A historic U.S. Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage created intense emotions and record crowds at San Francisco's 2013 Pride celebration. I was informally told the parade drew 1.5 million. Imagine pushing through them in the hot sun with inch thick fur on!

Video by Mallius
For dozens of local furs, the great fun and positive vibes of Pride 2012 were small compared to this year's enthusiastic turnout. If it grows as much in 2014, it'll be awesome to see.

GaymerX is the first gaming convention focused on LGBTQ themes for "gaymers", their allies, and geek culture. On August 3–4 GaymerX will bring contests, parties, panels and more to Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco's Japantown.

Panels at the con include Natural Allies: Furries and Gaymers, by Vulpinfox, and a bear drawing panel hosted by Grisser.

Founder and Director of Technology, Andrew Evans, told me:

Creating a safe space for queer geeks and their allies to come together, discuss their geekiness, hang out and feel safe is super important to the community. We felt like the gaming community wasn't doing enough to bring together queer geeks, which is why we're doing GaymerX and built out GaymerConnect. ["A service that allows you to find queer gamers and allies of every identity who play the same games you do."]

Update: Use code GX13FUR by July 26 for a $10 registration discount. [Latte]

Industrial music is aggressive, exciting and ominous, with futuristic themes of dystopia and urban decay. As art, you might call it the cold, metal shadow to the light side of nature, animals and furry things. It's a big contrast to the sunny electronic pop that furry con-goers may expect. (Does music have anything to do with animals, anyways? Well, heavy metal gets associated with Wolves...)

It's a challenge to make this weird connection and wonder who wants to read about it. (Not coming soon: my article about Furries and Juggalos.) It might be oil and water to many, but let's shake it up and see if anything mixes. In Part 2, I'll be posting interviews with DJs.

San Francisco hosted the 14th annual How Weird Street Faire last weekend, with the theme "WEIRDI GRAS: Carnival of Peace." An informal fursuiter outing was organized through Meetup.com and its active Bay Area Furries group (independent from the mailing list), which runs many local events each month. I offered changing space at a nearby apartment, and scored a pair of "Disco Pants" for costuming, direct from the office of local web-based fashion startup company Betabrand. Afterwards, Betabrand was cool enough to post photos of modeling the pants on their "Model Citizen" section. (There's more photos on Reddit.)

Left to right: Kitten, Meerk, Patch. Background: Ty Cougar.

Any news media story that covers furries is likely to focus heavily on fursuiters, and their striking visual appeal and fuzzy glamor. Fursuiters can't represent the whole of furry fandom, when "furry" is a vague and broadly defined umbrella over anything related to anthropomorphic animals- but I think it's OK to consider fursuiters the expressive, theatrical soul of furrydom. There is an element of "ambassador" role to their hobby. Without the 15-20% of furries who wear fursuits and costumes for role-playing, you'd just have regular unglamorous nerds saying "meow! I'm a cat". That's what crazy people do.

… takes them to the dungeon, and does bad, bad things to them. If you thought VancouFur had an offensive theme, watch out! This one is truly NSFW, and best for those who appreciate wanton displays of licentious content.

The queer furry rapper's video, "Why the Boys All Love Me", follows an announcement for the making of a "nightmarish gay goth animal S&M" video at Halloween in San Francisco. It flaunts his mission to "put Satan back into hip-hop", and makes a sequel to a previous video featuring fursuiters. This time, Furry content is minimal, and indirectly limited to a few cameos and participation by dedicated furries who cross over between that group and others (such as the S&M fetish scene). Please consider it labeled that way up front, and view accordingly.

Urban raccoons are known as cute, smart, yet sometimes destructive pests that cause headaches for homeowners. Their mischief can range from raiding trash, to sensational headlines about terrorized neighborhoods that call for traps and controls.

According to the PBS nature show Raccoon Nation:

In an effort to outwit raccoons, we may be pushing their brain development and perhaps even sending them down a new evolutionary path. One biologist who has been studying raccoons for 25 years believes the city life is in fact cultivating “über-raccoons,” ready to take over the world.

While PBS jokes about "über-raccoons", Germany has somber, no-nonsense, bedenklich news about their Nazi raccoon occupation.

Some people worry about repelling them, but other people have a much more welcoming point of view... although they might keep their unsavory interests on the down-low. Mauricio Baiocchi, a distinguished San Francisco Bay area animator with credits from Industrial Light and Magic, lets us in on their sordid secrets in his 2011 short film, Cooners.

Furs may enjoy the recently-announced mobile "motion comic" Subject #9, judging by its preview video. [tip: Lux/WeFurries]

NARR8 has its own introductory video, where it's breathlessly described as:

An entirely new way to experience dynamic and engrossing stories for free. [...] Unique layouts, animations, and visual effects, in regularly-updated episodes.

Essentially, they're creating original animated comic books and graphic novels.

Subject #9 follows a straightforward plot:

The adventure begins when eight young and vastly different prisoners unite to escape from a mysterious secret laboratory. Each one of them has unique abilities that they are yet to master. But first they have to learn team-work, understand the nature and goal of the laboratory experiments and find out who is behind all of it. The answers to these questions lead our heroes towards the grim truth...

Subject #9 combines sci-fi, adventure, and traditional superhero elements with colorful characters and an engrossing plot full of secrets and mysteries. We hope you'll enjoy reading Subject #9 as much as the team enjoyed creating it.

MC Crumbsnatcher's recently released first music video is set to be followed by a second video shoot on October 15, timed to benefit from Halloween season. The video is themed "S&M gay bar in hell", and is meant to cross over with leather/animal costuming popular among a subset of the San Francisco furry community. It will feature a story about witches who abduct Crumbsnatcher's love interest, a penguin.

A series of videos are set to follow, including a shoot in Las Vegas for a wedding scene of a unique nature.

As a club-goer most likely to get down to goth/industrial/EBM, I'm not qualified to say much about hip hop/rap. However, I know that MC Crumbsnatcher is a secret goth too, and that's my fursuited ass he's humping at 4:00 in the video, so let's do this.

The San Francisco Bay area hosts many subculture scenes. They bring people together who often stay separate in less busy places. MC Crumbsnatcher's ties might be tagged as spoken word/slam poetry, indie rap, electro, Nerdcore and Homocore. His Facebook page also lists Poo Joke Teller, ruiner of childhoods, and being a trained psychic. Let's add Furry to the list.

Content warning: Video contains extremely graphic sexual language and suggestive dancing.

In San Francisco culture magazine The Bold Italic, SF's legendary monthly furry club night gets a classy writeup: Plush Life: Jesse Hirsch goes animal style with furries at Frolic.

According to his profile,

Jesse is restaurant critic for the San Francisco Examiner. His writing has also appeared in SF Weekly, the Chronicle, the New York Times, San Francisco magazine, the Wall Street Journal and a few really funny emails.

The 42nd anniversary of San Francisco Pride happened this weekend. People from all over the world filled the city to celebrate. It was too large and fabulous for words, so I can only personally comment about fursuiting at some street parties. There was no organized furry event or mission, just a good opportunity to wear a costume.

The last organized furry participation was a float in the 2005 Pride parade, arranged via BAF and its mailing list. (I heard that there was some negligible drama about connecting furries + LGBT, but it stayed internal, with positive reactions elsewhere.) Due to logistics and cost, it hasn't reoccurred.

However, one of the organizers posted on Facebook: "The SF Pride committee bugs me every year to bring the Furries back, and that's just what I am going to do for 2013! That's right, for the 2013 pride parade there will be a Furry float!" (Yay!)

Does anyone remember this story from a few years ago, about a coyote who wandered into a Quizno's shop, inadvertently starring in one of the best viral sandwich and drink ads ever?

"Roadrunner sandwich please, hold the mayo."

Across the world, wild and feral canines make cities their own.