What the Dismal Masking Situation at Furry Conventions Says About Us as a Fandom
I used to love going to the furry convention VR portals.
Ever since they started up a few years ago, they've always been a jumbled, crowded, loud mess of people. There's only so much space in front of the two cameras (one facing into a VR world, the other facing into the convention space), so people jostle just to be seen and to greet their friends on the other side. It was chaos, but despite that, I loved it...
...until I noticed something. Now that I've seen it, it's impossible to unsee. I notice it every time, and my heart sinks a little lower.
Almost nobody at furry conventions has worn a mask in years.
I see the same reality play out all around the world, and it doesn't matter where you are—in the US or abroad, in a “red” or a “blue” state—you can count the number of folks masked up on one hand. And that number stays the same whether it's a con with a thousand attendees or ten thousand.
I see those hundreds of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with not a mask among them, and all I can hear is a booming voice in my mind saying, “furry cons won't ever be safe for you again in your life.“
I'm not okay with that, and frankly, I'm tired of being nice about it.
The Pedestal of Furry Cons
The furry convention scene is getting to be a big deal. A really big deal, some would argue too big of a deal.
Conventions that hosted 2,000 people just ten years ago are now bursting at the seams with well over 10,000 attendees. Hotel room blocks sell out minutes after they open and venues strain to accommodate the ever-growing crowds.
It's no secret why: furry cons are all the rage.
Spend enough time in furry VR spaces, and you'll find it makes up nearly every third conversation. “Which cons are you going to?” is a universal icebreaker among furries.
And why wouldn't it be? A lot of folks say furry cons are a “life-changing” experience. Especially if you live somewhere where it isn't safe to be yourself in your everyday life, cons give you a rare chance to let your furry side out, make new friends, and celebrate your passions in a “safe” space. It's no surprise that in a world that feels increasingly hostile, especially to the predominantly queer audience in the furry fandom, conventions would boom in popularity.
Naturally, there's a flipside to this collective obsession over conventions, though: the stigma and exclusion that comes from not being able to attend one. So many friendships are made and strengthened at cons that it's easy to feel like a second-class citizen if you don't (or can't) attend them. The fact that attending cons is something of an expensive luxury has also made them into a “status symbol”, further driving a wedge between the comfortably wealthy furries and the ones struggling to live month-to-month.
Besides cost, though, there are plenty of reasons one might not be able to attend a furry con. Maybe you can't get time off work. Maybe the crowds overstimulate you. Maybe the venue isn't accessible for your needs. Or maybe, like me, you're a part of a huge group of people who are at higher risk of bad complications from COVID or other airborne infections.
High-Risk, and Low (But Never Zero) Risk
I don't need to impress upon you that COVID is a devastating virus that has killed millions worldwide and disabled hundreds of millions to varying degrees. I also don't need to state that it's an airborne virus that easily transmits in spaces where lots of people are close together. Those of you who know this already know it, and if you don't believe it, nothing I say could convince you to.
What might surprise you, though, is just how many people are statistically likely to have worse outcomes from a COVID infection.
The CDC has a page dedicated to medical conditions that have higher COVID risk, and while you might expect to find diseases that damage the immune system (like cancer, organ transplant medications, or diabetes) and chronic illnesses of the lung and heart on there, there are other conditions you might not expect listed there, too.
If you're overweight or obese or physically inactive, you're at higher risk. If you live with ADHD or depression, studies show you're at higher risk too. And further studies show that people on the autism spectrum have higher rates of severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID.
Together, these represent a huge portion of the furry community. Even if you aren't in one of these categories, you almost certainly know someone who is. Heck, if you know me, you know someone who's in maybe four or five of those categories!
Every time I talk about a vulnerable group of people, though, I'm met with the same sort of cynical, almost ghoulish response: “I'm not in any of those groups, so why should I care?”
Say you're young, immunocompetent and physically active. You've survived COVID before, so the idea of another infection doesn't really scare you.
What you might not realize is that every single COVID infection you endure is another roll of the dice. You might've weathered the previous one with just a few weeks of feeling nasty, only to have the next one knock you on your ass for months or years. You might come home from a con with a positive COVID test, thinking to yourself “Worth it!!”, only to discover the lingering cough and brain fog never quite go away. It affects your work life, your social life, and makes getting out of bed a challenge. Now, instead of a survival story, you're another victim of a virus that has destroyed so many lives already.
Why would you roll the dice if you don't need to?
A Collective Cultural Gaslighting
For years now, the “COVID-conscious” among us have been subjected to something I can only describe as a societal gaslighting effort. Our political leaders, our bosses, and our peers insist that the pandemic that ravaged our society in 2020 is all but over, even as cases and hospitalization rates spike, and the horrible reality of “Long COVID” starts to become clearer.
I get it. Folks are eager to purge the year 2020 out of their memories. The isolation, the fear, the hopelessness that folks felt in that year was so traumatizing on everyone that it's easier to just pretend we've moved past it, even in the face of evidence that we haven't.
There's just one problem, though: you know how terrible it felt for you in 2020, when you weren't sure if going outside would spell certain death, when you had to choose between socializing with friends and being safe? Thanks to your collective inaction, that's how people at high-risk have felt every single day for four years now, some even longer.
Together, we could've pushed for a safer world for the most vulnerable in our society. We could've insisted upon regulations that required robust air purification and circulation in public buildings. We could've made remote work the new normal. We could've normalized social distancing and mask wearing, so our collective risk was lower and those who needed to be protected the most didn't feel singled out.
Instead, folks drove it out of the collective consciousness. They insisted the threat is long gone (if it was ever there to begin with), and instead punished the vulnerable by banning mask mandates and, in the worst cases, banning masks themselves.
I understand that furries are just a microcosm of society itself, and I don't necessarily place individual blame on every furry who falls prey to this collective delusion that COVID isn't still among us, isn't still destroying lives, or isn't a risk we can mitigate through a combination of collective changes and individual actions.
As a fandom, though, we always have the opportunity to not just be a little window into society itself, but to do better than that, to take better care of the marginalized and vulnerable in our own community. Surely you can understand why it upsets me that we don't do that.
The Cost
Imagine, if you will, a person. This person isn't just a furry, but they're also queer and neurodivergent. They live with physical and mental health challenges that make holding down traditional jobs hard, so they struggle with money basically all the time. That makes it almost impossible for them to escape the region they're in, one that's increasingly hostile to people like them. It also makes traveling to distant events out of the question, and those same health conditions put them at high risk of something really bad happening to them if they caught COVID.
One day, a furry convention springs up in their own backyard. Finally, a place they can be themselves. A place they can see friends they've only known through screen names online. A place they can find friendship and comradery amongst people with shared interests. A place that won't judge them or hold their identity against them. A light in the darkness. Finally.
They show up at the convention center and look out across the crowd, and their heart sinks. There's not a mask in sight. The crowds are thick, almost over the capacity of the venue, standing shoulder to shoulder in long lines for nearly everything, from registration to the vendor hall to the elevators. This isn't a safe place for them, not at all.
“Well now what the hell do I do?” they wonder. This was their one escape from the soul-crushing doldrums of their daily life, and now they have to choose between whether to trudge through this exceedingly high-risk event to see their friends and to feel a part of something, or to turn around and go home, where they may be miserable, but at least they'll live to see tomorrow.
Yes, I'm describing myself here, but I'm also describing countless people I know and care about who face this same reality.
You may think the inconvenience of wearing a mask is too high, but this is the cost of not doing that.
Conclusion
If you ask most furries, they'll tell you that the furry fandom is something special and amazing. It's a more progressive and inclusive community, with its roots in the queer and neurodivergent communities, and it prides itself on being a safe space for identity, self-expression and joy. It's a principled place, and while it's not perfect, the fandom always strives to do the right thing.
But I don't think you get to pat yourselves on the back just yet.
Those of us with the “loud” principles, who aren't afraid to call a community to account on its shortcomings, will tell you almost universally that the principles that the furry fandom prides itself on having are, more often than not, skin-deep.
The community says they want to be better and do better, but when people bring up the specific steps necessary to do that, from hard discussions like combating hate and bigotry to easy steps like just strapping on a mask at a convention, more often than not they wind up on the receiving end of hostility themselves.
You can't have it both ways. You can't claim to be a progressive fandom while silencing the voices of the marginalized people in your own community. You can't claim to be inclusive while you collectively create and foster spaces that are unsafe for people, then make them so important that those people feel even more excluded from the fandom for missing out on them.
I'm tired of being called the crazy one, the obnoxious one for urging basic public health measures like masking (alongside urging conventions to choose better, more accessible, more spaced-out and ventilated venues) just so me and those I care about don't have to roll the dice with our own lives to be a part of the fandom's shared experiences.
Wearing a mask isn't the ultimate solution to ending COVID, but it's such an easy and effective step to take that it speaks volumes about a community and its priorities when even that is considered not worth doing. It says a lot about what the furry community cares about, and who it is willing to leave behind.
We can do better. In fact, to live up to the ideals we strive for, we must.