Summer means I have time/bandwidth for archive work again, so let's have some furry history, thanks to a donation by @duncandahusky.wolfhusky.org. We often say furry is queer, but that hasn't always been the case, esp. in a narrow definition of queer as non-heterosexual. Case in point: Ten Furcent.
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We hawked our comics to furries, but our market was way bigger than the fandom.
Shon very actively worked to grow furry fandom, but our market was way bigger and more normie than Rod & Mark’s crowd.
A lot of gay guys would buy pinups of pretty girls too. So it was always a very mixed market.
I have somewhat inadvertently gathered a collection of comics (including what I believe to be a full set of Furrlough), but have always struggled to get an idea of what circulation was like, especially for later / intermittent publications.
We should go through it sometime.
(I'm happy to be proven wrong of course.)
I'd say upload to https://archive.org and if anyone objects they can file a DMCA.
I've seen the debate about whether the need to preserve, archive, and make available is more important than respecting decades old copyright on material that's not being sold anymore. I tend to lean towards the former. But it's your prerogative in the end.
The artists and fursuiters who were creating their own characters were overwhelmingly queer.
But we'd been getting flak before then. The TBOF folks accused of only being in the fandom for gay sex/fetishes (even though I'd been drawing furries for almost a decade before learning about Furry fandom). The didn't want the queers in 'their' fandom.
He used to have it all. He was a big name, ran a popular APA, was part of convention staff---a veritable fixture in Furry fandom.
And then he squandered it all on his ill-fated gatekeeping crusade, declared the fandom beyond saving, took his ball and went home.
Not in our lifetimes at least.