Strom also mentions a 1994 Wired article and a 2001 Vanity Fair article, both of which he feels unfairly portrayed furries as freaks. "People like to look down on someone else to make themselves feel better," Strom says. Or maybe it's simply that the world, especially the geek world, just needed an underdog. "We started getting people who were like, this is a good place for us to go and meet swingers and get our jollies off! They put on costumes just to fit in and were only interested in the sex, not what the majority of us are actually there for." These miscreants were also quick to pipe up to the media, giving the outside world the wrong impression. Then there was the time when organizers of a certain unnamed furry conference advertised in BDSM magazines. "They would go to other sci-fi and anime and comic conventions and look at anthropomorphic smut in public, or have loud conversations about, 'Boy I'd really like to hit this-or-that character from that random movie.'" "The early indiscretions of a few people" triggered a media frenzy early on that painted them as sex-crazed cosplayers, he explains. By the mid-90s, when Strom attended his first furry convention, hundreds were flocking to cities from Philadelphia to Essex to attend organized events where sold anthropomorphic art and fiction, congregated with fellow furries, and - on occasion - dressed up as bipedal animals. Today, there are dozens of furry conventions every year with some - like the esteemed Anthrocon - attracting nearly 3,000 people.īut if the furry fandom truly is friendly and imaginative role-play, not a fetish, why do so many people see it that way? There were a few catalysts, according to Strom, and he becomes visibly upset to talk about them. People were already hosting weekend furry parties in their homes, but the early conventions proved that there was enough of a following to make these a regular occurrence.
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The offline socializing among fur-fans started off as room parties at anime conventions then, in 1989, some of the early adopters decided to hold their own event in Costa Mesa, California, which they called ConFurence Zero. A lot of it has moved to Second Life, but I still have some characters there." Strom was also a theater major, so role-playing was a natural fit. Combine Zork, the old Infocom text adventures, with World of Warcraft, and you get a MMO text-based game where you can write the room descriptions and build out stories. It's basically a chat room that you telnet into. "I backdoored into FurryMUCK through Disney use groups. "It just made a lot of sense." That's where he discovered, a furry newsgroup. "I met a lot of people who were also interested in this stuff," he says. He got a campus job as a lab admin, where he spent most of his time on Usenet. In college, Strom joined the furry fandom.
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Who could forget the savvy canine archer and his muse, foxy Maid Marion? "Every character in that movie is effectively a furry," Strom says. Many veteran furries credit their entrance into the fandom to Disney, specifically to the 1973 animated hit Robin Hood. "I was like, these are the coolest things ever," he says. As a teen, he volunteered as a fox cage maintenance guy at a wildlife reserve. "It's like a tech nerd going to MacWorld."Įver since he was a little kid, Strom liked to draw pictures of animals that spoke - Bugs Bunny, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "The furry fandom is just like any other group of like-minded individuals," Strom says. Strom says that the fandom is not about sex at all, and that it's no different than communities of people obsessed with anime or superhero comics. He cautiously agreed to an interview with me because - as a 17-year veteran of the fandom - he wants to set the furry facts straight.
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But Strom isn't here to tell me about costumes or kinks. Furries are often portrayed as weirdos who dress up as animals for sex play. Strom is a furry - a subset of geeks who like to role play as fictional anthropomorphic characters with human traits.
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He's gotten himself in trouble by doing this, which I myself have done a couple of times. He offers his services when he shouldn't be because the people he's helping don't really deserve his help. He's in his 30s, he has blue eyes and blond hair." Strom says, pointing to his blond ponytail and gentle blue eyes. "He's a nice guy to a fault. "He is six foot two, which is how tall I am. For the past 17 years, Strom has had an anthropomorphic alter-ego: Jaded Fox. There's just something about them that speaks to me," he tells me over coffee and a sandwich near his downtown San Francisco office, where he works as an IT guy for a media company. Josh Strom always loved foxes, but it wasn't until he became an adult that he started to imagine what it would be like to actually become one.