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Walk with me.
We’re going to wander up to the third floor of Mason Hall — up those evil stairs — on a Sunday afternoon and stumble into room 3427. We’ll find a happy crowd of a few dozen students, picking their way over a spread of colored pencils, scissors and other art supplies. Someone is drawing. Someone else is streaming a football game on their computer. It is Sunday, after all.
Oh, also, I should mention: You might see fuzzy, dismembered, anthropomorphic animal heads on tabletops around the room. That’s because we have discovered the furries of the University of Michigan, officially known as the Anthropomorphic Art Association.
On the day I walked into Mason 3427, a few minutes late, I was greeted warmly by Dante Garetto, a stylish, mulleted LSA junior from Singapore and the president of the AAA, who proceeded to introduce me to his audience:
“Liam Rappleye, an award-winning student journalist, will be here today working on a story about us,” Garetto said. I scoffed at the aggrandizing introduction, but sat down and took my place nonetheless. The two hours I had arranged for this interview have since turned into three enlightening weeks.
Left: Liam Rappleye walks with the President of the Anthropomorphic Arts Association Dante Garetto in his fursona Luckii in the Diag Sunday afternoon. Right: Liam Rappleye puts on fursona Luckii’s head. Lila Turner/Daily. Buy this photo.
***
A politician from Oklahoma planted a seed in my mind that festered for months before sprouting this fall. Justin Humphrey, the representative of Oklahoma Legislature’s 19th District drafted House Bill 3084, which is something more akin to a joke than legislation.
It reads, in full: “Students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school shall not be allowed to participate in school curriculum or activities. The parent or guardian of a student in violation of this section shall pick the student up from the school, or animal control services shall be contacted to remove the student.”
While Humphrey later made it clear that this was a political stunt and not a genuine attempt at persecuting furries, the sentiment was clear to me. Humphrey, like many Americans and perhaps like you, sees furries as off-putting, questionable and cringe. Maybe, there’s a chance, you’ve heard some rumblings about the deviant, twisted sexual acts they partake in. Maybe your buddy once knew a furry who was accused of some real yucky stuff.
For years, I, and perhaps you, too, would scoff at furries. Rumors swirled around in middle school about so-and-so who seemed to be wearing that cat-ear headband a lot. To me, they weren’t normal. They were cringe.
But something changed when I first saw this bill.
Despite harboring a slight sense of hesitance toward furries — perhaps confusion is the better word — my opinion changed after seeing the arm of the state leveled at a group of kids. Kids, who, while I might have considered them cringeworthy, just want to kick it with their friends who understand them — kids who like animals and might not like themselves. I wanted to see for myself: Do these people deserve animal control?
I’m telling you, loud and clear: no.
For the last three weeks, I have been immersing myself in furry culture. I’ve gone to meetings. I’ve learned about fursonas. I’ve met the furries, human eye to human eye, and even donned the big fuzzy masks we’ve all been conditioned to wince at.
So, who are they?
Garetto, the president who heaped an embarrassing amount of praise on me, runs a tight ship for AAA, and he does it easily. He’s well dressed and charismatic, seemingly friends with everyone in the room.
The first meeting I attended was simple. There was some information about club finances (interestingly, the AAA is in the process of registering as a non-profit with the IRS), a few reminders about the semester’s events and an agenda for the day: For all the new club members in the room (Garetto will later tell me that this is one of the largest crowds the club has ever drawn, largely composed of new furries gained by their recruiting at FestiFall), the day will be spent drafting up a “fursona” — the alternate identity tied to a costume donned by a furry.
Garetto takes the club seriously, but not too seriously. The slides he presented were decked out with usual silly-slideshow fare: “The Simpsons” memes, “SpongeBob SquarePants” photos, a warning in the safety slide that read “NO BARKING!” You know, the normal stuff.
After sending the club members off to begin working on their fursonas, Garetto spoke with me about his time as a furry.
He’s been involved in the scene for years, he said. He makes all of his own suits by hand, in part as a matter of creative expression and doubly as a matter of saving money. With some commissioned fursuits soaring well over $1,000 on sites like The Dealer’s Den, it makes sense to build them yourself.
“There’s no way I’m going to pay the price of a used car for a fursuit,” Garetto said. “I don’t even have a car yet.”
As president, Garetto has seen the AAA grow quite a bit. When it began a year ago, eight or 10 folks were showing up to meetings each week. They started recruiting a little more intentionally this fall, posting flyers around campus — although they were quickly ripped down in protest, Garetto said.
“I think people saw it at first as, like, ‘Oh, the weird kids got a little novelty club.’ But we’re here, you know?” Garetto said.
And as for the ripping down of the posters and online hate the furry community — and AAA specifically — might receive, Garetto doesn’t mind.
“Sometimes it’s nice to have a hater on your back,” Garetto said. “If what I’m doing isn’t making somebody uncomfortable, then what I’m doing isn’t making a difference.”
Garetto explained how furries have been historically misrepresented and therefore misunderstood, which was precisely the reason I was there with him.
“There’s this gap between the understanding of the community and the general public. There was that one CSI episode about a furry who —”
He gets cut off by someone else with a pink dog head in their lap.
“Not the CSI episode!” Ery Millican, Art & Design senior from Grosse Pointe, said.
“That set us back years,” Garetto said.
Season four, episode five of the crime-drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” is hilariously titled “Fur and Loathing.” The funny title is all I will give it credit for (I may be a furry sympathizer, but I also think Hunter S. Thompson is cool).
The episode tells the tale of two investigators who discover a dead man in a fursuit on the side of the road outside of a Las Vegas furry convention. They follow the tracks, joking endlessly about how perverted furries are. They apprehend the culprit by busting in on a furry orgy, interrogating combative, sassy, outrageous characters and revealing the motive of the crime to be fursuit sex — or “yiffing” — gone wrong.
It’s a stifling representation of the furry community. It’s everything I thought they were when I was younger. In some great irony, it’s actually everything they’re not.
“People look at furries and they see, like, they see this weird thing, they think of people in fursuits having sex,” Millican said when I asked them about their interjection later. “It’s — that’s not the point.”
“When you’re on the outside, you just don’t understand why people want to do things,” Millican said. “Everyone on the outside only sees that (sex stuff).”
Look, before I go any further: Yes, there are probably a few furries who do weird sex stuff. There are also a few students in your math class who do weird sex stuff. There are professors of yours who do weird sex stuff. Hell, who are you to define what constitutes “weird sex stuff”? For further evidence of how commonly students at Michigan practice kinky sex, consider The Daily’s 2023 Statement Sex Survey (which Millican aptly criticized when I told them I worked for Statement because it failed to draw a line between being and furry and doing “pet play” in the bedroom — a stark difference).
But more to the point, it seems we only relegate a group of people into an outsider identity when it’s easy to do so; when they are outwardly different, literally wearing a costume that sets them apart, we pin more badges of eccentricity onto them.
The kids jumping around in a fuzzy suit and throwing up peace signs with their paws might be an easy target, but what if I asked you to consider the furry not as a strange deviant, but as an artist?
Millican, for example, is literally a practicing artist. They are a senior at the Stamps School of Art & Design, and the reason they’re drawn to the furry community, they said, is largely because of art. And, perhaps, because they love animals. With bright-orange hair, two dog bone hair clips and a variety of necklaces with dog bone pendants hanging on two of them, Millican explained what a labor of love it is to make fursuits.
Almost all fursuits are made by hand, Millican said. It begins with crafting foam, which the artist sculpts with a turkey carver into pieces that are meticulously assembled with glue and a lot of tact, before being covered in faux fur. The fur is methodically placed, with scattered easter eggs hidden in each fursuit, like little hearts or hair patterns representing the person inside of the suit.
On Millican’s fursuit, named Honey, there is a matching ear gauge, a septum piercing and flashy, felted eyeliner that mirrors the sharp black strokes around Millican’s own eyes. It’s all handmade.
It’s not easy to make a fursuit, Millican explained, even if they’re not as detailed as Honey is. Some members of AAA make money by crafting suits and accessories for other people in the community, something Millican did for a while.
“(Making fursuits) is pretty lucrative, even if you’re not good,” they said. “People just want art.”
Art. That’s what this is about. It’s what it’s always been about for them.
“I’ve been sewing basically ever since I could,” Millican said, stitching a liner into Honey at Mach speed. “My fursuit is one of the most daunting pieces of art I have ever made.”
Replace the word “fursuit” in the last few paragraphs with the word “painting” or “sculpture,” and suddenly it’s normal again. Suddenly you’re not raising your eyebrows. Suddenly, Millican is an artist to the skeptic, as if they haven’t been this whole time.
But who is somebody like Millican to the politician from Oklahoma, who thought a valuable use of taxpayer coin was to draft up a clown bill that did nothing but point at the furries and demean them?
Why are furries on the receiving end of this strange hate? What other subcultures — people with innocent, shared interests — are targeted by legislation?
Millican, who laughed at the bill when it made headlines in January, said furry hate, whether institutionalized or just in the hallways, probably stems from homophobia.
While furries are not extensively studied, some scholars, gathering sample data from surveys at furry conventions, estimate that nearly 90% of furries identify as LGBTQ+ in one way or another.
“People are just like, ‘I don’t understand. You’re autistic. You’re gay. You’re weird,’” Millican, who is neurodivergent, said. “You don’t have to be a furry. Just be normal about them. Please.”
The same identity markers Millican said furries are criticized for, though, are also the basis of the fandom.
“The furry community is founded on people who are neurodivergent or ostracized or don’t always like who they are,” Millican said, turning stitches in and out of Honey’s head. “When you put the suit on, you get to be something or someone you want to be. You don’t have to worry about your hair, your face, your makeup. Maybe you have to make sure your fur is straightened out, but you don’t really have to be yourself, you can be who you want. For some people, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is such an escape from my life — my life where no one understands me.’”
Often, the person in a fursuit is an artist who felt ostracized — like they never quite found their place in the world. Their art becomes a literal veil for them to put over their head, a means of survival. Their shields are made of pink fur and foam.
Millican and I kept chatting, but the meeting started wrapping up. As Garetto made a few final announcements to the club, Millican helped pack up the colored pencils, stuffed Honey into a plastic garbage bag and went on their way.
***
In one particularly salient conversation, Garetto said, “The furry community has values of being authentic, expressing yourself — being cringe, but free.”
That phrase, “Cringe, but free,” is a sort of rallying cry for the furries, who know what they do might be a little strange and cringeworthy. Despite the perception of being a furry, it makes them tick. It sparks some joy. It sets them free.
If the poet W.B. Yeats was right, that life is just a long preparation for something that never happens, shouldn’t we all be doing what sets us free while we’re here? Shouldn’t we capture the thing that makes us tick whenever we can?
Garetto seems to have figured his passion out.
“I will not take shit so seriously. I will jump around in a big fluffy suit and make people happy,” Garetto said. “I’ll do that over being cool and nonchalant in the back of the room.”
So after three weeks of seeing the furs on Sundays, sitting nonchalantly in the corner while taking notes and interviewing members, Garetto invited me to join a few members of the club for a walk around campus in the fursuits. He provided a suit for me to wear — a purple wolf named Luckii — and we went to the Diag to waltz about in fuzzy regalia.
At first, I walked with them in my own clothing, black shirt and black jeans, without the suit on. The rest of them were suited up, catching skeptical glares from people we walked past.
I saw myself in the passersby. I felt like I knew exactly what they were thinking about us. Then I turned around and saw two blue dogs, a pink deer and a purple dog. Behind me were friends — it was a group of people who included me into their circle and encouraged me to join their fun.
We paused on the Diag, and Garetto handed me Luckii’s head and some big purple paws to match. He helped me put it on correctly so I could see, and I slid the mask over my head.
It’s hard to see with a fursuit on your head, but it’s not hard to notice people taking photos of you. Once I had the suit on, I saw people taking sneaky pictures on cell phone cameras. There was a certain degree of shame to their citizen journalism — if you waved, they tucked their phone away and turned around.
Not everyone was so bashful, though. Children specifically were eager to wave at us as we walked toward the southeast corner of the Diag. I was elated when a few people approached and asked to take pictures with us in the suits.
Even if we were dressed as animals, I could not shake the feeling that it was a precious moment of human connection. I felt happy.
So now, I ask of you, since you’ve walked with me, from the depths of the middle-school hivemind to the Oklahoma House floor, up to the special energy on the third floor of Mason Hall where the furries hang out and all across campus: I hope you’ll walk with the furries, too — cringe, but free.
Statement Correspondent Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu.
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