Burned Furs, Puriteens, and Furry’s Real Golden Age

This article was originally a Twitter thread from 2021. With X/Twitter setting itself on fire, it occurred to me that it’d be useful to pull it into an actual blog post. I’ve updated a few bits and “dethreaded” it for publication here.

So the Burned Furs come up every so often in The Discourse.™ And I’d like to talk about how they’re both exactly what you think and way more than you think. Gamergate, the Sad Puppies, Bronies for Trump—we had it all ahead of schedule, writ small and stupid.

In some ways, the BFs came out of arguments furry is still having now. Should we be more circumspect about sexy-stuff in general and fetishes in particular? Should the Shame Nun angrily chant and ring bells at us for our contemptible tolerance of disgusting things? If this sounds like an earlier take on the “puriteens” of the present moment, well, bingo. Charla “Squee Rat” Trotman would probably have objected even then to being described that way, but if the foo shits, right? When I first wrote this, I thought Squee Rat was 15 or 16 when she wrote this, but Wikipedia claims she was born in 1978. In fact, Squee Rat was only 19 or 20 when she wrote her “Sordid Little Business” broadside that effectively kicked off the Burned Furs. She didn’t start the BFs, but she defined their ranting, angry tone.

Here’s the thing: “Sordid” isn’t just a profane rant, it’s a weird profane rant. There’s a paragraph or two complaining about zoophiles, another about “plushophiles,” but the vast bulk of the article is about what she saw as the real evil: Furry Lifestylers. Furry what? We don’t use that term much now, but it rolls up a lot. I mean, a lot.

Back in the relatively early days of science fiction fandom (say, the 1950s and 60s) there were two somewhat tongue-in-cheek camps, “FIAWOL” (Fandom is a way of life) and “FIJAGH” (Fandom is just a goddamn hobby). Arguably, “furry lifestyler” was our version of FIAWOL. Even in the early days of furry, some people deeply identified with their fursonas. There were “furry houses” like the Prancing Skiltaire.

So “lifestyler” encompasses anything that involves seeing furry as deeper than “cartoon animals are cool.” Otherkin, definitely. But to the Burned Furs and Squee Rat, it encompassed just wishing you were an animal. Deeply personal fursonas. And, uh, being vegan. Seriously, she wrote more words railing about vegans than about zoophiles. #priorities

So on the one hand, “Sordid” is deeply immature, and on the other, kind of bonkers. Sure, furry was (and remains) full of adult and fetish material. But it argues the true scourge, the evil whose inclusion would surely doom furry to the trash heap of pop culture history, was: plushophile vegans.

Anyway, “Coyote Nate” Patrin wrote the actual Burned Fur Mission Statement, which also calls out bestiality, plushophilia, and fursuit sex. I don’t know if I’d call that manifesto and its supplemental FAQ either excessively puritanical or overtly homophobic, but let’s put a pin in that for a moment.

I would, however, call them whiny, in the “I don’t care if this stuff is here but why do I have to see it and if other people see it they’ll think all furry is like this so actually I do care” way we see in current puriteen crusaders. Also, the FAQ caps on vegans again, because while furry has nothing to do with your self-identity it apparently has everything to do with your diet. Interestingly, they’re also focused on commercial prospects: there was a perception at the time that furry was getting a bad rap in the animation and comics industries. Once you’re branded with the Scarlet F, kid, you’ll Never Work In This Town Again!

So, back to that pin. The mission statement began by bemoaning “‘alternative lifestyle’ groups associated with [furry], many of whom have little interest in…anthropomorphic art, stories, costumes, etc.” And acts the Burned Furs “strongly discourage the support of” included not just bestiality, plushophilia, and fursuit sex, but “other things seen as ‘wrong’ by non-fandom individuals.” I can’t prove this was meant as a homophobic dog whistle, but let’s be blunt: it’s sure easy to hear it as one. And this is where things get even more complicated.

See, while you know the name “Burned Furs,” what you might not know is that they had an antecedent, the “Take Back Our Fandom Brigade” fomented by Gallery editor Rich Chandler:

Well, frankly, I think it’s time we collectively said “Enough is Enough!” Things are not going to get better by themselves. Tolerance and political correctness and even manners be damned, we have to reclaim our fandom.

This raises immediate questions: reclaim it from who and for who? It rested on the dubious idea that there had been a “golden age of furry” which had already passed by the mid-1990s due to all the pr0nz.

Oh, you mean all the naked vixens?

Oh, no, those are fine.

Then I guess you mean the weird Nazi-adjacent imagery, with the obvious uniform and heavy weaponry fetishes—

No, no, we don’t mean that.

(Angry goose meme) WHAT KIND DO YOU MEAN, THEN, FUCKER? Uh-huh.

The folks in Southern California—the late Mark Merlino and his partner Rod O’Riley, founders of the Prancing Skiltaire—who organized the first furry parties and the first furry con were self-described lifestylers, and openly gay/bi/poly. Furry started out entwined with queer communities, and started out being pretty frankly sexual. (The first furry-as-we-know-it comic was arguably Reed Waller’s Omaha the Cat Dancer, whose first appearance was in the funny animal APA Vootie in 1978.)

And some people hated that furries were so damn open about sexing up their cartoon animals, were so brazenly queer-friendly, were so visibly weird. They hated that being tied to those dirty dirty furries might affect their prospects in the animation industry. At least in theory, they weren’t anti-queer prudes (Chandler would repeatedly point out he identified as bisexual, so he couldn’t possibly be queerphobic); in practice, though, they really hated that furry was, yes, so damn queer. That it wasn’t, for an increasing number of people, just a goddamn hobby.

And these were the guys—all (cis white) guys, as far as I know—with the reactionary, Gamergate-foreshadowing vibe. They didn’t do a lot before this except grumble, but the Burned Furs gave a vindication of their views! And had attention! And wanted members! Despite their protests to the contrary, the BFs obviously did want gatekeepers in furrydom. Furry needed people who would force all the undesirables back into the closet and/or out of the subculture entirely, and obviously only the people who saw the problem were qualified to be those gatekeepers.

So while the Burned Furs didn’t start as a conservative power play to Make Furry Great Again, that’s what they became. Some people still genuinely believe it was about “improving furry,” but, well. Some people still genuinely believe Gamergate was about ethics in game journalism.

The most charitable reading of their premise is that furry shouldn’t be about your identity, but just about the art. I actually get it; long ago, I bristled at the idea that it was about anything more myself, and I was concerned about how easy it was to find adult art. (I didn’t want to suppress it, but I didn’t want it to be people’s first experience with furry.) But I realized, thankfully quickly, that furry was always about both art and identity. Telling people how they can and can’t identify is a mean-spirited, ugly proposition. And ultimately, a losing one.

So it isn’t surprising that the Burned Furs, er, burned out. Nate Patrin became a professional music journalist, writing for Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Spin, among others. (The article I linked, “It’s Hard to Tell Who Is Real in Here: On being tired of fighting over taste,” takes on a decided ironic cast now, doesn’t it.) In a truly glorious example of Bet You Didn’t See This Coming, C. Spike “Squee Rat” Trotman became an award-winning publisher of erotic comics. Neither of them want to discuss furry anymore, which, you know, fair. Trotman’s company nonetheless produced and distributed Tracy Butler’s “Lackadaisy” short film; I’m not sure if that means she’s forgiven furry, or if she would strenuously argue that “Lackadaisy” isn’t furry, it just has, you know, anthropomorphic animals in adult situations. (I guess it’s okay because they’re not vegan.)

Some other Burned Furs, TBOFs, and BF-adjacent types like Chandler joined Gamergate and/or the Sad Puppies, because of fucking course they did. Each movement rested on near-identical paranoid conservative fantasies of restoring an imagined Golden Age now under existential threat. Our modern fannish purity culture isn’t quite the same—as Vox notes, it’s often spearheaded by people who’d otherwise describe themselves as liberal, and stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between real-world harm and fictional harm—but the similarities are clear.

It’s ironic that an anti-diversity group started with a young black woman’s rant—but furry’s full of cis white males, and the reactionaries saw a chance to say “follow us or you’re doomed.” We didn’t. And it turns out we’re still here—bigger and better than ever. We’re more diverse, more creative, and frankly, more popular and accepted.

Sure, we’re still a work in progress. But at least in the eyes of this giant cat who was really there all that time ago, the closest we’ve ever had to a Golden Age in Furry is now.