In 2002 my involvement with furrydom dropped while Axiom and I were on sojourn in Paris. We had vague plans about moving there and getting jobs but our high-school/restaurant level French quickly put the kibosh on that plan. It was really an extended vacation - after many years marinating in the hustle culture of Silicon Valley it was a much needed break. We spent most of the year in Europe, based in France but with extended drives through Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Airbnb did not exist, but similar short-term rentals did, and we availed ourselves of them.
While we were in Europe looking at cathedrals and art museums, furry fandom was shifting and evolving beneath our feet. We were on the MUCKs almost every night in internet cafes, or posting on Livejournal to our friends and acquaintances. So we were “involved in furry” in that respect. But furry itself was changing - the influx of the Millennials had begun, happening mostly outside of our notice until it was everywhere.
I remember the first time a fur I was chatting with was born in the 1980s, and how weird that felt. I was in HIGH SCHOOL in the 80s. Then and now the first thing I ask a new fur I’m chatting with is their real life age. I will not knowingly chat online with an underage fur, in any fashion. And when 18+ began to mean born in 1983, or 1984 - years I remembered well - it felt very strange. Today there’s furs born in the 2000s, a decade after I joined the fandom, and it still feels weird. Perhaps it always will.
I hit the age of 30 in 2002, and learned that what sounds like decrepit old age when you’re 21 is really not that bad. 30 is not “gay death” or “furry death”. You’re still you, with all the same interests, flaws and quirks that make you who you are. But you’re a bit older than most furs, and then later you’re much older than most furs. You get older, furs stay the same age. But you have nowhere else to go - what are you going to do? Play golf? When you turn 30, or 35, or 55, or 80, you’re still going to be a furry. I’m here for life. I got nowhere else I'd rather be.
Most of the new millennial furries around this time did not get on FurryMUCK or Taps as their primary means of furry socialization. Many hadn’t even HEARD of the MUCKs. FurryMUCK, once the hub of the online furry world, was becoming a backwater occupied by increasingly cranky Gen-X furs, while the younger ones were hanging out on Livejournal or instant messengers or other online spaces that didn’t require a unix shell or a command line interface.
Furry was becoming younger, less nerdy, more queer, more fursuit-centric, and most of all, much, much bigger. Back in Toronto in the 90s, the local furry group was pretty small and it was possible to know all or most of the local furs. That was no longer the case by the early 2000s, and every city had scattered groups of furs that did not even know each other, only coming together at local conventions, which were popping up like weeds. CF6 had 700 attendees and was the biggest furry con in existence in 1994 - by the 2000s a big con pulled in 2000 people. And there were two or three of those per year.
As it grew too big to overlook, the mainstream media started to take notice of furry fandom: most notably a major Vanity Fair article and the infamous CSI episode that depicted furry cons as costumed sex orgies. Both those things (much like the Wired article that had introduced me to the fandom) were wildly inaccurate hack jobs, but they also introduced thousands of people to a subculture that intrigued them. And when enough articles state that furry fandom is mostly about fursuits, then that starts to become true. The number of fursuiters at cons at this time began to explode, and cons began to cater more and more to fursuiters.
In 2003 we came back to the States, and had a year of nomadic existence living a few months at a time with my or Axiom’s families, and crashing on the futons of various furs. Some Massachusetts furpals, Bazil and Nukroo, were very kind to us and set us up for several months with them in their apartment in suburban Boston. We hung out with Aethan and Iyu and Paf and Baker and other Boston furs. Axiom and I eventually got jobs nearby and we moved into our own place not far from Providence, RI. Think of Quahog from Family Guy and you got the vibe.
While hanging out on those furs’ couches, for the first time since those sketchbook art jams in my early furry years, I began to draw.
Sketchbooks and pencils and Micron Pigmas are cheap, and I would draw and ink a pic, scan it and clean it up on my laptop in an old copy of Photoshop, and then post it onto a website that I coded up myself - cargoweasel.com. The website was hosted by a fur named fEk on his private server so I knew there wasn’t a problem with content restrictions. I bought a cheap tablet to make coloring easier and soon had a fully functioning mobile art station up and running at a low cost. One decision remained: what I wanted to draw, for real.
I knew plenty of other furs with my fetishes, and thats kind of how social groups had begun to organize within the fandom.
Inflatable furries hang out with other inflatofurs. Vore furs become friends with other voreaphiles. Whatever odd kink you’re into, furries into it find each other and form social groups online. And so it went with furries who liked diapers and ageplay. I noticed this tendency from early on, but it really became definitive in the early 2000s as regional or city-based general furry groups got too large to be workable.
Even with this knowledge, for a couple of years I had put my kinks by the wayside, both for practical reasons while travelling, and for stupid reasons like I was trying to put all that silly fetish business behind me. I’m acutely aware of the fact that most people, even many furries, absolutely do not care for the things I enjoy sexually and need emotionally. Axiom, the love of my life, was and is not kinky in any fashion. I had resolved years earlier to seek relationships only within my fetish spheres of influence, but that failed when I fell in love with that fox. I was not willing to give him up, and perhaps out of some kind of misplaced fear of rejection I chose to suppress my own kinks.
I was certainly able to do this for a time - but I was also making myself miserable. So in 2003 that broke open and I just decided to frickin' go for it. I’d draw the stuff I want, the furry art that I wanted to see, my deepest sexual fantasies rendered as well as I could do, regardless of who might see them and think less of me. Some old friends might not have known this side of me - I had to face they might not like it at all, and it might cost me those friendships, but it was a price I had to pay. Axiom was always, always, 1000% supportive.
A new word for the things I like had started to crop up. While I was quite happy with my diaper furry friends I knew from the MUCKs and Proxima’s, quietly and outside my notice an IRC channel had started up called #babyfur. Now I never liked or used IRC, I found it hostile and more likely to get myself hacked than enjoy my time on a given channel, but this one was populated by a whole bunch of furs that I didn’t know - new to furry, never touched the MUCKs, just doing their own thing somewhere else on the internet. And it wasn’t just that IRC channel. There were tons of other little groups of crinklebutt furs popping up all over. Websites. Yahoo groups. And they called themselves babyfurs. A term that I didn’t like at first, and I still don’t think it totally captures my deal, although its popular enough that I use it.
Babyfurs had become a whole subculture, right under my nose, without my knowledge, from those dozen furs back in Proxima's, now there were hundreds of babs out there that I had no idea existed, many a decade younger than me irl.
The babyfur artwork field at the time was mostly tame and depicted diapered cub furs stealing cookie jars and the like. Marci McAdam started drawing name badges a few years earlier and she had already even then become associated with babyfurs, mostly because every bab who knew Karis would get one from Marci at every con. That woman has drawn a lot of diapered furries. More than any of us will ever know. There were quite a few adult furries in diapers, but again the pics were generally just “heres a diapered furry”. What I wanted to draw was adults in diapers with boners. And just to get way more explicit with the diaper fetish material. My characters were not cubs, but they were definitely in cubby situations and attire. The nature of my kinks has nothing to do with underage ("cub") furries and DEFINITELY not humans, I want to make that perfectly clear. If you wanna see the kind of stuff I drew, you'll have to check on Furaffinity.
Furry fandom was taking off.