OH MY GOD!!!!!




PLEASURES OF THE FUR
Welcome to the world of "furries": the thousands of Americans who've gotten in touch with their inner raccoon, or wolf, or fox. Judging from the Midwest FurFest, this is no hobby. It's sex; it's religion; it's a whole new way of life.

BY GEORGE GURLEY
A moose is loitering outside a hotel in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. The moose -- actually a man in a full-body moose costume -- is here for a convention ... and so is the porcupine a few feet away, as well as the many foxes and wolves.

Even the people in regular clothes have a little something (ferret hand puppet, rabbit ears) to set them apart from the ordinary hotel guests. One man in jeans and a button-down shirt gets up from a couch in the lobby and walks over to the elevator, revealing a fluffy tail dragging behind him. The elevator doors open. Inside, a fellow is kissing a man with antlers on his head.

The other hotel guests look stunned.

"We're a group of people who like things having to do with animals and cartoons," a man in a tiger suit tells a woman. "We're furries."

"So cute," the woman says.

Welcome to the Midfest FurFest.

Here, a number of "Furries" -- people whose interest in animal characters goes further than an appreciation of The Lion King -- are gathering together.


At 7:30 P.M., near the front desk, three men known as Pack Rat, Rob Fox, and Zen Wolph are scratching one another's backs -- grooming one another, like macaques in the zoo. "Skritching" [sic], they call it. I am tempted to turn around and run. Instead, I find myself talking with Keith Dickinson, a self-described "computer geek." Not long ago, this man, a 37-year-old from Kansas City, Kansas, was so depressed he could barely bring himself to go to the grocery store. And then it hit him. He started to believe that, somewhere deep down, he was actually ... a polar bear.

"In normal society," Dickinson says, "two people who hardly know each other do not walk up and scratch each other's back. But when you're one of the furs, it's one big extended family."

Next to him is his skinny, longhaired, fedora-wearing sidekick, a 23-year-old art student named Ian Johnson (nametag: R.C. RABBITSFOOT). Last year, Johnson, who has brought the ashes of his dead cat to the FurFest, persuaded Dickinson to attend another furry convention in Memphis, and that's what did it.

"It's a new way of looking at the world," Dickinson says. "It's like looking at it with baby eyes, or cub eyes."

"You regress into a child when you come to a convention,"Johnson says, "because it's that kind of camaraderie, or childishness."






i am seriously afraid now......