Suggested music: Moby, “We are all made of stars” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rFAaAKpVc

I lived in Los Angeles for two years, from mid-97 to mid-99. It taught me a lot.

My job was in West Hollywood. I lived north, in the Valley, a place called Sherman Oaks. My roomies were two furs and their gigantic dog, who was an effective barrier against anyone coming to visit.

Los Angeles, the greater area comprising the Valley and Orange County, were full of furries. In Toronto at the time, we were not a large group - it was possible to know of most furs or at least friends of friends. LA was more scattered, and there were whole groups of furs that I never interacted with. Many more lived down in San Diego, and many, many, MANY more furs lived up in the bay area, about five hours north by car.

LA was everything I’d imagined based on 25 years of movies and TV shows. You couldn’t get around without a car. Famous landmarks were everywhere. The movie business was everywhere. The people, especially where I worked around Sunset and La Cienega, were supernaturally attractive. I referred to that place as the Kingdom of the Elves. It was where the most physically hot people from across the country had all coalesced into one five mile radius. Celebrity sightings were commonplace. I’d see some guy goofing around in a burrito restaurant and be like “oh, hey, Brendan Fraser”.

And the furries in LA that my roommates knew and therefore I hung out with the most were the most secretive of all:

The Industry Furries.

Furries that worked as animators, storyboard artists, theme park suiters. High and low positions throughout the animation and film business, at studios you know and obscure companies you never heard of. Their names appear in credits of hundreds of movies. The furries that designed and animated Disney characters you’ve bought plushies of. Furries that worked in special effects, and had just sitting around in their garage, screen-used stormtrooper helmets with smudges of Tunisian sand on them. Filing cabinets full of pencilled keyframes from Tiny Toons or Transformers or TLK or Balto. The cel art. The scripts. These furries worked on the movies you know of, the cartoons you have DVDs of, and the cereal commercials you saw when you were six. If there’s a cartoon character you thought was cute, chances are a furry drew it. All the way back to the 70s. Yes. Even him.

And they were generally extremely quiet about their furriness, because if your bosses at Warners or Disney found out you were too furry, it was *finger drawing across throat motion*. It wasn’t that long ago that Disney had regulations about hair length and beards. And if you were out as gay you would not work for the Mouse for long. Those regulations had fallen by the wayside by the 90s, but being too visibly furry was still a bridge too far. But even still industry furries had awesome fursuits, custom plushies, multiple aliases, didn’t post their most recognizable art, there were ways to be totally furry and yet totally on the down low. And many of these industry furs were full of anecdotes about job applicants with furry porn in their portfolios or other such dealbreakers.

Just hanging out in their houses was a fuckin’ trip. You can make pretty good money in some of those positions, and one fur I dated for a while, I’d go to his killer Bojack Horseman-ish house on Mullholland and just gawk. On one level he had the dream life. What we all think we want. But he was one of the loneliest men I ever knew. He worked at an incredible job. But at one hell of a cost.

At one of those industry furries’ houses we saw a workprint of The Iron Giant three months before it came out and I was convinced it was going to be the next Star Wars. I loved it so much and then I saw it come out and crash and burn due to horrible marketing. They didn’t know what they had. I’m still salty about it.

You might think I would try to parlay all this industry networking into a job. I had desperately wanted to get into the movie business - it was why I moved to LA in the first place. But if it felt like you were angling for a job, they’d cut you off. But more so, it quickly became apparent that I didn’t, in my heart of hearts, want to live the life of an industry fur. Mostly because there was another thing that was way easier, faster, and with way more upside: the internet. It was a time when jobs in tech were falling off of trees, and why should I bust my balls to work for scrub wages in an animation studio, assuming i could even GET one of those jobs, and at constant risk of getting laid off, when I could write some PHP and make a lot more money? And change the world in the process?

In 1999 the dotcom era was peaking, and while there were plenty of web-based companies in LA (one of which I worked for), the burning heart of the revolution was north. in Silicon Valley. Its where most of my friends were and where I wanted to be. So I started job hunting in the bay.

But before that, first we need to go back, before SoCal, to early 1997, to CF8, the convention I refer to as the Fall of Rome. My boyfriend at the time was Silfur, a bunny boi who was very friendly, very flamboyant, and very skimpily clad. He wore some outfits at that con that provoked the greyest of the greymuzzle furries, the Jim Groats of the world, into drawing highly caricatured and homophobic artwork, which can be found if you dig around. Silfur became a flashpoint at that con, his general demeanor and fashion sense was the object of countless crushes, and countless outraged “whats going ON here” posts on alt.fan.furry. The events from CF8 got spun by internet discourse wildly exaggerating what actually happened, and turned it into a festival of perversions which led directly to the great backlash: the creation of the Burned Furs, a group that ended up crashing the world’s biggest furry convention into a brick wall a couple of years later. It was a lesson in the butterfly effect - Silfur bounced through an Anaheim hotel in daisy dukes and set in motion a chain of events that shook the fandom to its core.

Also at CF8 I first saw a fur playing the piano in the hotel lobby, a cute fox named Axiom, who was surrounded by an audience of onlookers while merrily playing cartoon themes and super mario music to the crowd. “he seems like a fun guy, I should get to know him better.” I thought to myself in passing.

More later.