I finally learned how to be gay
And all it took was the help of some cartoon animals.
Some disclaimers to start: This is about my experience as an autistic gay furry. Nothing here should be universalized to furries, gay furries, or even autistic gay furries in general. This especially shouldn't be taken as an authoritative statement on furry fandom because I am very new to that fandom.
My allegiance to the flag 🏳️🌈
On the occasion of Pride Month this year I wrote that I didn't know how to be gay. At different points in my life I've identified as different shades of asexual (gray-ace still feels about right) and I had understood myself as not-straight in some capacity for a long time, but I had landed on this sense that I was orbiting gay male identity while feeling all the while somehow inauthentic in it. I felt in June 2025 that the U.S. was going through a moment of crisis for LGBTQ liberation and I wanted to show up for at least to the metaphorical fight as my entire authentic self. At the same time, I felt I didn't have an authentic self. I knew I loved the cause of LGBTQ liberation as my own and in particular I instinctively knew that I needed the strength of recognizing gay men living authentically in this world. But I didn't know how to show up for roll call. It was both a dispiriting experience and very motivating: at thirty-four years old I felt a sudden urgency to unearth this part of myself that seemed submerged and inaccessible.
The critter in the attic 🐾
This desperate journey of self-discovery led somewhere I hadn't quite expected. Let's cut right to it: I'm a furry, and it turns out that for me this is a more essential part of how I experience both being gay and being male than I had anticipated. Furry-ness is described in a lot of ways: a fandom, a hobby, a loose web of communities and groups, a genre of art. So to be more specific about what it means to me in particular: to me being a furry means I have long found it easier to emotionally relate to stories, to share and process emotions, when those stories and emotions are expressed through anthropomorphic figures: cartoon animals and so forth. In hindsight I feel like a bit of a dumbass for not understanding this about myself earlier; a number of childhood experiences that felt a little strange and hard to explain are common enough to have become pretty much trite jokes about the Gen X and Milennial furry set. Did seeing Robin Hood get tied up in that movie where he's a fox make you feel really weird? Did Disney's The Fox and the Hound emotionally devestate you in ways you can't even describe? Did the Redwall book series occupy vast real estate in your young imagination, even if you can't necessarily recall many of the specifics now? I can relate. And by adulthood not only did this kind of art still have the same emotional heft (see One Stormy Night for example), but I increasingly found myself following an awful lot of furries online, enjoying their creative endeavors, feeling jealous of the conventions and events they were doing... Somehow I just didn't put it together for a long time.
What I really didn't expect or understand before was just how important this could be to me, how central to who I am. I have a pretty big capacity for affection and empathy, enough that sometimes it can be overwhelming and difficult to regulate. We pay a lot of attention to the foundational psychic challenge of taming the classical id drives: sexual desire and aggression. But affection and empathy too can be challenging to integrate into a socially accepted self, especially if you have them in large amounts and particularly, I think, if you are assigned male like me. These emotional expressions are linked to a basic capacity for emotional vulnerability that is also important to experiencing both fear and genuine intimacy.
As a neurodivergent kid who would be easily upset by the most minor deviations between the way I expected things to happen and reality, I cried a lot. It became a source of shame that motivated me to train myself not to cry. But at that age the crying was instinctual and basically impossible for me to control. I really did not have the capacity to hide my feelings. So without realizing it, what I was doing instead was training myself to suppress a lot of my emotions. You don't have to hide the emotions you can't feel!
As I grew up I developed this deep well of repressed emotion fortified with byzantine defenses, and all that extra feeling I didn't know how to handle went down into that well and pretty much stayed there for twenty-odd years. And what I understand now is that somehow, furry subculture has a way of breaking through those defenses and reopening that well. I've noticed, for example, that if in an online chat someone shares a picture of their coyote fursona blushing, where I think the “normie” reaction would be to find it kind of silly, my instinctual reaction is I should offer the coyote a hug! Naturally, not everyone will respond to anthro art this way, but the fact that I do says something significant about how I experience the world.
Imagine taking the means you have to access a part of your emotional life that big and putting it away on a shelf for decades. It's a crazy thing to do! In the days since I have come to understand and accept this about myself, and to share it with others, my partners have reported that my whole physical bearing has changed, that I smile more and stand more confidently. Basically, I had allowed the entrance to that well of repressed emotion to fester into a bundle of neuroses over the years. For a little while as I was coming to understand this about myself and figuring out how to articulate it in words, I felt an intense shame: not shame about being a furry but about having allowed something so big to sit there unacknowledged for so long. There was also an element of fear, as I discovered that I had the unrealized capacity for feelings that were so big. But ultimately the liberation of (re)discovering and embracing this part of myself had to win out.
We have to talk about the porn 👀
I don't want to obfuscate this: furry porn is definitely an integral part of the overall experience of anthro art and furry expression that drew me to the fandom. Frankly, I learned that gay furry porn could make me horny in ways that mainstream porn generally could not. A lot of people might be tempted to look for a kind of vulgar-Freudian explanation for how that could happen, some singular complicated childhood trauma that diverted the course of my developing sexuality and created a paraphilia. But to me, now that I've accepted that anthro art is fundamentally tied into the way I emotionally relate to the world and to myself, it seems simple and obvious. If the creative output of furry fandom unlocks the fullness of my inner emotional life than of course it is also uniquely capable of making me horny. Sexuality is, after all, inherently emotional for me; it is a site where abstractly felt emotion and lived bodily reality collide in intense ways.
If I were to describe furry porn in one word it would be the same word I'd use to describe furry art in general: it's expressive, exceptionally so. If you're trying to understand the role of sexuality within this mode of expression it's key to acknowledge that furry porn is inherently art, intentionally drawn from the fantasies of artists and their patrons, and as such it can be difficult to definitively mark where non-erotic furry art ends and furry porn begins. That is to say, like other artistic cultures, furry art speaks to a breadth of experience that shades into the erotic as boldly as it does into other areas, and often at the same time.
Finding euphoria 🩷
I'm connected to a lot of trans people in my personal life, enough to know what a difference it can make to someone to finally after a long time find a gender expression that feels comfortable and authentic. There is, too, a lot of trans participation and beautiful trans self-expression in furry fandom. So in a way it has been surprising to me that engaging with furry fandom has made me feel more cis. For a long time I have felt very alienated from masculinity; it often feels foreign, unrelatable. But in a furry context it suddenly feels comfortable and authentic. Conceiving of myself as a human man feels like a poor fit somehow, and yet imagining myself as a male creature feels entirely natural. I can't say I really understand it, and maybe I don't need to. I'm enjoying this novel feeling of feeling comfortably and authentically male or masculine. The part that is surprising is that what enables this newfound confidence is not so much the gender itself (since I am assigned male after all, and have been slotted into this gender category my whole life) but the context in which it is expressed. However that happened... it's nice!
Likely related to this newfound gender euphoria, I feel like for the first time that I can say I'm gay “from my chest” and it feels correct and uncomplicated and good. I didn't feel shame about being gay before but it felt like if I told people I was gay it came with an implied asterisk, like it was not entirely true about me. I recall once a trans acquaintance rediscovering his sexuality in the midst of medical transition as many do, telling his friends online “I'm so gay!” with so much pure excitement and enthusiasm and enjoyment and I envied it. It's something I also sensed when I visited Keith Haring's mural Once Upon a Time in March 2023. I'd sought out Haring's 1989 work painted on the walls of what was a public bathroom in a Manhattan community center because I suspected that I would feel something from standing in a room the artist had painted that I didn't get from looking at reproductions of his work on a screen. I did—and the powerful subject of the work is gay joy. Once Upon a Time is Haring's take on erotic bathroom graffiti, an explosion of fantastical penises and men enjoying them with abandon. Standing in that room I could sense the pure joy that he derived from being a gay man. I didn't know how to access that feeling and now I do! It truly rocks.
Important… but not entirely serious 👅
Here's where I want to again take care to reiterate this is all about my specific experience and some of it will not generalize well. I'm acquainted with and have a lot of respect for a number of therians—those who, in the words of PROJECT: NUZ ZINEZERO.5 have “an animalistic sense of self concept, an integral identification as an animal, or animal-like being.” I'm not (yet?) fluent in nonhuman terminology like this, but I've been trying to articulate why furry fandom, moreso than therianthropy or another nonhuman identity, feels like the way I want to frame this aspect of myself right now. I think the answer is that to me, therian identity feels serious and I… don't. It feels actually a little bonkers to me that living authentically demands that I interact with cartoon animals and envision myself as a gay raccoon man. Core to my identity and also bonkers. Bonkers in the best possible way. I want to enjoy and celebrate how bonkers it feels and furry fandom feels like it might be where I can do that.
There's a lot I haven't done just yet in acquainting myself with the fandom. I have yet to attend a con. Travel is logistically challenging right now, but I hope to be at one within the next few months. Further down the road I want to pick up enough design and textile skills to either make a fursuit for myself or at least have a very clear idea of what I'm looking for if I commission one from someone else. Another big aspect of this is learning how to socialize. I would say relearning how to socialize, with a more complete understanding of myself, but I think ultimately the emotional stuntedness I lived with for so long kept me from completing important social-developmental tasks I would have typically done in adolescence. So if you see this raccoon in the wild, please feel free to say hi! I promise he's friendly and doesn't bite. 🦝💜
Where not otherwise noted, the content of this blog is written by Dominique Cyprès and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.