Microsoft has revealed its anime mascot for Windows 10. If you’re a fan of anime, you’re likely applauding Microsoft for its latest promotional efforts. Microsoft’s Japanese offices have.
Marshall Woods (Ostrich), in raccoon costume, isn’t comfortable with the human form. Photographed at his home in Fairlawn, Ohio, on January 10, 2001. Even the people in regular clothes have a little something (ferret hand puppet, rabbit ears) to set them apart from the ordinary hotel guests. One man in jeans and a button-down shirt gets up from a couch in the lobby and walks over to the elevator, revealing a fluffy tail dragging behind him. The elevator doors open.
Inside, a fellow is kissing a man with antlers on his head. The other hotel guests look stunned. “We’re a group of people who like things having to do with animals and cartoons,” a man in a tiger suit tells a woman. “We’re furries.” “So cute,” the woman says. Welcome to the Midwest FurFest.
Here, a number of “furries”—people whose interest in animal characters goes further than an appreciation of The Lion King—are gathering together. At 7:30 p.m., near the front desk, three men known as Pack Rat, Rob Fox, and Zen Wolph are scratching one another’s backs—grooming one another, like macaques in a zoo.
“Skritching,” they call it. I am tempted to turn around and run. Instead I find myself talking with Keith Dickinson, a self-described “computer geek.” Not long ago, this man, a 37-year-old from Kansas City, Kansas, was so depressed he could barely bring himself to go to the grocery store. And then it hit him. He started to believe that, somewhere deep down, he was actually a polar bear.
“In normal society,” Dickinson says, “two people who hardly know each other do not walk up and scratch each other’s backs. But when you’re one of the furs, it’s one big extended family.” Next to him is his skinny, longhaired, fedora-wearing sidekick, a 23-year-old art student named Ian Johnson (nametag: r. Last year, Johnson, who has brought the ashes of his dead cat to the FurFest, persuaded Dickinson to attend another furry convention in Memphis, and that’s what did it. “It’s a new way of looking at the world,” Dickinson says. “It’s like looking at it with baby eyes, or cub eyes.” “You regress into a child when you come to a convention,” Johnson says, “because it’s that kind of camaraderie, or childishness.” Riding with Ostrich It’s night. Ostrich has to run an errand.
We get into his Chevrolet Metro and speed away from the Sheraton, toward the nearest mall. The headlights illuminate the road ahead. Ostrich, whose real name is Marshall Woods, is a compact guy in a denim jacket and blue jeans. He’s 39 years old and works as a network administrator at a rubber company in Akron. “When I was very, very young, I knew I wanted to be some type of animal,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily want to be the animal, but I wanted to have the animal shape, as far back as I can remember. It’s that way for a lot of people.” He did normal things, like playing in the high-school marching band but he couldn’t stop thinking about cartoon animals.
Throughout his teenage and college years, he hid his furriness, thinking it was a “babyish thing.” “What the hell,” he says. “Now I’m old and I’m warped, everybody knows it, so I don’t bother hiding anything anymore!” It wasn’t until 1994 that he came upon others who shared his interest. He was a chemist at the time, collecting dinosaur stuff on the side. One day he went to a comic-book shop and discovered Genus, a furry comic-book series with sexy characters.
“And I looked at it and I was like, Whoa! This looks pretty much exactly what I’d like to read—I gotta have one of these,” he recalls. Now he writes a newsletter for Ohio Furs, an organization of furries with 87 members. He got his name after taking some ballet classes and not being very good at it. “I was sincere but not impressive,” he says.
“I guess I was technically competent, but not very much fun to watch. And I was compared to the ostrich ballerinas in Fantasia. They are trying very hard, but they are not quite there.” In 1998, Ostrich put up a Web site where you can see his animal drawings, his animal-themed poems and short stories (one of which was published in Pawprints, a magazine for furries), his instructions on how to build a fursuit, and pictures of himself engaged in animal-centered activities. Like the time he made a solo trip to Sea World. “There’s something just inherently cheerful about ducks,” reads the text next to one picture on his Web site. “They seem almost ridiculously optimistic about the world and their place in it.” Next to a photo of sea lions, the caption reads: “Do they have any idea how cute they look when they beg?
Who could refuse them?” For a while, he concedes, he was a “plushie,” which is the word for a person who has a strong—usually erotic—attachment to stuffed animals. He even wrote a plushie newsletter for a while, but gave it up.
“It doesn’t really interest me now,” he says. “I just like to have the stuffed animals around. I would still say I’m a plushophile—I’m just not that interested in it that much sexually. In a casual way, but not really seriously.” He goes into a store and purchases materials for a puppet-making workshop he is scheduled to lead the next day.
Back behind the wheel, Ostrich says, “I don’t like the human form. I never really have.
It does not please me. The body, just the flesh, the general design, I just don’t like.” He says he’d prefer to be a lemur or a rabbit and still be intelligent and keep the opposable thumbs. He thinks the technology will be available relatively soon to help him achieve this dream. Talking about all this almost causes Ostrich to miss his exit. Less.” Eventually, we pull back into a parking space back at the Sheraton. “A lot of the people here are the very same way. We don’t have a lot of deep real-life contact.
It’s superficial. I kind of skate through society.
I mean, you see a lot of people—I see them at work—who have no idea what they’re doing, or why, and they sit there and bang along from one hour to the next. As fucked up as I am, I at least know how I feel and what I want to do, and I have the good fortune to have a number of friends who feel the same way.” Ostrich leads me up to his suite. It’s filled with stuffed animals. “Before I found the organized fandom, I lived in the country,” he says. “I lived as far out as I could by preference. But the odd thing is, the longer I do this and the more deeply I get into it, the happier I am in the city and around crowds. I suppose it is, uh, it’s probably a symptom of my increasing mental health, or something.” “How are you fucked up?” I ask.
“Everybody’s fucked up in some way, I think. Right now I’m happy, yeah. Feeling expansive. Willing to expand on topics and so forth. Talkative.” He sits on the chair and says there is a low percentage of women in the fandom, and a preponderance of gay men—or seemingly gay. “I am not really sure myself that as many of them are gay as think they are. It’s just more, you like this person because of who they are rather than for their body.
And we find as the number of women increases, the number of people who thought they were gay but decided otherwise increases, too. I know a couple people who thought they were gay until they met a furry girl.” He gets up. “In some ways we’re very closed off—sort of a subculture. I have trouble looking at it objectively, because it seems so natural. It’s how I was my whole life, and all of a sudden, I’m like, Wow, here’s a whole bunch of other people like this!
Having not come to it from the outside, I have difficulty saying what it actually is. I’m too deeply into it.” Some Furry Theory There are many kinds of furries, but they all seem to have a few things in common. Something happened to them after a youthful encounter with Bugs Bunny or Scooby Doo or the mascot at the pep rally. They took refuge in cartoons or science fiction.
After being bombarded by tigers telling them what cereal to eat, camels smoking cigarettes, cars named after animals, airplanes with eyes and smiles, shirts with alligators, they decided their fellow human beings were not nearly so interesting as those animal characters. But it wasn’t so liberating, having these intense feelings, when you thought you were the only person on earth who had them. The second big revelation for most furries came when they got on the Internet. Not only were there others like them, they learned, but they were organized! They started having conventions in the early 90s.
Now, such gatherings as the Further Confusion convention in San Jose, California, and Anthrocon in Philadelphia, attract more than 1,000 furry hobbyists apiece. (The Midwest FurFest is a smaller “con,” with about 400 attending.) There are other conventions, too—even summer camps. The furry group has its own customs and language. “Yiff” means sex, “yiffy” means horny or sexual, and “yiffing” means mating. “Fur pile” denotes a bunch of furries lying on top of one another, affectionately, while skritching. “Spooge” is semen—a possible outcome of a fur pile. A “furvert” is anyone who is sexually attracted to mascots and such.
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Many furries have jobs related to science and computers. They role-play on a Web site called “FurryMUCK,” a chat-room kingdom where users pretend they’re red-tailed hawks, foxes, and polar bears. A high number of furries are bearded and wear glasses. Many resemble the animal they identify with (especially wolves and foxes, the most popular “totems”). Some have googly, glazed, innocent eyes. A few are crazy-eyed. A Moment with Mike the Coyote Down in the lobby, a coyote is sitting on a couch.
His nametag reads, shaggy, but his real name is Mike. Not all the conventioneers want people to know their full names, lest their bosses or parents find out what they’re up to on the weekends. Mike the Coyote says he is a security guard in Indiana and has been going to furry conventions since 1992. The Midwest FurFest, he says, is “very mellow so far, rather surprisingly so, in fact. I hope it stays this way. We don’t need the weirdies to fall out of the woodwork.
For me, walking around a con with a tail hanging out my butt just seems weird. Just not my particular bag.” But Mike the Coyote has something for anyone who finds furriness strange: “Just go look at the Packers and Vikings fans at the game. You think we’re weird? Look at the 350-pound guy that’s got his body split in colors half and half, he’s wearing shorts and paint and nothing else, and he’s screaming, ‘Vikings!’ Oh my God! Anybody involved in beauty pageants? Children’s beauty pageants, where they dress the little girls like they’re 25-year-old prostitutes—which is just sick.” “There’s Something About Raccoons” One man who didn’t make it to the Midwest FurFest is Ostrich’s friend Fox Wolfie Galen, the King of the Plushies.
“He’s O.K.,” says Jack Below, a 28-year-old on-line worker at Southwestern Bell, who doubles as Spiked Punch, a wolf with a mallet. But, Below adds, Fox Wolfie Galen is “one of the people I really worry about. I really don’t have anything against him; I just think if people really knew the full story on him, it would kind of set a bad image.” Two months prior to the FurFest, I visited Fox Wolfie Galen, whose real name is Kenneth, at his house in a small Pennsylvania city, where he lives with a roommate and more than a thousand stuffed animals. He was staring at his computer screen, monitoring an on-line auction. He put in a bid of $40.01 for a 40-inch skunk stuffed animal, then lay down on his mattress on the floor. Wearing my mask, yay! Looking like a bear, yay!
Wearing my mask and looking like a bear I’m a rac-cooooon! The Furry Show Now it’s showtime. The Chicago Room is full of furries.”Y’all ready for a good three, four hours of entertainment?” says Tyger Cowboy, the master of ceremonies.
Babs Bunny is the first act. Basically, it is someone in a bunny outfit hopping around while singing Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in a high-pitched voice. A group of furries in cat regalia do a few songs from Grease. A little boy in the front—a son of the convention chairman, Robert King—has his fingers in his ears.
The Squirrelles sing “You Can’t Hurry Love.” An Elmo muppet does “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Ten seconds into the number, a wolf creeps up and rips Elmo apart. The place goes nuts. The Furries vs. Army The next morning, at 11:50, the lobby is full of furries and soldiers in camouflage gear.
The 85th Army Reserve Division, headquartered in Arlington Heights, happens to be having a convention here, too—a commanders’ conference, during which they’re to go over what took place in 2000, and set goals for 2001. The furries in the lobby look baffled. A few military men are smirking. One square-jawed hard-ass stares at a rabbit-eared furry for a moment and, finally, says, “Yeah!” It’s sarcastic. He sounds like a high-school jock sizing up the class freak.
“Unusual,” says a Sergeant Major Jennings. “I think it’s comical, myself,” says one of his subordinates. “God bless America,” says the other. Ostrich comes tearing past them, saying, “The fursuit parade’s about to start!” Soon, about 40 people in mascotwear—the fursuiters—are marching quietly through the lobby. Flashbulbs pop. Furries in civilian clothes reach out to touch the fursuiters as they go. A wolf with a huge mallet.
A bear eating a raccoon. “Show us some tail, baby!” says a furry bystander.
“I didn’t know rabbits were in season,” says an army guy. A Lieutenant Colonel Flowers is taking it all in, good-naturedly. “A little unusual,” he says. “Of course, they’d probably say the same thing about us.” A half-kangaroo walks. “Pretty good, pretty good, pretty imaginative,” the lieutenant colonel says.
“What are they, an advocacy group?” Another lieutenant colonel, named Farrar, is unfazed. “Well, when you see people wearing dog collars and chains you know, I went to college,” he says.
“It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out what these people might be doing behind closed doors. The clean aspect, O.K., these guys are cartoon figures, I can see that. But if you go a little left of that, then suddenly you’re adding a new dimension to it. It doesn’t make me very comfortable. Certainly nothing I agree with.
Tantric sex comes to mind. People that have problems.” He thinks some more. “But we’re all getting along!” Without hesitation, he poses for a picture with a brown bear. Another man in uniform, Lieutenant Patrick George, is chatting with a young raccoon.
“This is something nice to bring kids to,” Lieutenant George says. The raccoon suggests there might be no more war if everyone adopted the furry attitude toward life. Lieutenant George smiles. “There will always be wars as long as there’s people on this earth,” he says. “Not if they all pretend to be animals,” the raccoon says, then rejoins the parade. Lieutenant George has been watching some of the furries. “Touchy-feely, with each other,” he says.
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“I noticed that last night. They’re scratching each other and laying in the lap. You don’t have to be too smart to figure it out. It’s easy.” He stops his friendly chuckling, however, when he learns he has been chatting with a guy who might really want to be a raccoon. “That’s different,” he says.
“But different people have different beliefs in this world. We can’t be the same, we’re all individuals. So to each his own.” A Skritch Session The Eagles are playing loud inside Trophies, the hotel sports bar. Football is on the big screens. The crack of pool balls can be heard over “Hotel California.” Tyger Cowboy is holding court at a table and working on a Reuben and an iced tea. His real name is Christopher Roth, and he’s a 36-year-old travel agent who has booked flights for many of the furries present. “I am a tiger in a human body, yes.
I am very feline. I am very neurotic about having my paws sticky. They have to be washed. Yecch!” Roth lives in St. Louis, with his mate, Jack Below (Spiked Punch), the wolf trapped in a human body. They’re both well-known furries, and they run arf, a support group of furries, who do things together such as visit hospitals and volunteer at the zoo. Tyger Cowboy, who has been in the fandom for three years, also runs the UniFURsal mailing list in St.
He was picked on growing up. He lived near a nature preserve and was very “animal-oriented.” Later, he says, he played semi-pro hockey and rode broncos in the Texas Gay Rodeo. But now he lives for furrydom. The guy next to him is wearing a dog collar and a black T-shirt that reads, bad dog, no biscuit.
His name is Robert Norton. He is 23 years old and works at Wal-Mart while attending technical school in Wisconsin, but he’s really a. “I’m a Rottweiler,” he says. “A lot of my friends used to say I acted like a canine, especially Rottweilers. I’ve had Rottweiler breeders tell me I remind them of one of their dogs. Certain expressions I do.
I chew on furniture. Little mannerisms. If somebody says the wrong thing and it upsets me, I’ve been known to spontaneously start growling at them without realizing it. I kind of got myself in trouble at work doing that. I growled at a customer.” It’s time for the charity auction, and Tyger Cowboy has to get into his seven-foot tiger-kitten costume; he is offering a five-minute skritch to benefit Tiger Haven in Tennessee, an animal sanctuary damaged by a fire in which four tiger cubs died. Up in Room 822 (“Furry Central,” they were calling it), Tyger Cowboy strips down to his tight white briefs. Norton, morphing into his Rottweiler persona, gets on the floor and begins gnawing on a chair.
Behind him is another man who fancies himself a Rottweiler; he gives Norton a vigorous back rub. Rottweiler number one starts exhaling loudly. “He’s drooling again,” Tyger Cowboy says. “Felines rule, dogs drool.” He puts on his tiger head and then, with his right paw, beckons me closer to him. He put his claws on my head.
And gives me my first skritch. “You have a cat?” he says.
“Yes.” “Just think. You’ve been petted by a cat!” The Coffee Mug of Dreams The bespectacled auctioneer is Dr. Samuel Conway (furry name: Uncle Kage). He’s a biomedical researcher and a furry celebrity of sorts.
He is auctioning off the mallet belonging to Tyger Cowboy’s mate, Spiked Punch. “Spiked will give you a nice big hug if you buy his mallet,” Uncle Kage says theatrically. It sells for a hundred dollars. Soon, Uncle Kage is showcasing a coffee mug with Native American art depicting the transformation of a young brave into a wolf. “Don’t we all wish—isn’t this all of our dreams?
I have $30 for the mug that depicts our dream, the transformation of a man into a wolf—let’s hope he stays that way, because it’s unthinkable to go back. Sold for $30!” The Cat and the Fox In the vendors’ room, furries are buying comic books, cartooning kits, swords, axes, and tomahawks. A sign on a table reads, no children. Behind it is a wild-haired, busty woman named Bushy Cat. She is an artist whose drawings show erotic furry fantasies, with fantastic anatomies drawn in glorious detail. Back in 1997, Bushy Cat was going nowhere. Her animal art wasn’t selling at craft fairs.
“I was ready to work at McDonald’s,” she says. “I wasn’t clearing any money at all, and no recognition.” Then she went to Anthrocon in Philadelphia, where she found out what sells. With binders full of X-rated drawings, she went to conventions in Tennessee, California, Washington—all over—and put in 30,000 miles on Greyhound. Jurann Foxtail, a 24-year-old dot-com worker, stops. He is a “huge collector” of “yiffy” art. He says his life changed after he saw Disney’s The Fox and the Hound at age four. “For weeks I begged my parents to be the fox,” he says.
“I wanted to be the fox. ‘I want to be the fox, Mommy, I want to be the fox!’ ‘You can’t be the fox, you’re a person!’ ‘Oh, that’s no fun.’” Fox Talk It’s Saturday evening, and a discussion group, “Foxes in the Fandom,” is in progress.
It is moderated by a pudgy, bearded man who goes by the name Craig Fox. About two dozen males are present; half look like foxes. Like Randy Foxx and Phallon. And Rowdy Fox, smiling naughtily as his fox hand puppet nibbles on his free hand. “Do you think movies and books portray foxes evil more, or good more?” Mr.
Fox the moderator asks. “If the main character was a mouse or a rabbit, then the fox would be the evil villain,” says Denver, a longhaired guy in an eltonjohn.com T-shirt. “It also depends if the main character is, for example, a lion.
I’ve run into a couple where the fox is a bumbling sidekick. It depends on basically the line of the food chain with who’s the star.” “Right,” says Mr. “Um, another thing about foxes, in general, is that—how can I say this?—the fandom looks upon them as extremely yiffy. Why do you think that is?” There is some giggling. “If you want to go yiffy,” Mr.
Fox continues, “let’s look at the rabbits! Whereas foxes actually mate for life, as a general rule.” Now it’s time for tales of real-life fox encounters. “Has anyone been around an actual fox?” the moderator asks, before telling of how he once went to a petting zoo, where red foxes sat on his head and licked his face. Denver says he has had 12 encounters with foxes, all in the wild. “There is one fox that lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that apparently likes me, because he has been staring in my window all night.” Everyone laughs hard.
After everyone agrees that it would be wrong to have a fox as a pet, there is a pause. “What would people like to see the image of the fox be in the new millennium?” Mr. “What would you like to see, foxwise?” “I got a question,” says a woman in the back. She is half bat, half cat. “What’s everyone’s passion for foxes? Because I don’t know anything about it.” The Griffin in the Bar Matt Davis, a slender 30-year-old dude with black close-cropped hair, is in the hotel bar.
His T-shirt reads, my sexual preference is not you. Davis drove up to the Midwest FurFest with a few other furs from Arkansas. He’s a security guard and furry artist who fantasizes about being a griffin, which would make him half eagle, half lion. “I’d be a security-guard griffin,” he says. “I could fly and patrol the area.” He would have a griffin mate who would look like him but “a little bit thinner-boned” and “adorable.” “I’ve had fantasies that I’ve spent a long hunt through the forest catching my prey and bringing home to my nest moose and deer, something like that. Something large.
Carrying it home to my nest, where my mate is waiting for me, and after eating, we engage in ferocious sex and fall asleep cuddling together in the nest.” With him is a rotund fellow with long blond hair. He says he is the March Hare (real name: O. “Being human, first of all, we’re not all that cute,” he says. “In fact, we’re butt-ass ugly. Second of all, intelligence, while it is a wonderful thing, is not that wonderful. Having what we think is understanding and then realizing it’s not is more painful than being hunted down and killed by your predator.” Being furry, on the other hand, is a solution to life. “It gives me thunder,” says the March Hare.
“I can walk into any situation and go, ‘I am the dude!’ It’s like having a switch, a psychological switch you can tap into and turn something on.” It helps even when he’s flipping burgers. “You have 30 orders up there,” he says. “If I wasn’t the hare, I wouldn’t be fast enough to get those 30 orders out—and in under three minutes—and be the dude.” The Furry-Haters Later on in the bar, at two a.m., a dozen 30-ish patrons, part of a wedding party, are making noise. I hear the word “faggots.” “They’re freaks,” says a blonde who gives her name as Sylvia. “No,” says Johnny. “ Star Trek people that have lost Star Trek. Now they run around with mouse costumes on.
Very disturbing.” “A bunch of freaks running around!” Sylvia insists. “What is the purpose of the fur costume?” “Pretty much guys that can’t deal with society,” Johnny says. “There’s more to it than the costumes—they’re blatant homosexuals.” “Bestiality!” Sylvia says. “It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of people here who are getting the wrong impression of Chicago,” says Johnny. “Like, a bunch of queers running around in a mouse costume. It, uh, it just makes me sick. Whitey!” Whitey comes over.
He is wearing a Phish shirt and a red University of Wisconsin cap. “Oh, these fucking clowns running around?” says Whitey, who is drinking whiskey, smoking a Dunhill, and swaying a bit.
“I’d love to take my 10/22 and take a couple plink shots at them!” Today is the opening day of deer season, and Whitey missed it because of his “dumb-ass” friend’s wedding. “Freaks,” Sylvia says, cracking up. Still, Whitey says he is not one to “fucking cast judgment on anybody. And if that’s their bag of tricks, that’s cool, but it’s just kind of like, I just think I could come up with a better hobby.” For example?
“Killing real animals,” he says. “Snowmobiling.” Furry Comedown Sunday is the comedown day. At noon, furries are catching vans to the airport.
Uncle Kage, the biomedical researcher and auctioneer, is in the lobby, still wearing his white lab coat. “They put little bears with sweaters in our cribs,” he is saying. “We have cartoons where rabbits make us laugh. Shirts with little alligators on them.
Anthropomorphic animals are part of our culture.” R. Rabbitsfoot comes over with his dead cat’s ashes in a soup can and hands it to Uncle Kage, who looks puzzled. About 40 furries are in the lobby now. They’re hugging and skritching one another good-bye. “I’m going to cry when I leave here,” says the March Hare. “Probably everyone’s going to.
That’s my closing statement.” Toward a Furry Future A month after the Midwest FurFest, I call Ostrich at his apartment in Ohio. He has been sitting around drawing a picture of a fox and playing with his cat. The FurFest was a success, he says. “I’ve heard nothing but good about it,” Ostrich says. “I’ve heard two complaints about it, and they’re both from known malcontents.” He confirms there was a fair amount of wild sex at the convention: “Oh, yeah, I know there was for a fact. I probably would have been involved in it if I hadn’t been so busy.” Was he still hopeful about the possibility of genetic engineering?
That’s pretty much the future of the world—there’s no way around it. If I can live another 30 or 40 years, I might live several hundred more. Obviously, I’d like to rework my body to make my physical body conform more to my body image. I’d want a tail, I’d want some fur, and, basically, some cute cartoon eyes and stuff. The technology for that’s coming. I don’t think it’s as far off as most people think.”.
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