The first thing that hits you when you press through the revolving doors of the Hyatt Regency hotel and convention centre in Rosemont, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, is the wall of sound. A cacophony of laughter and karaoke, pumping bass and gleeful, shouting voices. The second is the odour. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, coffee, alcohol, baby powder and deodorant. But the other senses fade out when your eyes start to process what they’re seeing. Because the thing that makes entering this lobby so sensationally surreal – the kind of experience you usually have to lick rare Amazonian frogs to achieve – is what people are wearing.
In December 2023, I attended the Hyatt Regency for a convention called Midwest FurFest. It’s a gathering, one of the biggest in the world, for an often-misunderstood community known as “furries”, which is why about half the crowd – and there are nearly 15,000 people here this weekend – are dressed head to toe in massive, flamboyantly colourful, furry animal costumes.
Over there, a hot-pink fox dances with a blue husky with plush purple ears. A scarlet dragon parades by, its spiked tail held aloft behind it by a velvety green cat. A canary-yellow wolf tries to squeeze past, almost knocking a polka-dotted panda into the path of a green kangaroo with glowing LED eyes. A cerulean bear, a skunk and an orange mouse sit against a wall, their oversized heads beside them on the floor so that their occupants can reach their mouths with plastic forks of salmon rice, watching as half a dozen rainbow reindeer assemble for a parade outside. It’s pure joy. And pure chaos.
Depending on how online you are, you might have heard a bit about furries. If so, a lot of what you’ve heard has a good chance of being pretty distorted, if not flat out wrong. Very basically, furries are a community of people who like to craft and embody stylised animal personas; personas they occasionally get to act out in real life, at conventions like these. Those glorious fursuits – that’s what they represent. Each is an artistic personification, an avatar, of an animal character the wearer has chosen.
Wolves are the most popular animal for a “fursona”, followed by dragons (subclassified as “scalies”), then foxes. Some of them are flashy and expensive: top-tier fursuit makers charge tens of thousands of dollars and are so in demand they often have waiting lists that are years long. Others are more homemade and careworn, but each is its own distinct work of art, imaginative and lovingly crafted.
In December 2014, this same convention at this same hotel was the target of America’s second-largest chemical weapon terrorist attack. Just after midnight on the Saturday night, in an emergency exit stairwell on the hotel’s ninth floor, a chlorine gas bomb was detonated. The building was evacuated and 19 people were rushed to hospital in respiratory distress, some coughing up blood. Police ruled it an intentional act. But over the subsequent decade, the investigation has quietly stagnated. No charges or arrests have ever been made.
Exactly what happened is not the topic of this piece: I’ve spent the last nine months delving into the furry community to solve the twisted mystery of who perpetrated this attack, for my podcast, Fur & Loathing. But from the start, one thing was clear: nobody, not the media nor law enforcement, took furries or the attack seriously. Mainstream media outlets struggled to contain their laughter, even while victims were still in hospital. It is next to impossible to imagine the same outcome if the target had been almost any other group.
“The furry fandom is unique among the other fan groups out there,” Dr Samuel Conway, who chairs Anthrocon, another large furry convention in Pittsburgh, tells me. “The vast majority of them are consumer fandoms. Someone else has a dream and then these people jump on that dream and ride with it.”
Marvel, say, or Lord of the Rings, or video game or comic book fan communities also involve elements of cosplay (dressing up; the word is a shortening of “costume play”) and hold gatherings, most notably the gargantuan Comic-Con in San Diego. But for Conway, who goes by the fursona name Uncle Kage, furries are different. “We are a producer fandom. We make our own dreams. And that makes it a lot more personal to us. And being able to meet with someone else, there is that extra dimension to it,” he continues. “You aren’t just sitting down with somebody who likes the same thing that you like. You’re sitting down with someone who dreams the same way you dream.”
The roots of furry culture can be traced back to underground comic publishing in the 70s and 80s, and it developed its distinctive aesthetic from cartoons – in particular, the 1973 animated film Robin Hood. But it really started to explode as a subculture with the introduction of the internet. As Conway says: “Furries realised that, via the computer, you could connect with people. You could share some companionship, at least in a virtual sense.”
Furries, Conway believes, “invented the internet”! That’s intended to be a little hyperbolic, but not much: furries are deeply embedded in the DNA of digital culture. The community evolved on usenet groups, message-boards and later on social media and shaped the internet as it grew. Its amalgamation of Japanese anime with western cartoon art styles seeped into the web’s wider aesthetic. It also served more generally as a counterweight to the edgy, nihilist troll culture emerging on places like 4chan. Both pushed the cultural envelope, but in opposite directions: the internet, the furry community demonstrated, didn’t have to be an entirely cruel place.
Considering how little most people know about them, furries are a pretty sizeable group. It’s impossible to assess the exact number, but estimates suggest somewhere between one and three million worldwide. You will likely know a furry, even if you don’t know it. That’s partly because being one is still portrayed in most media as, not to put too fine a point on it, a Weird Sex Thing. In some ways, it’s almost the platonic ideal of a Weird Sex Thing: a perfect blend of alien but earnest, intriguing but cringe, alluring but contemptible.
Historically, coverage veered between pearl-clutching outrage and prurient, even voyeuristic, fascination. The tone was set by an infamous 2008 Vanity Fair piece titled “Pleasures of the Fur: the Animalistic, Sexy World of Furries”, and the scores that followed hewed to the same course. Furries even featured as a kind of crazed zoophiliac cult in an episode of CSI: Miami.
It’s a complex problem, because there is undeniably a significant sexual side to furry culture, encompassing all kinds of erotic artwork, sexual roleplay and kink. It’s just that it isn’t the core, or even the most important element, of a culture characterised much more by art, cosplay and a loose philosophy of radical acceptance. “Why are people always pointing the finger at furries? Are we any more or less sexual than other groups? I don’t believe so,” Conway says.
Perhaps, in socially conservative 90s and 2000s America, it was enough that the fandom distinguished itself from the start by openly embracing people, especially LGBTQ+ people, who didn’t fit into the conventional milieu. Today, many in the community are not “out” to family or co-workers – as queer or as furries, or both – which is partly why conventions like Midwest FurFest represent such a release of energy.
“I think for a lot of furries, this is like your chosen family,” says Zeigler Jaguar, who requested for this reason to be quoted only by their furry name. Zeigler, who has been coming to Midwest FurFest for 13 years and was there the year of the gas attack, works in tech in the outside world and makes kinky furry art in this one. He describes himself as a “pretty socially anxious” person. “But when I’m around furries, I don’t care about that as much,” he says. “It’s a judgment-free zone.”
Furry culture, Zeigler agrees, was “born out of internet culture. Born out of queer nerds,” he says. “If you have someone who’s queer, and the nerdier they are, there’s an exponential curve that goes up with the probability of being a furry.” He says it attracts people “who are definitely neurodivergent, who are outside the mainstream, who are outliers. And it’s fun. You meet a lot of very, very interesting and often smart, talented people.”
There are infinite ways to be a furry. The lifestyle, the kink stuff, the art, the cosplay, the conventions, the community – it’s all optional and people pick and choose which parts are meaningful to them. There is really only one defining characteristic: imagining and inhabiting anthropomorphic animal characters. “Virtually all furries have a fursona. It’s their alternate ego, if you will. It’s their furry self. And they create it,” says Kathleen Gerbasi, a professor of social psychology at State University of New York, Niagara. “For a lot of furries, their furry identity is kind of an idealised version of who they are. It’s like, if I could be more extroverted than I am in my street clothes.”
Gerbasi, who authored the first peer-reviewed study of the fandom in 2008, has had to push against a broad range of misconceptions – and most of all, one in particular: “This whole thing that furries want to be some animal; that they, deep down inside, are really a dog or wolf or fox or cat or whatever,” she says, “that’s not what furries are about.” Crucially, furries don’t actually identify as animals. “The typical furry is about having fun,” she tells me, “in a fandom whose norms are to be supportive and non-judgmental. Where they can feel comfortable.”
There’s clearly a stigma at play, even when we talk about how we talk about furries. The idea of adults acting out fantasies with each other, taking joy – sometimes sexual, sometimes not – in exploring different identities led to furries being framed as deviant outsiders. Some in the fandom don’t mind that; some prefer it, even, if it means the cultural mainstream leaves them to their own devices. But it can make itself felt in darker ways than just mockery.
As the fandom grew in the early 2000s, it made enemies. The ingrained niceness, the thing that makes furries so endearing to me, infuriated the more unpleasant internet communities – people for whom earnestness is the most mortal of sins – and made them a target. Furries are tech-savvy, wise to a lot of the tricks that would make them vulnerable to trolling, but they still face a considerably above-baseline level of online abuse. Anthrocon, the convention in Pittsburgh that Conway runs, has regularly been targeted with bomb threats. Even the 2014 chlorine attack was widely and actively celebrated on social media at the time.
On top of that, the emergence of what came to be called the “alt-right” was mirrored within the fandom by the rise of so-called “alt-furries”, importing far-right political ideas. A subgroup called the Furry Raiders, linked to neo-Nazi organisations like the Proud Boys, adopted a swastika armband modified with a pawprint as their logo and began infiltrating conventions and starting their own. In 2017, two years after the gas attack, Midwest FurFest finally banned them after learning of a plan to bring alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos to the convention as a stunt. But the group is still going today.
Somehow for the mainstream political right, furries came to represent “woke” before “woke” was even a thing and, by the end of the 2010s, they were routinely being wielded as a culture war weapon. It wasn’t just the queer-friendly leanings of the community; it was, in a way, their perceived lack of shame that seemed to make cultural conservatives so angry. And because of the part they played in the development of concepts around non-physical identity – including, eventually, gender – they became an easy foil for attacks against the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
The “litter box” controversy is the clearest example of how this plays out. In 2021, the stars of the American right-wing galaxy – Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al – started to latch on to the idea, originally an obscure hoax, that schoolchildren had started “identifying” as animals. “Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry?” Scott Jensen, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate for Minnesota raged in a speech in 2022. “We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost our minds.”
Joe Rogan mentioned it on his podcast, which sent the story stratospheric. Republicans started calling it a “crisis”. It even made it across the Atlantic: Piers Morgan opened a segment of his show in June 2023 with the preposterous: “It wasn’t so long ago that when teachers asked children what they want to be, they meant what profession. Now they’re asking them which animal, object or beast they identify as.”
Putting aside the fact that, as Gerbasi says, “identifying as” simply isn’t what being a furry is about, it’s not difficult to spot the ideological jujitsu being performed here. It’s a reductio ad absurdiam argument, designed to target the wider concept of gender identity and awareness. Just another salvo in the culture war: a trick that allowed them all to bloviate, as Morgan did, on how the left has “gone too far”.
There is a bleak coda to this story, actually. When NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny looked into these claims and tracked them to their source, she did indeed find that some teachers, in Jefferson County, Colorado, had put toilet-buckets, if not exactly litter-trays, into classrooms. But… it was so that students could have somewhere to urinate during mass shooter lockdowns and drills.
“I have never delved into the psychology of the bully,” Conway says when I ask what he thinks is behind the abuse and trolling furries receive. “Other people with much broader degrees than mine no doubt have. But these groups tend to hate, or at least outwardly hate, the innocence. The love of life. The playfulness. Why? Is it because they can’t have it, and long for it, and thus decry it when they find it?”
“If that’s the case”, he adds, “that is heart-wrenching – that these folks could be so incredibly miserable that the only way they can be happy is to try to tear somebody else’s happiness down. What I have to say to them is: throw the edgelord thing aside for a while and come down and join us. Because we’re not going to turn you away at the door. We’ll let you see what we’re about.”
The Fur & Loathing podcast by Nicky Woolf is available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts