It's weird to work at a furry convention - MJ MFF2019 Selfie

This is a public post.

Greetings, readers.

Let’s say you finally got to attend an eagerly anticipated convention and you could only choose one image to encapsulate the experience. Would you commission art of a meal shared between you and your friends? Would you snap a selfie in the afterglow of you and your long distance partner finally getting to share a bed together? Would you scrawl a doodle of the first time you met your favourite artist?

This is a piece on how it feels to attend [mostly furry] conventions until they all start blurring together, and the most important things I learned in the process that led to this artwork.
 

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An office job but with more silicone

If you’ve only ever experienced conventions for a good time, it would be difficult for you to understand what it feels like to work at one. You may go to a furry con to escape mundanity. Creators, however, bring the mundanity into the furry con space. As a furry at the convention, you may have escaped your office job for this thing. That thing you escaped to is my office job. At the artist alley, someone going by a very dragon-y name will hand me my earned rent money. If I sell a super hot painting in the adult section of the art show, the person buying it should never have to think about how much un-sexy work it was for me to get it to look right. My watercooler chats with other dealers are normally surrounded by sexualized fanart printed on body pillows. This is all so mundane to me that I barely even notice it anymore. There’s a whole separate culture when existing as a furry professional (which I will unpack further in future writing), and you can’t really feel how wacky this is until you’ve lived it for yourself.

The struggle of working a convention doesn’t start with getting to the venue. It starts when you either develop a body of work to sell, or develop the skills to take on-site commissions. Assuming that multi-year process has been completed, one could say it actually “starts” with your application being received and then accepted. Over the years, I learned that some conventions handle the application process better than others. Hell, some barely handle the applications at all, opting for guesswork rather than individually reviewing applicants. You may do everything right in the application process, get rejected anyway, and then have no insight as to what you could improve for next year’s application. Normally, this is because furry cons aren’t juried. Reasons I’ve personally heard include: fear of playing favourites, fear of non-furry professional influence on furry culture, or often just a lack of experience of well done but non-furry art exhibitions. I’ve seen capable and seasoned artists denied a Dealer’s Den tables in favor of art thieves reselling designs and non-creatives using tables as garage sales. Some tables did have artists… but their catchall nerd subjects had nothing to do with furry. When conventions do this to their dealers, we all lose out, and some lose more than others. Many furry artists are forced to rely on conventions to survive, but this isn’t always tenable. When one transitions to furry freelance, they learn that relying on a dealer’s den table may be foolish, but it’s also necessary.

Making it to the convention is almost always an issue. Sometimes it’s throwing a dart at a board several years and thousands of miles into the future. What if you don’t have a car? What if there aren’t ramps catered to your mobility issues? What if your dead name on your license isn’t a problem in your home state, but it is in the convention’s state? Speaking of states, do you Americans know which one of the 50 state tax systems you’re expecting to deal with at the convention? I don’t want to scare anyone from trying to get back into furry cons, but you would not believe how intimidating it is for the first few years! My partner and I normally drive for several days before having only a few hours to unpack our table setup AND hang our art show pieces. I’ve had to do this all by myself before, and I still don’t know how it’s possible.

Dealing can be a lot of fun, but it is so damn hard. I used to take on sketchbook commissions, but felt like the time it took me was never worth the money (I can’t bust out great sketches, quickly). I would pull one or two all-nighters if it meant earning an extra 500USD that weekend. At the time, I thought that was just what I should do for the perks of being my own boss. Even without the constant fatigue, I learned my traditional on-site sketch commissions were a disappointment to a few clients. That was enough for me to rethink my relationship to on-site work altogether. Still, I miss it. When you burn the midnight oil in the same place with the same people, every night of a convention, nothing replaces that feeling of camaraderie… except for a good night’s rest.

One little aside: I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight convention volunteers, and hotel / convention center staff persons that also make a show possible. Some conventions require department staff meetings year-round and countless free labor in the months leading up to the space you enjoy. It’s not only your fun but your personal safety that these people take on when they build the event you love attending. This isn’t to guilt anyone, just… Please thank these people for their service the next time you see someone working.

I’ve heard there’s more to life than money

At any one convention, no two people will have the same story. This is true even while united by a relatively small fandom. And yet, somehow, something brought all these people to the same loud and brightly coloured fandom space. For some, attending a convention took immense bravery on their part: physical therapy, rehab, trauma recovery, probably financial stress. For this reason I view every interaction as a gift. Because I can’t possibly know what context a person is carrying until they choose to share it with me, I treat every interaction like there could be a profound consequence. As I hold that priority, as long as I’m standing at my convention table, my hand is also forced to focus on selling. Despite a wealth of edifying social interactions, nearly every convention I attend is with the intent to make money. I hate that. I don’t like that every interaction at my table has to eventually either become about income or make way for the next income-related interaction. There are many more important things, but none of these important things will pay our expenses. So, sell I must.

When explaining what exactly my career is, I inevitably must articulate this dichotomy:

If people are telling me the truth, my writing and art has saved lives, restoring hope to those who otherwise didn’t have it. While this is among the highest accolades one’s work can receive, it can’t directly pay for gas, rent, or groceries. Nothing is more important than caring for the future of our environment (including people), but until society agrees, your landlord will never care about how much goodness you promote.

My intentions indirectly paying for my expenses, however, is another story: I cared so much for so long about others that eventually others took notice. People following my work for long enough get what I’m about, and of these few people, some had the means to give me money. Those folks extended financial support to me because they felt I was deserving. If this feels warm and fuzzy to you and not scary, I implore you to read this article to the end.

Done having fun

Certain logistics of the new Midwest Fur Fest Dealer’s Den were an improvement, but there was no natural light and only concrete. Plenty of interactions throughout the weekend were pleasant surprises, but there was also a lingering feeling that some inarticulable bad thing was near us. It wouldn’t be until a month or two later that we learned our suspicions were correct--people I thought were my friends were spreading some painful lies about me before the convention and long after. I suppose the longer one shows up in a place, the more these kinds of things are an inevitability. It doesn’t take social dynamics to make convention work difficult, and MFF 2019 already had some disquieting undertones to it.

No negative context can change that a furry convention is a spiritual highlight of my life. When people interact with me and reciprocate the care that I show them, I feel like my time on this earth isn’t wasted on an online simulation. I’m reminded everything I do, online or offline, has a consequence, and I am so grateful for that reality. Now more bad things are tied to the good things, a dynamic that will probably only get worse with time.

On Monday, December 9th, 2019, just shy of 1AM, I was brushing my teeth in a hotel bathroom in Chicago. This was the end of Midwest Furfest, a convention I had attended six times before. After plans starting over a year prior, including the strange unvetted submission process for artists, Sasha and I drove 1,270 miles with thousands of dollars of art and convention materials purchased in advance. Like all convention dealers, the art we’d bring, the setups we’d erect, and the talks restructured for our audiences offer no promise of income. This time, we reserved money to pay for a friend’s services as a convention assistant. One can usually make more money, with enough table space and an experienced table assistant. Despite our assistant being excellent, experienced, and resilient, I don't think she was ever paid what she deserved in any job. At this particular convention, we didn’t meet our goals. She was paid the minimum, as agreed, with a little extra to fluff out some financial duress, and then Sasha and I started planning how we’d use the remainder of sales. She still deserved so much more than we could give her.


Feeling lonely surrounded by friends

Despite my regular pangs of loneliness, it’s been a long time since I needed help and no one else was there for me. That’s just how my life works, giving and receiving in this strange honor system. On rare occasion I feel a little proud of this, but mostly it’s devastates me. It's triggered depressive episodes in me more than once, knowing that I'm doing better than most people, and I am extremely fortunate to be where I am, but so many things aren't going well for us, and it's more obvious than ever than Capitalism isn't designed to meet people's needs, but to keep incentivizing inequality and chaotic growth. My efforts to follow my convictions, concerning my freelance career, will not affect change at the institutional level. What success I have is merely survivor-bias squeezed out of a debilitating system working as intended. My favourite people in life are those who not only admit this, but they’re willing to bite the hand that feeds them the first chance they get.

As you’ll hear me say often, the furry fandom is a microcosm of the greater world. Yet, we have our own elevated issues to navigate. In a dominantly queer, increasingly trans, and often anti-Capitalist environment, the furry fandom collects folks on the outskirts of their societies. In navigating one’s own identity, including found family versus outdated social scripting, we’re all basically bullied kids that grew up and fell down the furry funnel. When so many of us suffer from a lack of control in our lives, policing others on social media can simulate that needed sense of control. Like any fandom with protective members, the space between setting healthy boundaries and straight-up bullying people isn’t well-articulated.

I was used to being misrepresented outside of the furry fandom. I took a lot of judgement on the chin (and perpetuated a lot of it, too). Once multiple people within the furry fandom went out of their way to unjustly attack my character, it locked away a critical part of me. I went from hating cynicism to being forced into it. Any time I admitted something good about myself, automatically I produced thoughts of self-harm. Even including the word “unjustly” in “unjustly attack my character” caused me to wince, because a bad faith actor would read that and assume that I can’t handle criticism. Any time I met a new person, I wondered how long it’d be before they read a lie about me and erred on the side of caution by politely avoiding me. They have no idea how hard I’ve been trying on a daily basis, just to do well by others. It’s easier for them to assume it’s all a ruse worthy of disassembling. Unfortunately, it’s not a ruse, it’s just people appropriating good intentions to harm me unjustly. Whether or not bullies realize it, each time they hurt me it becomes harder for me to identify my own friendships. It kills me a little bit, each time, because parts of my healthy self get chipped away.

In the same way that most furries won’t know what it’s like to work a furry convention, most people probably won’t know what it’s like to have to look at a list of their friends and wonder which person leaked their private Twitter account. On two separate occasions. I assume most people probably won’t know what it’s like to think you’ve worked things out with a friend, only to have them completely block you, then hear rumblings of related lies, not knowing how far it’s spread. I published some Patreon articles, knowing that the details were vulnerable for me, but I shared that knowing that my own fears weren’t as important as helping others. Imagine someone making fun of me for sharing my fears about my identity, my divorce, and navigating my journey towards self-esteem. When I feel lonely, even around friends, part of me is glad that most of them can’t relate. More and more of my friends can relate, and that kills me.

The choice of a spider monkey for my most recent fursona is something I've talked about before. One of my favourite parts of primate furries is how polarizing they are within the furry fandom. "Why be a little human-like thing when you could be a doggo?" I don't want to be a doggo. I'm a conflicting person with a love-hate relationship to things, not someone designed to make people smile, and I'm done trying to get you to like me. I reject your canine and replace it with a primate of my own.

I snapped the selfie this painting references while I was at the end of a furry convention. My partner, friend and I didn’t make enough money. I gave as much as I could in as many directions as I could, and I didn’t have any time for myself. About a month prior to this selfie, someone I thought was my friend said some truly horrible lies about me. One week before this selfie, I cut five years-worth of hair off my head. Five hours after this selfie was taken, I started the 1,270 mile drive back home. One month after this selfie another supposed-friend would make my life even worse, and an artist I’ve never met would use their large following on Twitter to spread more lies about me. Two months after this selfie, a friend's unearthed ties to Neo Nazis will destroy me. Three months after this selfie will mark the official end of the Before Times, as I’ll be completely overwhelmed by the first wave of COVID-19 deaths in the so-called United States. But in this moment, I’m just brushing my teeth while snapping a selfie that I felt compelled to take.

I don't know at the time why I felt the selfie was important to take, but I'm glad the art exists now. And now, so does this writing.

Thanks for reading.

-J

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This article was paid for by my patrons, and other friends who offered their financial support outside of the platform. Without these donations, I would not have the means to do these kinds of involved personal paintings or writings. If you want to help more of this work find its way to people, please consider donating. The Artist tier has the very high res image in this post. Joining the Black Hare tier of the Patreon for even one month grants access to a large backlog of exclusive content. Even if you can’t afford to donate, feel free to follow my Patreon for free posts like this one. And if you'd like to experience an extremely intense but cathartic experience, pick up BEOKAY here or DM me for a free copy if you can't afford it.