RICK CASTRO: MY FIRST TOUCH OF FUR

 

this is a blast from my past~ circa~ 2002~

MY FIRST TOUCH OF FUR

Rick Castro, co-director and writer of Hustler White, gets warm and fuzzy with the newest trend in fur.

A man dressed as a crocodile grabs me by the arm. "Hurry! The fashion show is about to begin!" We gallop into the theatre just as someone in a musk deer outfit prances down the catwalk. A zaftig skunk with a full bustline saunters by in a red sequin evening gown.. A sexy black cat in a lame' loin cloth struts past a little red fox, who then leaps off the catwalk. A winged lizard sings "Break Away." Out come two wolves wearing sweatshorts torn in just the right places. They seem enamored with each other and anything with a nice tail. A kitten with a whip puts a leash on a wily coyote and leads him down the catwalk. A deer wearing a leather harness and boots does a straddle pose. Bending over, he shows his twitching tail. The crowd literally barks and howls as a litter of white kittens stuff dollar bills into his jockstrap. It was a tremendous show. But I later learned that in another room, a furry wedding was simultaneously taking place. Gosh, I'm sorry I missed that! And that was just the beginning. Because until I encountered the world of Furries, I thought I'd seen it all.

(director- rick castro)

From exploring sex clubs in the 80’s, to S&M play parties, to membership in the LA Water Polo Team (get it?), I am no stranger to sexual subcultures. I've been a bondage enthusiast for most of my adult life, devoting a decade to photographing it. And when my film Hustler White played at Sundance and in theaters in 1996, some audience members fled during the sex scenes, including one involving an amputee. At this point in my life I'm proudly jaded. But nothing could have prepared me for my experience covering the furry conventions of 1998-2000.

(photo~ rick castro)

It all started for me at a furry convention. Billed as a "ConFURence," it was a four-day celebration of  anthropomorphic love. At a nondescript Buena Park, California hotel, folks of different sizes and shapes walked around with stuffed animals made of fake fur. Others were in puppet form, animated by their owners. These people with plush toys are generally called plushies.

 (photo~rick castro)

Plushies are not to be confused with furries, who have a deep love (not sexual) for animals themselves (as opposed to their fake-fur representations) and for anthropomorphic beings that exist in fantasy worlds. And then there are fursuiters, who derive pleasure from wearing a costume likeness of an animal.

 (photo~rick castro)

Though "plushie" and "furry" may sound like obscure, specific sorts of fetish, I soon learned that there are sub-cultures within the scene and in fighting inherent with such fractionalization. On one end are the basic fanboys, who collect furry art. Then there's my personal favorite, plushies. They love inanimate stuffed animals (I don't mean taxidermy, although now I’m convinced this also exists). If they are plushophiles, they love their plush in a more erotic way. Furries walk around wearing cute little ears & tails. I met military furries, sci-fi furries, Goth scalies (who love reptiles)  Christian furs and many fursuiters.

Some furries discussed the possibility that plastic surgery and cloning could make a furry human being possible. Why, just look at NYC society lioness Jocelyn Wildenstein!

Notable favorites among the fursuiters are foxes, wolves, skunks and rabbits. The craftsmanship I saw rivaled Sid and Marty Kroff. There were even hermaphrodite fursuiters (don't get scared, they only dress the part). Some furries were slagged off as "burned fur" because they disapproved of the more yiffy (horny) aspects of the fandom and want the scene to be more "normal." Speaking of normal, people not in the scene are called "mundanes." A mundane might think these events are thinly veiled versions of bestiality. But that’s not so and the B-word is verboten among furries. This scene is more about fantasy, art and role playing than it is about shagging a poodle. And their artistry would make Disney’ so jealous, that their "mundane" fur would stand on end.

I was impressed with the high quality of artists involved in the fandom. Subjects ranged from cute anime-style art prints of Kimba the White Lion to X rated drawings of Brer Rabbit having it off with various members of Dr. Dolittle's menagerie. I grazed through boxes of zines with names like Hamster Vice or Ten Furcent (for gay & lesbian furries). The furotica got very specific, with names like Tail Raisers. Furderick's of Hollywood contained the old tits & tail, with some real foxes wearing the latest lingerie.

Walking through the convention, it dawned on me that I was one of the few people there without a tail, let alone ears. At one booth a lion dressed like a king took a photo of a zebra wearing a red mini-skirt. I stopped to sample some of the artwork. It was beautifully colored computer art of giraffes and zebras together like I’ve never seen before. The heads were traditional, but the bodies had a sort of muscle-queen style. They wore skin-tight cut-off jeans with an ample supply of basket, and always anatomically correct.

Furries started as an offshoot of Trekkie conventions. Sometime around 1980, about 20 artists produced ConFURence 0. Mucks, or furry chat rooms on the Internet (populated by folks with names like Skunkwiff, Alina Piglet and Marmaduke Master), helped the scene gel and grow to the point where furry events are now held monthly everywhere in the world. The larger furry conventions attract well over 5,000 people per event.

Like most fandoms, furry conventions seem to attract a disproportionate amount of men to women. One shy young man I met calls himself Big White. He is a slightly built, 22-year-old with gentle eyes who lives in Northern Washington. "I enjoyed my stuffed animals as a child," Big White said. "When I got older I saw no reason to give them up. They gave me comfort and security that people didn't give.

But why does that comfort extend to the sexual kind? Well, what my journeys through the sexual underground have taught me, is that anything can be eroticized. I agree with the late Satanist Church leader Anton LaVey’s theory of ECI (erotic or emotional crystallization inertia), meaning that you can become permanently fixated on objects during puberty and ones first erotic experiences. In these days of bad choice marriages and broken homes, I personally see anything as a valid relationship.

For Big White, "They give my life purpose. I now feel I have a direction and I've enjoyed meeting many new friends on the mucks." Big White's animal of choice is polar bears. When I met him, he was in the process of stitching up his first fursuit. Some furries make their own suits and wear them out to furry events and sometimes in public. They can be the most basic fake-fur fabric made into a pillow case shape (which was what one pathetic guy dressed as a lamb came up with) to very elaborate real fur costumes with movable eyes, mouths and tails. One guy, who dresses as a cross between a Tasmanian devil and a wolf, had a voice distortion box built into his fur suit. It made his voice sound like a deep growl whenever he spoke. I found it scary, and sexy at the same time.

Some fursuits have SPH’s, (strategically placed holes) to accommodate relieving and enjoying themselves. They then wear shorts to cover the private holes.
I ask one furry artist by the name of Bushycat why there seemed to be so
many gays, transgender and bisexuals in furry fandom. (I always suspect that male bodies are inside some of those hourglass bunny fur suits). "Sure," she said, "many furries are bi, they're by themselves!"

This catty comment may reek of burned fur, but she was merely being

playfully feline. Bushycat is a Rubenesque female furry in her late 20's who wears a faux tiger-fur miniskirt and a plastic Halloween mask that she re-painted to look like a tiger face. I met her at a Seattle furry convention where she displayed her artwork depicting gay male white tigers bound and gagged, spooging with masterful black panthers. She considers herself a proud and caring cat fag hag.

I also met a couple who call themselves Alice in Furryland and Loriana; The Feminine Fox. Alice is a Texas housewife in her mid 50’s. She lost herself one day in cyberspace and landed in a furry muck. She began to correspond regularly with Loriana, first online and then on the phone. When they met in person about a year later, they felt they were soul mates. They do look alike, at least, when Loriana isn’t fur suiting. When I first met Loriana he was male in gender. He and Alice danced all night wearing matching fox backpacks. They held matching fox plushies that they held paw to paw and animated in dance. When I ran into Loriana at another fur-lined event, she had completed the first stages of sexual reassignment and was sporting new breasts and her first fursuit. "I enjoy living the fantasy of an animal being,"Loriana said. She believes animals are more honest and free than humans are are. "I feel the need to be closer to them and have full respect for them as individual souls on the same level as humans."
Still, animalistic tendencies can be fierce. I discovered through hushed interviews that plushies are the low bears on the totem pole of furry hierarchy. Their cutesy/nerdy demeanors make them prey for the sarcasm of their natural furry predators. "They're just toooo cuddly," one furry sniffed, strictly off the record.

But others I met find the furrydom more welcoming than the outside world. "Before I met the people in the furry world my life was grey," said Alice. "Now it's in living color!"
It couldn’t get more colorful than the Fur Le Dance, the soiree that culminated one of the Confurences. Furry fans scurried about the lobby, grooming each other, removing furballs and doing last minute touch-ups on their whiskers. I sat in a corner depressed because in my haste I had forgotten my cat ears.
A rumor began to circulate that fursuiters would not be allowed at the Fur Le Dance. What a shock! The official reason was safety concerns. A fursuiter's vision and mobility are impaired in costumes that make them up to three feet higher and two feet wider. Accidents could happen, as I witnessed first-hand: A dainty mouse in a polka dot dress toppled down a small flight of stairs. If it weren't for the heroic efforts of a parrot with a cape, she could have broken her tail!

Breaking away, the fursuiters arranged their own dance poolside. With a ghetto-blaster blaring "Hound Dog" and "Hungry Like The Wolf"(a sort of furry anthem), a squirrel with an oversized tail danced with an alley cat with a nasty grin. Nearby two huskies wrestled playfully grabbing at each other’s personalized collars. In a dark corner a giraffe made out with a zebra, (I found out later, they were married). It became a disco duck inferno as a giant kangaroo with an hourglass figure lead a monitor lizard and a lamb through a bestial version of the Macarena.

At the wee stroke of 11, hotel security ushered the loony tunes away. Not because the bear jamboree was unruly, but because the other guests needed their catnaps. Some furries meandered up to the 9th floor banquet room to continue an all-night fox trot. Others coupled up in their own lairs. The yiffy wolves and hound dogs formed a spooge pack and practiced what could only be described as the most extreme form of safe sex. Rubbers seem outright bareback compared to people going at it in fur suits.

I barked my good-byes and walked to the parking lot to the sounds of wolves howling at an imaginary full moon. As I drove down Beach Boulevard, passing Knotts Berry Farm and Disneyland, images of the zebra giving the giraffe a pony ride danced in my head. Turning onto the 5 freeway and heading north back to the "mundane" city of Hollywood, I realized I had indeed not seen everything life has to offer. Back at home, as I lay exhausted on my bed, I could not look my cat straight in the eye.

Plushies & Furries aired on MTV’s Sex2K program~ january 1st, 2002

Director: Rick Castro Producers: world of Wonder

Running Time: 30 minutes

PLUSHIES & FURRIES took me 2 years to film @ various con"fur"ences around the country. the doco then aired on MTV
january 1st~ 2002 scoring #2 in the ratings with a rotation of every 3 hours for 4 months. HBO commissioned an N17 version as did channel 4 UK.

you can watch versions on WOWTV here~

everything here is copyright- rickcastro- 2002
cannot be reposted without consent.