Back in the early 90s I was active in the furry community, helped write parts of the codebase for FurryMUCK and FurryMUSH (I was a bearkin), and attended several of the early 'mini cons' that were piggy backed on mainstream events like Dragoncon.

Then in the early 2000s it started to get... weird.

I mean cons were always a hookup place for nerds, but if you were in a fursuit after then 90s it was different.

In the 90s if you were wearing a suit and hooked up with someone, you took off the suit and if things went well, had some fun. Furries and non-furry con-goers were pretty well distributed as hookups, everyone mixing with everyone.

But again around 2002 the whole scene shifted, people started asking 'to leave the suit on', and furries started to self-isolate as hookup partners, insisting on only partnering with other furries.

I mean by no means did I have my finger on the pulse of furry culture at the time outside of my MOO gameplay, and this shift was a big surprise to me.

Then the disgusting stuff started happening. A lot of groping, like a LOT. I mean anywhere you have cosplayers you will have some of it but DAMN was there a huge difference in number of events. People leaving their rooms covered in shit and diapers were nearly always in the furry camp.

Then was the sales of CDs filled with actual bestiality porn being run out of people's rooms. That was the breaking point for me.

I had never really considered my fursona as a sexual entity, it was just an extension of me that let me have fun pretending to be something else for a little while. Once every prospective partner requested 'suit on', I was done. Around 2006 IIRC.

And I've watched the community get even more and more depraved, and you have no idea how angry it made me that some bestiality loving shit fetishists ruined a once wonderful community.