I found one that my friend was on that was originally an Animal Collective fan forum that turned into a general shitpost forum. That’s actually something that I always really love, weirdly specific Internet communities-ones that are small and self-contained. It’s weird-obviously message boards still exist, but it feels like they’re way less central to the Internet now. But for me, it was probably browsing general Internet forums, like Something Awful and 4chan, where gay furry porn would be used for, like, ironic shock value? And I’d be saving it, like, “no wait, this is actually good.” And also, an abstract cartoon depiction of a gay relationship feels less threatening than an actual gay relationship. I think a lot of it has to do with the language of intimacy being different.
The interesting thing about that is-this is something I’ve discovered is true of a lot of gay people who are into furry stuff-that I was into furry stuff before I was into gay porn.
I guess the first thing I should ask, just because I’m curious, is how did you first realize you were into furry stuff? My friend Rory Frances recently moderated a discussion of cartoonists working in the funny-animals style, and I liked how he described its powers of abstraction there: “A lot of talking-animal stuff kinda works with the idea of a fractured ecosystem and puts it in a more human social context.” With all this in mind, I decided to talk to consult another friend and longtime FurAffinity lurker, J Bearhat, the author of zines such as Gay Apathy. Not that it ever really went away in comics, where humanized critters have always told gags for kids, or narrated Lewis Trondheim’s diary strips, or, via Art Spiegelman, documented the Holocaust. And it felt like the whole furry aesthetic had been undergoing a resurgence-the cultural backwash of ’90s Disney movies, maybe. There had to be a history I’d missed.Īs somebody who spent way too much of high school on message boards for terrible nerds, I have a lingering interest in the social dynamics of niche Internet communities. But the collective alienation clearly went deeper than that. When you’re in the business of customizable trinkets, an audience constantly commissioning new drawings of their fursonas might be the ideal market. I know this site and other Furry sites have exchanged hands/paws before BUT those transactions were made by Furries for Furries …Furries are not mainstream, and that is a wonderful thing.” The suspicion sounded reasonable: Artists who use FurAffinity to host their work have already accused IMVU of stealing designs. Said user IvanBunny: “My biggest concern about this whole situation is that an outside corporate entity has been brought into the Furry Community to operate a site who’s people they likely do not understand. It’s a hefty membership-the forums claim nearly 100,000 members-which has currently left 1,817 aggrieved comments on the big official announcement. I know a few people involved with furry fandom to various degrees, and they couldn’t believe how angry FurAffinity’s users were. That was when they announced they were buying FurAffinity, perhaps the single largest online community of people who really love anthropomorphic animals, whether their motives are playful, sexual, artistic, professional, or some fuzzy combination. I had never even heard of IMVU until last week. It doesn’t actually let you move around, as in the obvious source material Second Life-your dead-eyed doll-avatars just chat with each other from predetermined positions. The metaverse of IMVU, which launched in 2004, coerces you to spend money on a vast range of fashions, pets, and décor, all of them also reminiscent of 2004, like the My Chemical Romance song that was probably embedded on my Myspace page back then. As with every speculative bubble, profiteers appeared.
Second Life is now used mostly for virtual raves or low-resolution sex roleplay, but there was a brief period in the late 2000s when that online world and its user-generated merchandise seemed like they might supplant the entire North American economy.