This article is about sexuality, and contains sexually explicit images below.  It is certainly NSFW.  Please take care.

“So………. is that a sex thing, or?”  my friend/coworker asked me some weeks ago, after reading my twitter feed closely enough and asking me about furries.  As an answer I gave a furtive “UMMMMM.  NOT REALLY.”

And since then I’ve been working on a “well, SURE.”

Sure it’s a sex thing.  I can’t profess to write about furry culture without writing about it.  Journalists can still safely grant themselves license to straight up make. shit. up. about us and our sexual lives without challenge, and here I am with a safe platform to speak my truth. Describing the exact affinity for cartoons is kind of beneath any of us at this point.  We’re perverts.  We watch too many cartoons.  What do you want?  Furries make cartoon animal bodies and mash them together with other cartoon animal bodies, and we mash together our human bodies too.  We live outside our fungible ape forms on the internet and inside a fursuit, a swamp of our own breath and sweat.  The fursuit, on the outside, is our insides, the cartoon inhabiting us.  Furry sexuality is the flat null space between bugs bunny’s legs and the sensual line of ink distinguishing his tits.  The life as a cartoon animal is one that wrestles with the anxieties of, and the frolicking joys of, inhabiting a human body, and that often centers the experience of fucking, or the experience of being fucked.

My history of my being a furry is my history of being in this body.  Of wanting to survive cartoonish giant hammer blows.  Living through the gulf of decades between Hare-Um Scare-Um and Space Jam and whatever that new cartoon is out now because if you’re strong enough, and you’re a cartoon, you can postpone death indefinitely as long as someone is watching. My body and mind existing in the Bosch-ian nightmare that is to be gazed upon and of inflicting a terrible gaze.  Horniness making my teeth grow long and my bones to twist and my fur to come out.  Overcoming the overwhelming paroxysmic fits of ticklishness that have previously made intimate touch feel like an attack.  Not flinching from my femininity or my vulnerability.  Feeling cute and safe in my little matchbox bed.

Enjoy some Ice Cream.
A piece I drew for Mice Making Love, a zine I made with my spouse.

Assigning value to furry smut categorically is a tedious process.  It’s not on the whole a panacea against patriarchal repression or the feast of the Maenads with cat ears and a clip-on tail.  Every furry is responsible for the continuum of choices in making and engaging with sexual material, as well as the atmosphere of the community as a whole.  Though the images we repeat and the language we use to describe them can telegraph clues about attitudes, there is no linear elevation of tastes or kink that acts as a signpost for a person’s character.  No threshold under which one is just vanilla enough to be beneath suspicion of making bad choices or taking advantage of someone.  Which isn’t to say “hands off, judge not.”  I think furries on the whole are  reluctant to be self-critical of our permissive culture.  Our reticence to call out has shielded some nasty behavior and unsocial attitudes among furs with a high enough reputation drawing porn in the community.  Online spaces are especially fraught because the relationships people build, especially when they are young and emotionally isolated like I was, have lasting impact.  Finding a community and gaining status when that experience is not connected to your offline life can be chaotic, radicalizing.  I don’t know if I can count myself as lucky that I stumbled upon the Vixen Controlled Library and found that *enough* before I ever heard of ch*n sites.  There was AOL furry roleplay before that.  Yiiikes.  Through furry I at least gained the advantage of encountering people whose sexual experience was radically, bewilderingly differently than mine.  And I got to be friends with them.

Covers for Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley.
Art by the great furry illustrator Terrie Smith.

On 90s furry Internet, I was able to uncover illustrations related to a furry comic called Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley.  A punchline by a generation of young furries much savvier and with more resources for articulating their weirdness than us greymuzzles.  It became the great furry comic cliche.  Lonely sensitive homo goes to college, everyone is gay and they all fuck, no one uses condoms and everything is lovely.  I knew of this comic’s existence as a young fur but didn’t read it until I was older, collected in a nice hardcover edition.  The comic means more to me as the previously unavailable prize, the sense of NEEDING to read it more powerful than whenever I actually got around to like… reading it.  Squinting at the tempestuous, loathesome storm of my teenage years like a ship in a bottle now.

A common motif in furry porn is public sex.  We are teleported to the locker room, the bar, the dancefloor, the back alley adjecent to the bar or dancefloor.  The furry subjects in these dioramas are enthusiastically rutting while an audience telegraphs their titillation.  Maybe one bystander performs a perfunctory gesture of being scandalized while the peanut gallery winks to the audience.  The stigma of sex, of being seen as wanting sex, is flattened and erased in a cartoon environment.  We watch ourselves watching each other, and in our inhibition we are free from the stigma of being watched.  But isn’t it annoying when there’s a line of bottoms on the bar with tails up when you’re just trying to get a drink!

By my friend Artdecade.
You can see more at his website Artdecade Monthly or buy his gay furry visual novel game Willy Bear Beach.

I imagine a world where Waller, Whorley and Vances’ Omaha the Cat Dancer is more respected and influential in comics than R. Crumb’s body of work.  They both radically sexualize funny animals.  Omaha (notably after Kate Whorley’s involvement) is a sensitive portrayal of many people’s journeys as sexual beings, mostly women.  It treats gay and bisexual people like people in a time when it is disadvantageous to do so (that time extends to present day).  It’s described as a soap opera.  It’s pulp is not the pulp like the paper that it’s printed on, that steals our breath.  It is pulp like the orange that nourishes us.  Omaha the Cat Dancer shows sex as a negotiation between two partners.  Fritz the Cat is Crumb’s dick.  His elegantly hatched dick.  Fritz is killed when Crumb’s dick finds him boring, or when Scrutiny, the evil stepsister of Muse, becomes like… a total drag, man.  The legacy of Crumb’s radically sexual funny animal art is as a cloak for more boring, insubstantial fuck art by people who don’t care about funny animals.  The demographic division between furry comics and proper independent comics has been delineated as much by the  sensibilities of comix doods who venerate Crumb yet ignore Omaha as the genesis of the CBLDF. As much as furry culture coalescing as a distinct identity that circulates material exclusively among our own community.  In our timidity to address the centering of sexuality in our artistic community, we have found ourselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of prestige as folk who make. alternative. comics.

As a person who makes comics, or webcomics, a niche market, I’ve made the deliberate decision to make a niche niche furry comic.  No, a niche niche niche furry comic with porn in it.  When I express myself the calculations of getting the dollars of non-gay, gender-conforming people who don’t like cartoon animals because they’ve been tainted by furries like me aren’t that much of a factor in what ends up on my pages.  It is possible, and it is an aspiration for me as an artist to depict, the love we give to each others’ bodies as affirming the inherent dignity and loveliness that inhabits our soft hairless ape shells.  That the debasedness of sex as represented in art high and low, and our wrestling with what it means to us as creatures who have to live with each other, is illusory.  To be a filthy animal is a fact of life.  To be a filthy cartoon animal is a gift.  We are squashed by ten thousand ACME anvils and do not bleed, only pool in a swamp of ink and reconstitute, with a constellation of dizzied stars and bells and tweeting birds circling our noggins.  Our bodies are ink on paper.  Just ideas at the mercy of a nib.  You see us, you turn the page and you wash your hands.