I find it hella ironic that you're about "free speech" yet you hid the only preceding comment on this submission. Good job at self-owning.

Same energy

I'm an old furry who has spent a lot of time with the people that started the first furry convention, been on staff of cons for decades I have to say this speech is highly inaccurate. You are mixing in a weird perception from the most tabloid press coverage as if it was real. The fandom was very queer though the 90s and 00's. Also perception of just being gay in the 90s were still colored by the AIDS crisis and how society was treating gay people in general. Furry was a safe space then for people to experiment. The first furry convention was started by a queer couple in the 80s.

Also murrsuiting was never the norm, I'm really not sure where that came from but the fandom was never fully family friendly as it sprang up from the independent comics scene. It is a fork of Funny Animal fandom owes a lot to early comics like Omaha the Cat Dancer. Also it sprang from early "Greater Fandom" which was also quite sex positive but people seem to forget that.

This is from the perspective of somebody that was there and knows people very well who were there earlier then me.

I see well thanks for the in put. Not all of my speeches' are going to be a hit and some are just going to be hot garbage. Though I write speeches as experiment's. Also my speeches tend to be more of me writing to myself which is why some might not make since. I am a late 3rd generation furry so I was not alive in the 80s or 90s. I just based it off what others have said and what I seen. though I might re watch the fandom documentary as I think I forgot what was in it.

It's ok. Everything is a learning process and history is weird and messy. We all have our biases on how we look back at events. I still contend much of the original hate and "Clean up the fandom" attempts back then were thinly veiled homophobia. The period wasn't a great time to be gay and there was a lot changing then. While not furry exactly the youtuber Matt Baume does fine work looking into how gay people were represented in media over the decades and recently started to talk about being furry. (In his writing more than his youtube channel)

(Disclosure: I was involved in the fandom documentary as a resource and digitized much of the archival footage and I run this archive of old furry media: https://confurence.com/)