Science fiction fandom, 1970's cosplay photos, and documenting furry origins

I have always been in favor of documenting our origins as completely as possible. Since I had my original exposure during the earlier WWW part of this fandom's history, I've been trying to find (not in a systematic way, though) as much old art and writings as possible in the Internet Archive and Usenet archives, but a hell of a lot of it is already lost.

A unified archive of old fandom materials would be really cool. Maybe it could give context to today's fandom.

In the 1939 photo, Forry Ackerman is specifically dressed as John Cabal (Raymond Massey) in the 1936 s-f feature "Things to Come" (which was my Very Favorite Movie for decades).

My "A Chronology of Furry Fandom", published in Yarf! #46 in January 1997, was posted online by Yarf! for over ten years even though the final issue of Yarf! was in September 2003. It was just taken down earlier this year. I have given Cubist permission to reprint it in "Anthro" with illustrations and additions, but he has been busy moving to a new house (he had to be out of his old house by April 1) and it has been delayed. The new printing will include some dates like Ed Zolna's creation of Mailbox Books, and the first use of the word "FurSuit".

It seems amazing (yes, even astounding) to me how the Japanese word "cosplay" has completely replaced the English word "costuming" throughout both s-f and Furry fandom almost instantly. "Cosplay" (costume play; an example of the Japanese creating a new English word) is definitely traceable to anime fandom.

[comment removed on request]

There was a fairly large collection of early furry stuff (and other sci-fi and fantasy items) given to the UC Riverside library by Fred Patton. I have no idea what was actually in the collection.

The earliest Furry history I know of dates to the 80's. The late 80's saw the first furry convention ConFURence 0, attendance 42, mostly staff. (I was one of the staff.) The early 80's saw "anthropormorphic" room parties (the term "furry" wasn't in vogue yet) as science fiction cons like San Jose, CA's BayCon, and comic conventions such as San Diego, CA's ComiCon. (I attending 1 BayCon and a couple ComiCons just for the room parties prior to spending a year helping organize ConFURence 0.) Those room parties had been going on prior to my attendance at them, however, I wasn't able to go to them until my late teens in the early 80's.

In the 1984 Worldcon photo album, Part 3, General Photos 3, the third photo on the left, *I* am the fan being stabbed to death with a Hugo Award trophy rocket, in Marc Schirmeister’s poster for the convention murder mystery, “Fandom is a Way of DEATH!”.

It really depends on what you personally define as furry.

If you are talking about people dressing up in anthropomorphic costumes, or even fursuits, it goes way back.

If you are referring to people going to furry conventions at hotels that have a major shopping room (dealers den) as well as workshops, then of course, it's going to be much more recent (as you're limiting the term furry to convention goers).

People were dressing in animal skins and dancing around fires to invoke the spirit of animals before a hunt, tens of thousands of years ago.

I also know an individual who live in my area, who was dressing up in a full bunny costume back starting in the early 60s. For him and the group he would fursuit with, it was mainly a spin off of the "happenings", "be-in"s, "mime troupe", and performance art/acid tests of the time. But hey, he was running around in a fursuit acting alot like modern day furries, just without the hotel and shopping. (You can find info/pics with a google search of his character's name: Astral-Naught Rabb-Eye , and yup, he still has his original fursuit he'll occasionally wear.)

"I was there" in the late 1970s when Vootie was started by "the Funny Animal Liberation Front" in Minneapolis, and when I tried to join, they said that I didn't qualify for membership because I couldn't draw; it was an APA for cartoonists only. ("Funny animal" turned out to mean "any comic book characters except costumed heroes".) "I was there" at the 1980 Worldcon in Boston when fans were intrigued by the first Erma Felna painting in the Art Show -- an anthropomorphic cat-girl pilot in front of a high-tech realistic fighter plane -- and the artist, Steve Gallacci, said that he had a whole sketchbook filled with Erma Felna drawings for an s-f story that he was writing about a spacegoing race of bioengineered animal-people trying to find out their origins. "I was there" when the group of s-f fans and cartoonists started to discuss other "funny animal" characters in s-f and animated cartoons, and it turned out that almost all of these turned out to be our favorite s-f stories and cartoons. "I was there" when Don Bluth's "The Secret of NIMH" came out in 1982, and Tim Fay & John Cawley started a NIMH fan club to write their own fan-fiction sequels to it. "I was there" when Vootie fell apart in 1983 despite Tim Fay's & Marc Schirmeister's attempts to keep it going, and when Schirm created Rowrbrazzle in February 1984 to be its replacement -- and he made it a real funny animal club, that all funny animal fans could join, not just cartoonists; I was a charter member. "I was there" when the informal funny-animal discussion and "I'll draw in your sketchbook if you'll draw in mine" fan groups around Gallacci at West Coast s-f & comic-book conventions solidified into the first "Furry" room parties organized by Mark Merlino & Rod O'Riley. "I was there" when Merlino tried to formalize the fandom by proposing that funny animal fans should adopt the annual BayCon in San Jose to get together at. "I was there" at the 1987 BayCon when anti-Furry fans graphittied Kris Kreutzman's Furry Party posters into "Skunk-Fuckers' Party" posters, and used them to try to get the Furry fans expelled from the con (it didn't work, but the hostility was enough to convince Merlino that the BayCons would not be a good hangout for funny-animal fans). "I was there" when Merlino & O'Riley started the first convention just for Furry fans, ConFurence 0 in January 1989; I attended all the annual ConFurences (except 1991, when I was in France) until 2004, the last one. Ask me about the early days of Furry fandom. (And I'm sure that Confurence 0 was larger than 42 fans -- I made it as 60+ fans -- even if I was not on its Committee.)

Hey Fred! When I was doing research in your archive in 2010 I came across those BayCon poster and made copies of them. So, it was all in good shape at least then, though it wasn't organized.

Aauugh! I get home really late after a long day to find this huge thread, and being too tired to give a good, long reply. Deuce, Skippyfox, it's kind of you to name-drop, but as Fred describes, he's the real expert (and part of my inspiration) - He was present at most of the major stages of the fandom as it evolved in the 70s and 80s. Me, I came in at the start of the 90s, and while I'm a librarian, I don't have a vast personal library. I don't know if anyone has a huge physical collection of old photos, comics or zines; I think Chairo's group has the most, except I forget what the acronyms mean (and I'm extremely tired right now). Fred was the first person to put effort into making a chronology of the fandom, and there are others who've been looking into the fandom's history too - Ironbadger, Joe Strike - WikiFur, by communal effort - and I listened to an interesting panel about Japan's kemono fandom from a fellow going by the name Imuhata. But none of us have written our stuff down in a form to be easily shared.

My historical interest in the fandom is a little more abstract - not about the hard facts and figures, but instead about its social evolution and changing internal drama and politics. I've done panels at WhatTheFur and FurFright about it, and if I didn't screw up the online form, offered to do a panel at this year's Anthrocon. But I don't know when they finalize their programming, so I don't know if it'll be included (or how much time it'll be given), which is a bit stressful 'cause I need all the advance preparation I can get, and have way too much that I could talk about. And my notes are a mess. :P

I'll try to post other comments for this thread tomorrow, or the day after, when I'm feeling more awake and composed.

(thump - zzzzzzzz)

Okay, I'm more awake now. :) Returning to the question of the original post, "What are the earliest records of organized furry activities?" - That's really hard to answer, because exactly when enough people started to say, "Hey, we've got a fandom happening!" and to what degree they organized themselves is really subjective. Furry isn't a spin-off of science-fiction fandom - well, ok, partially, but not entirely. It formed out of people from multiple fandoms - SF, anime, animation, tabletop RPGs and comics fandoms. Imagine a sheet of paper with a bunch of little dots all over it, getting closer together and eventually forming small clumps, but very very slowly.

There was a clump of people drawing comics, some of whom had leanings towards funny animals, in a zine called Vootie. There was a clump of anime and animation fans who belonged to a club called the CF/O who realized they liked animals in cartoons. There was a clump of comics, RPGers and SF fans who bumped into each other at SF cons and then started looking forward to meeting up with each other at future SF cons. Someone ran a local computer message forum (BBS) and started a sub-board for furry discussion, and after a while the first dedicated furry BBS was formed. Some people lived in a house together and started attracting a number of furry roommates (the Prancing Skiltaire). Some folks started a publication called Rowrbrazzle. Some folks started to hold furry parties at SF conventions. And with the room parties, that's a sure-fire sign of the fandom becoming organized, but many of the events leading up to that could count too, depending what you think "organized" means.

You see how this all gradually builds up, but is kind of nebulous at the same time? And this is before most folks had Internet access, so growth was extremely constrained by word-of-mouth and geography. The east-coast fandom took a lot longer to clump together than the west-coast fandom. And then all over the place you've got mini-clumps of two or three people who're stuck wherever they're living, and their only way to communicate with the rest of the proto-fandom - if they're even aware of it at all - is by long-distance telephone calls, or by writing letters. Even after the U.S. fandom started becoming more cohesive, you can see this slow-clumping pattern repeating in other countries later on, the slowness of fans finding and connecting with each other, even with the advantage of the Internet. Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Russia, Australia, Japan, etc.

In terms of fursuits, I don't know what the oldest photos are out there. No one had digital cameras, only film, and after getting the snapshots developed, most folks wouldn't own a scanner at home until 1995 or so. The earliest pictures I've seen are of Ed Kline's work, on some of the back covers of the Equine the Uncivilized or Red Shetland comics? - I forget. Late 80s. I managed to see some of his costumes in the early 90s. In person they looked really good. In photos, for some reason, the faces really looked... creepy. They did not photograph well. On the Internet Wayback Machine, there's this low-resolution encounter that was captured at a Renaissance fair.

In terms of archive material, The Megaplex staff started putting not only the photo archives, but also the conbooks, art used with the convention, video of events filmed, samples of the convention badges, as well as the original web site code on its own archive site. So fans and guests can go back and look at what each event looked like, how the web sites were designed, and what kinds of materials were used each year.

We found that our attendees loved this little "wayback machine" and it's served to help give as complete of a documentation of the convention as is possible.

I also have amassed an almost complete collection of Anthrocon conbooks (missing only 1997 now), and have many of the MFF conbooks on file as well. I had proposed creating a single repository for all conbooks in a single site a few years ago, but there was some copyright concern at the time.

I love the idea of documentation of the fandom...since it has evolved, and is far different than it was even 5 years ago. Social media and advances in technology have all changed the way that conventions operate and how our attendees interact with them. Keeping an archive of our history would be a great thing for the future.

KP

Documenting the fandom's history is important; we should start an encyclopedia about Furry fandom.

I managed to find the earliest photo I took at a furry convention - which turns out to not have been too early, at CF7. I remember a couple of costumes from the stage presentation (overall meh), but this one as far as I know only wandered into the lobby, and I never saw it again - maybe it was on the fragile side. It's too bad, because it was one of the more realistic-style costumes at the time (pretty rare) - walked digitigrade, and was the best-looking werewolf(?) costume I'd ever seen without looking monstrous or grotesque, like the Verdun stuff. I'm not sure who was wearing this, but I'm guessing Lance Ikegawa. (Image link.) Sorry about the graininess, I had a really crappy camera. The glowing eyes were an unexpected effect from the flash.

I donated most of my old furry stuff to the Anthrocon charity raffle last year. I didn't attend the convention myself, so some friends of mine dropped off my box of stuff for me. Sadly the contents didn't get separated out, which was a disappointment, because I doubt everything in there would have interested a single buyer. I think it raised $54(?), whereas if it had been separated, the items would've raised more money. On the other hand, the Toonseum had donated so much stuff - judging from the con photos, there was limited table space for raffle items! Anyway, whoever got my box ended up with two English Blacksad books, the full run of Fang, Claw & Steel, a good chunk of Yarf! issues, over a dozen convention books, and miscellaneous zines (Furtherance and Centaurs Gatherum), plus other things I've probably forgotten.