DVDanger: Fursonas

Dominic Rodriguez had two very good reasons to make Fursonas, his documentary about the furry community. Reason one, he needed to make a film for his film school production class. Reason two, he’s a furry himself.

So while Fursonas was supposed to be a 12-minute short, it became a four-year passion project. And if anyone was expecting a fur-suit-wearing fan of the scene to produce a puff piece about furries, that's exactly the opposite of what he wanted to do.

The first challenge is explaining what a furry is: Simply, it's someone who likes anthropomorphized animals. Which, at a certain level, everyone does. Everyone likes Wile E. Coyote, or Baloo the Bear, or Billy the Marlin. But furrydom takes that a little – or sometimes a lot – further. There are the hardened furries, that love the scene, and then there are the fur-suit wearers, who have made a complete furry persona for themselves, like Diezel the raccoon, or Grix the fox. Then there are those who represent the fringes of the culture: Uncle Kage, the self-appointed guardian of the scene; Boomer, who has a dog suit made of shredded paper; and Varka, a professional cocksmith who crafts dragon dildos.

Rodriguez's film is a rebuttal to the two ways the media portrays the scene. He said, "There’s the very exploitative, mocking view of furries. Then there are documentaries or short projects, usually done by furries themselves, that are PR pieces and defensive, even. ‘We aren’t what you think, we give to charity, we’re a great group of people who make the world a better place, and we make people smile. You should be proud to have us in your lives.’ Both sides felt phony to me, and it felt like everybody’s right, and everybody’s wrong. I wanted to do a film about people and their complexities."

Austin Chronicle: It always seems like there’s a group that it’s ‘OK’ for popular culture to be dismissive of or be mean about. Why do you think that it’s furries at the moment?

Dominic Rodriguez: I don’t know. I just think about when I started it. I didn’t know a single furry, I didn’t know any fur-suiters, and all I saw was just this image of all these hundreds of people in costume. You don’t know who they are. They’re just furries. And because you don’t know who they are, they’re easier to judge. That’s why I thought it was so important in the documentary that it took its time, and you got to feel who these people were in the first half, so it’s not as OK to judge.

AC: So knowing that, as you point out, furries are the ultimate Maury Povich ‘bring them out for the yokels to throw stones at’ guests, did that put extra pressure on you?

DR: Definitely a lot of pressure, but it was also freeing, in a weird way, because I knew that I wanted to make a serious documentary, and I knew that my crew was serious about it, and we knew that we weren’t going to do something that was an easy, mocking kind of thing. We wanted to do something that was complicated and with layers to it.

When we had this idea for another documentary before the furries, the one that fell through, it was about autism and the children’s hospitals. Thinking about how that would have went, there’s really only one direction you could have taken that, and you have to treat it very seriously. With this, it’s OK to be funny, and it’s OK to laugh with them, and have a little bit of silliness, but also endear people to them.

AC: You have the figure that 80% of furries are men, and 80% of that 80% are gay …

DR: Everyone’s treating that as fact, but it’s said in such a throwaway kind of way. I think that’s roughly true.

AC: Yeah, it didn’t sound like anyone had done a poll. And since you have a lot of people who are constantly in-suit, you’ve got no clue.

DR: It’s really interesting to meet a person and not know what they look like or anything about them. To feel like you know somebody, and then later realize when they take their head off, I didn’t know what they look like, I didn’t really know that much about them at all.

AC: How does that affect relationships, the balance between knowing them in-suit and out?

DR: It’s like a strange game of anonymity, especially when you’re in a suit and they’re in a suit. You’re putting on a face and you’re becoming something that isn’t you, but it’s also a way to get to the most pure you, and the most pure ‘this is who I am.’ There’s definitely something cool about that, and when you go into the fur-suit lounge, which is the area that only fur-suiters are allowed to go into – because when you take your head off in public it’s considered a bit of a taboo, breaking the magic. But to me it doesn’t matter, because real life is magic, and in the documentary I take my head off all the time.

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Fursonas (Gravitas Ventures) is available on VOD now.