"I Love Furry" Thoughts

"Room Party", the prior exhibit at Bunker Projects that ran during Anthrocon 2025, was doubtlessly a tough act to follow. I desperately miss the literature wall from it. However, "I Love Furry" was an extremely moving exhibit. In particular I want to talk about the photo wall, Exhibit 2.

I've seen the viewpoint that lives can be worth "more" or "less" based on how successful or full of agency someone is. Big picture concepts like legacy; leaving a mark on the world, having children, and the like have been pursued as long as there've been people. There's also the stuff we all want, even as queer DINK-aspirationals. There's an idea that a life less real and meaningful if it's something that can be taken away at the whim of someone else, if someone is stuck in an environment without a meaningful way to improve it, or if they're unable to achieve certain grand aims.

And I mean, I vociferously disagree with that. "I Love Furry" and its photo postcard wall reminded me more emotionally of why. I always make a point to take candid shots of the mundane stuff when I'm at conventions, even if I might not publish it for 15, 20 years, if ever for a variety of reasons. Part of it is the historical chronicler in me. I want there to be a record of what things were like for us gay animals at this historical moment, right now, for us and the future to look back on. But there's a less sober and more sentimental reason.

Obviously, our lives have meaning and value.

The photo wall was deliberately largely non-"keeper" photos. These are not ones that would make the cut in a normal artbook. Some are bad from a technical perspective like blur or lighting, like one I saw of a LAN party. Others are of very mundane things like people sitting around in front of Hall B with fursuit heads strewn about as they try to beat the heat. None of these are unique, necessarily; they're both totally mundane events that have happened before and will happen again.

However, we're gifted as people with the ability to infuse meaning into things like this. I know that people submitted those photos because of that. To anyone, these quiet moments might initially look mundane, but the possibility is endless. What if that was the moment you fell in love with the furry community? Found out you were a therian? Developed a love for a new subculture? Met someone you clicked wonderfully with? All of that matters, because of course it does. Our lives are vessels for the sacred and profound, and furry communities and gatherings have so much potential to be places with real choices, real discoveries, and real intimacy. That function is critical in a world that is constantly skewering us with morton's fork, trying to close off everything into a horrible [DEFAULT WHITE CHRISTIAN MALE] monoculture, and selling us the illusion of connection with workplaces insisting you're family and trying to replace genuine connection and interaction with automated LLM garbage.

I don't mean to imply that furry communities are havens untouched by the rot of capitalism. As noted by Tim Curry, it's quite an effort to escape to an uncorrupted place. There's even discourses about that subject and Anthrocon specifically occurring right now. I'm also in agreement that there is significant unused potential for furries to organize as a political bloc, something that will only become more urgent. However, the fact that there are tendencies here that strike at the heart of our rotten social world is undeniable, and I am deeply enamored of them. Put enough furries in the same area and it has the potential to generate life-affirming experiences. The mundane becomes sacred.

The time we spend together, the projects we work on, the queer sex, all of it matters. Even if it's small, even if it's brief. I promise you that it does. And that's one of the reason I love photos, and I love the Exhibit 2 photo wall. It's proof. There is proof we existed, proof that we were happy and sad and everything else. It's self-demonstrating evidence that yes, all of this matters. Do not be tricked into thinking it does not matter!

Addenda

A few extra notes:

• Exhibit 4, the extremely sexually lurid book describing the participants' first encounter with furry art, was so funny and joyful. I loved it.
• Please donate to Bunker Project and say you're a furry. I want them to keep doing these! Plus it's a cool artist residency anyway. The show is also still running at time of publishing, if you happen to be a Pittsburgh local or stop by after the convention.
• Thank you to everyone I saw at Anthrocon. It was overall a very good year for me which is a credit to all the lovely people I get to hang with.