at a science fiction convention in 1980 that furry fandom got its start. Up until this point, it’s safe to say that most portrayals of anthropomorphic animals had been the typical "funny animals," the mainstay of comics and cartoons that Disney owes its existence to.

An appearance at the NorEasCon II World Science Fiction Convention in Boston by comic book artist Steve Gallacci led, according to Patten, to a discussion of the artist’s planned "SF comic-art serial about bioengineered animal soldiers in a space war." The informal "Gallacci group," as became known, would meet at sci-fi conventions and "discuss anthropomorphics in SF, comic art, and animation, and to show off each others' sketchbook art and draw in each others' sketchbooks, from 1980 until about 1985."