They dress up as animals and are often queer. Who are furries, and what’s really hidden beneath their costumes?
At first glance, it’s easy to reduce the whole furry world to photographs of people dressed in giant animal costumes. After all, these are its most visible aspect. In reality, however, the furry fandom is a much broader mix of art, internet culture, cosplay, role-play, friendship and experimentation with how one presents oneself.
The basic definition is actually quite simple. Furries are united by an interest in anthropomorphic animal characters – that is, animals that possess human characteristics. They may walk on two legs, speak, wear clothes, have jobs, relationships or human emotions. As explained by the Furscience research project – led by academics who have been studying the furry fandom for many years – it is precisely this interest in anthropomorphic animals that represents one of the community’s fundamental shared elements.
And in fact, this is nothing we haven’t encountered in popular culture since childhood. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and the characters from Zootopia are anthropomorphic animals too. Furry culture, however, has developed this principle into a distinct fandom, in which people create their own characters, drawings, stories, costumes and entire virtual identities.
Being a furry isn’t just about a costume. And most don’t even own one
This is where the first major misunderstanding arises. You don’t have to walk down the street dressed as a two-metre-tall fox to be a furry.
Full-body animal costumes are called fursuits, and those who wear them are sometimes referred to as fursuiters. They can be professionally made to order, highly elaborate and, at the same time, quite expensive. Some people have a full costume, whilst others have only a head, paws or a tail.
However, owning a costume is by no means a prerequisite for membership of the community. According to long-term research by Furscience, only around 10 to 15 per cent of furries own a fursuit, although a significantly larger proportion of the community would be interested in one.
The image of the furry fandom created through photos from conventions or social media is a bit like the idea that all Star Wars fans own a stormtrooper costume at home. The most visible people are simply not automatically representative of the entire community.
Many furries participate in the fandom almost exclusively online. They follow furry artists, commission artwork, create their own stories, chat on Discord or social media, play games and meet up at specialised conventions.
An alter ego called a fursona
Far more important to the furry community than the costume itself is the concept of the fursona. It is a portmanteau of the words ‘furry’ and ‘persona’ and refers to the anthropomorphic character a person creates for themselves.
It could be a wolf, a fox, a dog, a tiger or a rabbit, but also a dragon or a completely fictional species. Often, it is more than just an image. A fursona may have a name, an age, a personality, a style of dress, its own backstory and, sometimes, a gender or sexual orientation.
It is precisely for this reason that it can function as a kind of alternative version of the person who created it. Research published by the Furscience project shows that people often create their fursonas as somewhat idealised versions of themselves. In other studies, for example, participants rated their fursonas as more extroverted or emotionally stable than they considered themselves to be.
A fursona can thus offer a person the opportunity to behave slightly differently from how they feel in their everyday life. An introvert might come across as more self-assured through their character; someone else might experiment with their appearance; and yet others might experiment with the way they communicate with others.
There doesn’t necessarily have to be any deep psychology behind it. For some people, a fursona is simply a fun avatar. For others, however, it can genuinely be a fairly important part of their self-expression.
Furries don’t usually think they’re animals
This ties in with another common misconception: that a person in a wolf costume actually believes they are a wolf.
That, however, does not automatically make someone a furry. Furry fandom is based primarily on an interest in anthropomorphic characters and on a certain form of fan identity. A person can have a bear fursona without considering themselves a bear trapped in a human body.
Why are there so many queer people among furries?
The relationship between the furry fandom and the LGBTQ+ community is particularly interesting. Being a furry is not part of one’s sexual orientation or gender identity, yet research repeatedly shows an exceptionally high proportion of queer people.
Data collected by the International Anthropomorphic Research Project indicates that furries are significantly more likely than people from comparable fandoms to identify as bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, asexual or otherwise non-heterosexual. At the same time, however, researchers expressly point out that it would be a mistake to describe the furry fandom as a homosexual community. Heterosexual furries do exist, and their numbers are by no means negligible.
Why this community in particular? There is no single definitive explanation. The researchers themselves, however, point out, amongst other things, the fandom’s openness to various forms of identity and the opportunity to experiment with self-expression through one’s fursona. A character does not necessarily have to share the same sex, gender expression or sexual orientation as its creator.
This allows people to try out, in a relatively safe environment, what it is like to adopt a different appearance, a different name or a different gender expression before doing anything similar in their everyday lives.
It is no coincidence that, for example, the American magazine *Them*, in its guide to furry culture, describes the fandom as a community in which creative self-expression has long been intertwined with a significant presence of queer people.
This also explains why furries might turn up at Pride. Some of them aren’t there because they’re furries, but simply because they’re also gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans or other queer people. Others may attend as allies.
Is being a furry a sexual fetish?
Probably no stereotype is associated with the furry community as often as sex. Some furry art is indeed erotic, and pornographic furry art also exists. Some members of the fandom link their fursona to their sexuality, and there are all sorts of sexual subcultures within the community.
It would therefore be inaccurate to deny this. However, it is equally inaccurate to use this as a definition of the entire fandom. Furscience has looked directly at the motivations of members of the furry community. The results show that, whilst sexuality may be one of the motivations for some people, it is not universal and, in this particular study, ranked among the less significant reasons for participating in the fandom. By contrast, a sense of belonging and self-expression, for example, played a significant role.
Similarly, an extensive report by the British newspaper *The Guardian* on one of the largest furry conventions describes the community primarily as a combination of art, friendship, costumes, creativity and a space for people who sometimes do not feel entirely at home in mainstream society. Sex is one of many possible aspects of the fandom, not an essential part of it.
Just as one cannot define the entire anime community by the existence of hentai, or the entire internet by the existence of pornography, it makes little sense to explain furry fandom solely through its erotic content.
The internet has transformed furry from a small fandom into a global community
The roots of modern furry fandom stretch back at least to the American sci-fi and comic book communities of the 1970s and 1980s. A cultural history published by the University of Texas at Austin traces the origins of this specific aesthetic subculture back to the 1970s.
However, it was the internet that truly created the ideal conditions for its development. Suddenly, it was no longer necessary to live in a major American city or travel to specialised conventions to find someone with the same interests. Furries could share drawings, create characters, commission illustrations and find friends on the other side of the world.
Furry culture is therefore, to a large extent, an internet culture today. It is built on community-driven creation. Moreover, unlike the fandom of a single film series, it does not have a single studio, a single author or a single original world around which everything revolves.
The characters are created by the members themselves. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the furry world. It is not merely about fans of someone else’s story; to a large extent, they create their own.
Behind that giant fox head is, after all, a perfectly ordinary person
From the outside, furry culture may seem strange. Partly because its most distinctive aesthetic is practically designed to be impossible to overlook. A person in an ordinary T-shirt on the street won’t attract attention. A two-metre-tall neon-blue wolf will.
But that’s precisely what sometimes creates a distorted picture. Being a furry can mean owning a costume worth several thousand and travelling to conventions in it. Equally, it can mean drawing a picture of your fox character once every few weeks. Some people in the furry community find friends, others find a space for artistic expression, or another way to experiment with their identity. For others, it’s simply a hobby.
Some are gay. Others are trans. Others are bisexual. And some are simply heterosexual. There is therefore no single answer to the question of why someone becomes a furry. The common denominator isn’t sexuality, gender or the desire to become a real animal. It is, above all, a fascination with a world in which animals can have human characteristics – and the opportunity to create their own character within it. For some, a profile picture on the internet is enough.
And some people simply get themselves a tail.
