How and where did furries start becoming a thing? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

You can find the more general case of "stories about people with animal heads" or "stories about animals who display assorted human behaviors such as talking, wearing clothes, and so on" pretty much throughout all of human history. Any 'history of the furry fandom', even a half-assed reply on /r/askhistorians, is obligated to mention this.

But the subculture actively calling itself "the furry fandom", or more simply, "furries", grew out of the science fiction fandom community in the early eighties, mostly in California. Wikifur's synopsys of this starts strong but starts getting really oblique in the mid-nineties when there's a major conflict over "just how adult should this fandom be" to dance around. And another one about "all these gay kids are ruining my scene full of drawings of hot animal girls with guns" - there was a major queering of the scene that started in the nineties.

Digging up primary sources on this is serious work; you need either a big pile of moldering zines and APAs that I no longer have even a fragment of, or to spend a lot of time with the Wayback Machine as more and more of the late-nineties sites documenting the first couple decades of the fandom drop off the internet. (Looks like this guy may be doing just that and putting it into a book, though.)

I Am Not A Source but I started to become part of the fandom around 1985 or so, when I started going to the comic shop and picking up a lot of furry comics published as part of the mid-80s small-press comics boom. That definitely spread the 'furry' scene around a lot. So did the Internet; there was a big change in the early nineties when people started showing up at ConFurence (the first Furry Convention, held in California for most of the nineties - and the only one for about half its ten-year lifespan) who'd come to the scene via FurryMuck and other furry-oriented roleplay environments. I don't have data to back this up but I would bet money that this is when it really shifted from being "the furry fandom" - a scene for people who like stories about animal-people - to "furries" - a scene for people who like to pretend to be animal-people.