Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: LGBT

Vote now! NorCal Furries shortlisted for Best Contingent award in San Francisco Pride Parade.

by Patch O'Furr

UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO AUGUST 15!

Each June, millions of people see the San Francisco Pride parade. Hundreds of thousands of attendees cheer for over 200 contingents. For 2023, five contingents are shortlisted to win the Best Overall Contingent award. Northern California Furries have the huge honor of being one of the five.

You can help win big positive recognition for furries everywhere. Spread the message and get everyone you know to vote!

Voting Poll is here: https://forms.gle/QvVoPoBd82ajMcUV9 – Don’t wait, the poll is open until August 15.

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How to join San Francisco Pride 2023 with the Northern California Furries

by Patch O'Furr

For members who completed an RSVP

Photo: AniMajor

The SF Pride Parade – Sunday June 25, 2023 – General info at SFpride.org

Let’s go! The parade is on Market Street, from Embarcadero to the Celebration area at Civic Center. Spectators will be watching from 10:30 a.m. until late afternoon. ABC7 will be broadcasting the parade to watch from home.

Be there with 150 furries. Be there for the GO moment when the crowd roars. Hundreds of thousands of people will make the street your stage. Many furries will march and interact with watchers, while some will ride the float. It isn’t just for fun and photos, but also to say that we’re not going away. That’s Pride for LGBT people and allies, while we help bring the diversity of it all.

Northern California Furries first joined the parade in 2002, and last year marked their 20-year anniversary. This year brings more interest than ever. Thousands of furries will also join Pride events internationally — see other news and history in the Pride tag.

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Papa Bear: Indie furry movie nears funding deadline

by Patch O'Furr

If you like making friends laugh and/or wasting company time, and have been on the net for 10-15 years, then you probably know The OnionCollegeHumor, Funny or Die – and Cracked. At one point it was the world’s most visited comedy site.

Papa Bear is a movie in development from heads of the Cracked video department at its peak. It’s about a furry in the family, and its climax will be filmed at a furry convention. Papa Bear promises to be dramatic, funny, daring, boldly LGBT-positive, and full of heart.

There’s a crowdfunding campaign for Papa Bear that ends in a few days, on June 16 – don’t wait to check it out! 

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Join now! Nor Cal Furries call for volunteers for the San Francisco Pride Parade on June 25.

by Patch O'Furr

What does Pride mean to you?

If Pride means being authentically yourself and refusing to hide, the San Francisco Pride Parade is one of the best places in the world. It’s so real when you’re there with a group, in the moment when they say GO, then you turn the corner onto the main parade route and the crowd roars. That’s how to BE.

The Nor Cal Furries will march with a parade float on June 25. (Furry is an interest that harmonizes with LGBT members, and many other interest groups participate.) Meanwhile, some people just found out that furries exist and want to attack them; for example, anti-LGBT law has forced Megaplex to restrict attendance due to power abuse by the government. This shows ongoing history where simply existing is an undebatable political statement. But people who oppose LGBT existence and think this is new activism don’t know that furries have been award-winning Pride marchers for 21 years. And the founders of Pride knew that just being there is winning. We can look forward to another 21 years of being there… but it won’t happen by itself.

It’s up to us and YOU. Nor Cal Furries can’t go without volunteer staff, so please answer or spread the call. If you can’t volunteer, come attend and tell a friend.

CALL FOR STAFF – SIGN UP HERE > https://forms.gle/Pb8n1UXDCTLNKaW6A

Let’s meet some of the team you can join (in no special order). Dogpatch Press asked each one: What does Pride mean to you, and why make this event happen?

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Fearless Furries Celebrate 20 Years at San Francisco Pride

by Patch O'Furr

Photo by AniMajor

Sunday, June 26 marked 20 years of furries at San Francisco Pride. (See the 2019 event and history or the Pride tag for more.) The Norcal Furries made a welcome return after no official parade marching for 2 years of a pandemic. They brought their own float, and it all came together so smoothly, it made an incredibly positive memory.

The biggest change from past years was no longer using rental trucks or Burning Man art cars. This year, Norcal Furries built their own float on a trailer. It was a wonderful asset. Using other people’s was always less than ideal (constrained by costs, time and logistics for loading/unloading, and even height with streetcar wires). All of that was easier under self management.

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Furries at Toronto Pride: “one of the largest marching groups of the entire parade”

by Arrkay

Welcome to Arrkay, a member of the Toronto furry scene (home of Furnal Equinox), and the bird who creates and produces Culturally F’d, a Youtube show that explores anthropomorphic artwork throughout history, culture and mass media. See Arrkay’s tag for previous stories. He’s sharing his story today by request of Patch who just marched with furries at San Francisco Pride. Here’s Arrkay’s on-the-scene report from Toronto Pride.

It was a terribly populated affair, with covid still ringing in the back of my head. Pride in Toronto was as busy as ever. Me and my partner just walked the street fair once, which was enough to satiate our curiosity and for me to buy some new sunglasses. It’s a strangely foreign feeling seeing this many unmasked people in one place.

Parade morning

My signs were made, and my flag was bundled up into my tricycle with water bottles, lunch, a vape pen of mint flavored cannabis and sunscreen. My outfit was a second-hand hyena agenda tank top, some compression shorts usually worn for fursuiting but with a complimentary jockstrap on top. I zip-tied a flag and protest signs to my trike. “Learn Queer History” and “Teach Queer History” with taglines “Always been here, always will be” and “No More Shit!” (a rallying cry from the 80’s bathhouse riots in Toronto).

Cardboard signs that read "Teach Queer History, always been here, always will be" and "Learn Queer History, No more shit!"

A crowd of furries accumulated near the group check-in site. Unfortunately it was nowhere near where we were supposed to muster. Not that it ultimately mattered, we wouldn’t be marching for a couple more hours. Navigating the dense crowd with a large orange trike was difficult, but everyone was generally polite and made way for our slow moving group of animal headed queers.

One of the groups we shouldered our way past was the New Democratic Party, with leader Jagmeet Singh visible with his pink turban.

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Furries return to the 2022 San Francisco Pride parade

by Patch O'Furr

Coming Sunday June 26, 2022

The SF Bay Area has the world’s most dense population of furries, but back in 2012, SF Pride didn’t have activities for the love of anthropomorphic animals. They had a parade contingent in 2002-2005, but it needed help to start again. (See a 2002 video or the Pride tag for more history.) 

Whose job is it to make it happen? Everyone’s. In 2012-2019 I was one of the organizers for award-winning floats in the parade, with hundreds of supporters and members. In 2019 (the second year to get an award) we won “Absolutely Outrageous” out of more than 200 parade contingents. The parade was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, but finally, it’s here again.

The Nor Cal Furries are going this weekend with a new trailer, built by @Zoren and @MrDisk0Dog and funded by community donations and volunteers to give everyone an experience to remember. (Funds still accepted, anything extra will pay forward.) Here’s how great it was in 2019:

PARADE INFO FOR THE FURRY CONTINGENT:

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Rhythm Bastard and his music: Support your local swole punk rock furry!

by Patch O'Furr

What is Rhythm Bastard? Hardcore Nerdcore Punk Rock. Alternative Laptop Punk. A DIY one-man-band with a furry Florida Man.

“Rhythm Bastard takes the stage armed only with his voice, his guitar and his bandmate, a laptop, playing a mix of punk and garage rock, with music inspired by every thing from video games, anime, comics and everything in between.” – Bio

His newest music is coming on July 1, so let’s hear about it from the Bastard.

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“Furries in Schools” Hoax Map documents a moral panic to attack LGBT people by proxy.

by Patch O'Furr

False reports about students “identifying as animals” and demanding unusual accommodations are like a resurrection of the 1980’s Satanic Panic. The public is being targeted with a wave of misinformation and greedy grabbing for views, at the expense of furry fans, public education, and LGBTQ people in general.

What better way to face bullying than to document it, and connect debunkers outside the community to watchdogs inside? Responsible journalists, take note!

Here’s a new resource from Troj, a furry fan, psychologist and researcher from Colorado: “I started making a map of school boards and regions that have courted the “litter box” myth and related urban legends about furries.” (They’re mainly American myths, but even reach Australia.)

Each point on the map has a note with details (check them for links to sources), and date of media coverage or earliest mention of a given urban legend. Similar myths are roughly grouped by color. They keep coming: at date of writing, one in North Carolina is too fresh to appear yet.

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Anti-LGBT Russian government morality activist visits and harasses fursuit walkers

by Patch O'Furr

From the fursuit walk in a video posted by Skip Doggy on Russian social media. SEE Q&A at BOTTOM about the walk.

“Here it is – the price to be a representative of the Moscow Furry Fandom.”

Furry fan @Matvey_Muhin has a story that goes with media reports like this one from PinkNews: “Russia considers officially branding LGBT+ groups and furries as ‘extremists’“.

BACKGROUND: The reports look at political homophobia in the Russian government, and a commission that claims to protect morality. The reports say the commission chairman, Andrey Tsyganov, called for the government to help law enforcement by listing ideologies on their extremism list. The list includes the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) of Alexey Navalny, a jailed opponent of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Listing these groups allows banning related gatherings and media, and Putin has been using it to squash his political foes.

That’s how Tsyganov wants to legally discriminate against LGBT people, supposedly to protect kids from “propaganda” — making it extremist to discuss LGBT people breathing and existing, as if they come from recruiting. The logic shows conservative belief of what a family should be, with a goal to enforce it by squashing LGBT people. Straight families with children are supposed to thrive through this false understanding of how sexuality works. They could just as soon seek power by squashing interracial dating.

Tsyganov started with such a reach, and blasted off from earth like Sputnik when he added LGBT+, radical feminist, child-free groups… and furries.

What’s the problem with furries, again? The logic is: (1) People on the internet make weird porn. (2) Some of them are furries. (3) Fandom freedom includes tolerance for LGBT expression. (4) Kids are in trouble while those exist. Those things don’t necessarily overlap, but it raises stereotyping about non-traditional gender and sexuality. This got furry porn site e621 banned in Russia (an easy target that shows the government was already watching.)

Furries face such attitudes rooted in old bigotry. Of course fandom isn’t exactly an identity, but it makes a community. Targeting their expression is just around the corner from direct homophobia. Compare how in the 1970’s, Disco music was targeted for being made by LGBT and minority people, even if the music itself is just music. So if furries belong on an “extremist” list, imagine getting attacked for dancing to the Ra-Ra-Rasputin song!

@Matvey_Muhin faced this with fellow furry Skip Doggy. He wrote:

“Can you imagine that Andrei Tsyganov came to our furry walk Tsaritsyno, Kolomeskaya. He continued to accuse us of pedophilia in front of children. But Skip drove him away. When a high-level official comes to us personally, it shows his madness. Long story short – the Christian radical and anti-vaxer is attacking us (especially me and Skip). Here it is – the price to be a representative of the Moscow Furry Fandom.”

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