Chapter 2: The Toronto Years

In 1995 I was 23, had been active in furry for about a year, and I was living in Toronto’s gay district, Church and Wellesley. I lived with treecat Slinky and bunny Silfur in a loosely defined polycule, with frequent guest visits from other Toronto-area furs and out-of-towners. It was a blast. All of us had been closeted nerds in school and when we got into our twenties we were coiled springs of horniness. It was the classic 90s furry apartment life, with parties and orgies like something out of a Lance Rund comic.

Or not really. Although there was a fair amount of playing around, it was by no means a constant orgy. Most of our daily life was pretty normal, just playing video games or hanging out watching movies - usually rented from Suspect Video, stuff like Meet the Feebles or Robot Carnival. Another popular activity was drawing - everyone with their sketchbooks having an art jam of some kind. These practice sessions getting lessons from animators like Slinky were extremely helpful in teaching me how to draw.

I had a job making websites for a corporate communications company, just basic stuff but it paid OK. On weekends we went to gay clubs and warehouse raves, where I first experimented with MDMA - now called molly, then it was E. We didn’t smoke weed, or drink much. Furry at the time was considerably more straightedge - even alcohol was uncommon, at least among the furs we hung out with. That would change later on.

In early ’95 I went to Confurence 6, my first real con. I had been to Furtasticon a few months prior in PA, but that was a hastily-assembled thing thrown together in a few weeks when Philcon ejected the “skunk fuckers” from its facilities. Furry fandom was born out of rejection by SF/F fandom - never forget that.

CF6 was different. I flew to LAX, which was the first time I’d been on a plane since I was a teenager, and my first visit to the west coast. It was at a midsize hotel called the Atrium Marquis in Orange County, and the total attendance was - brace yourself - something like 650 attendees. Wow! I couldn’t believe it. There were maybe a dozen fursuiters. The thing I need to stress here is that the furry fandom I joined was mostly about artwork, comics, and online RP. Only years later did it turn into the costuming-based fandom it is now.

At this time the main online gathering point of furry was FurryMUCK. A fur named Tigerwolf brought green-screen unix terminals to the con. You could log into the MUCK, check your pagemail, and coordinate meetups and dinners with other furs. Today Telegram would fulfill this function. But the con and the hotel was so compact that it wasn’t usually an issue - you could just happen across furs you knew in the dealers room or the lobby. I know - sounds amazing. I still like smaller cons for this reason.

Something else happened at CF6 though - the dance. It was terrible! The lighting was on the level of a middle school prom. The music was stuff like Eye of the Tiger. The DJ was “whoever happened to have some CDs and was standing nearby”. Today, furry con dances are massive affairs of lights and lasers and DJs selected from a complex and highly competitive selection process. That was not the case at CF6. I said to myself “Furry con dances need to be a lot better. And I can do it.” I had learned from going to raves what a con dance could be like. More on that later.

If you know me, then perhaps you are asking “Cargie, what about babyfurs?”. Its kind of something I'm known for in the fandom.

I wasn’t one at the time because they didn’t really exist as any kind of organized subgroup of furry. I certainly had all my various fetishes, firmly established since I was about 15, but I didn’t know any others into diapers and stuff even on FurryMUCK. It was in mid ’95 that I made contact with Proxima and Jaz and Centaur and other furs that formed the nucleus of what we called AB furries or diaper furries. “Babyfur” as a term was years away at this point. What there was was Proxima’s Nursery, a hidden area on FurryMUCK that you had to teleport specifically to and set a flag on your character to gain entry.

Proxima had set up all this - both the nursery on FM, and a password protected website to post art and stories. Secrecy was the order of the day - it was easier to buy E than it was to see furry diaper porn back then. Proxima was very concerned with privacy and as a result the bab community was quite small indeed - maybe a dozen furs had been willing to jump through the hoops required. The vast majority of furry was unaware of our existence.

In Proxima’s Nursery on FM there was a message board where I saw posts from Jaz (now Karis) and Centaur, among others, and they seemed like cool pals. We started chatting, scening, and doing little diaper-centric RPs on FurryMUCK and when the next con rolled around we decided to meet.

Later that year I attended Confurence East in Elizabeth, NJ, the sequel to Furtasticon, and met up with several more furpals from FurryMUCK. I was involved with the production of a TV show that did a brief story about furrydom. I am sorry to say the video from that show is lost to time.

At CFE1 is where I first met Jaz and his then-wife Marci who was already an active artist - but I don’t think she was drawing babyfur name badges yet. It wasnt until CF7 that I got to play around padded with any other furs.

It was also at CFE1 that I brought a case of CDs with me and talked to Smash, who was running tech for the con. Literally the day of the con dance I asked if I could DJ the party and he said “sure”. He was going to do it but I had more CDs and this took the task off his plate.

Just like that I was a con DJ and the first Purple Nurple Live! was happening. In the last chapter I mentioned that the Purple Nurple was the first LGBT space on FurryMUCK - well, the Purple Nurple Live was the first real con dance. And I played techno and dance music instead of 80s and Weird Al, with sprinklings of cheese here and there. Furry con dances became what they are now, in part because of me.

I played on CDs, and while I went right from song to song and kept things rolling, i didn’t really beatmatch. The primitive CD equipment of the time did not allow it. My true skill was track selection. I wanted to bring the feeling of those warehouse raves to furrydom, but keep it accessible. To enable a nerdy audience of introverts to experience something they’d never been able to do before - just rip loose on the dance floor with nothing else mattering. I played stuff that was hip but accessible. And it worked. My greatest praise was finding out furries who hurt their knees or ankles from dancing too hard at PNL. Yes. I freakin did that. I set people free from their inhibitions and their self consciousness. I, along with those other early furcon DJs and techs, brought the spirit of raves to furrydom.

I ended up DJing PNL dances at every con I attended, two or three times a year, up through FC 2000, and had a resurgence a few years later as a chillout lounge called Capsule. I'd still do it again in a second, but it's not a thing I'm likely to do again. Furry con dances are in better hands now.

Life went on like this for a couple of years. And I found myself with a persistent wanderlust. Toronto was great - especially in this time when the rent was fairly reasonable, my job was stable, I was having a good time - but I wanted to play in the big leagues. I wanted to go to California and get into the movie business. Or the game business. I knew I could stay in Toronto, have a perfectly fine life, but always with a tinge of regret for roads not taken. At the age of 25 I decided to go after what might be, before it became what might have been.

In 1997 I got my wish, as a new internet game company in Los Angeles was hiring and brought me on with a US work visa. In the summer of that year I packed all my worldly possessions into six large boxes, got on a plane, and moved to Southern California: right into another furry apartment with my friends Kaysho and Kayotae.

The Kingdom of the Elves awaited me.