Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Morgan Sung: I’m standing under a black sky with cobalt blue clouds. In front of me looms an Aztec pyramid. There are trees in the distance with puffs of fuchsia and chartreuse leaves. And there’s a massive tree growing in the center of the pyramid too. The steps leading to the top are lined with candles, as well as an array of offerings like food and sugar skulls. Strung throughout the space are vibrant paper flags featuring intricate designs of cartoon animals. A variety of creatures appear and then disappear around me. Foxes, dragons, and beings that look like more ethereal versions of Sonic the Hedgehog. And my guide to this mystical place?
Changa Husky: I’m Changa Husky.
Morgan Sung: Changa is an anthropomorphic, animated husky dog. He has gray fur that’s lighter around his muzzle and a tuft of black hair on top of his head. His eyes are icy blue behind gold-rimmed glasses and his brown ears move as his facial expressions change. He and I are together in this virtual world, but I’m talking to him through the screen of my laptop. And yes, there is a real person under his virtual costume.
Changa Husky: I am a furry of an older variety. I’ve been in the fandom for decades since at least the early to mid-90s, and I’m here to talk about, well, this world I built in virtual reality. We call this the Furry Family Ofrenda.
Morgan Sung: This VR world is inspired by the Day of the Dead, the Mexican holiday dedicated to honoring the lives of those who have passed away. Families welcome back spirits of their loved ones with altars called “ofrendas,” adorned with photos, candles, flowers, and offerings of the departed’s favorite foods. This isn’t a holiday for mourning, but for celebrating. Changa shows me how this virtual world is dotted with altars, each one with a framed photo, candles and a plaque. They’re all dedicated to the fursonas of people who have passed away.
Fursona is a portmanteau of fur and persona, essentially an alter ego. And just a note, in this episode, we’ll be referring to a few people, including Changa, by their “fursona” names. Furries are often the targets of harassment and bullying, so many of them are publicly known only by their pseudonyms to maintain their safety and privacy. Beyond that, fursonas are kind of like a drag persona. It’s how a lot of furries express themselves.
Changa Husky: A lot of drag personas are just that person exploring their identity. To be able to put on a mask and amplify your personality. It ends up being a way of exploring your identity and yourself. And not in those cliches of, “oh, I identify as blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, no, I know I’m human. But there are ways you can explore who you are and how you interact with the world and friends, through the lens of um like an anthropomorphic creature. It’s very much a medium. It’s like a medium of expression.
Morgan Sung: Changa stops at one particular altar with a framed photo of an older man, a human person, to be clear. He’s got glasses and he’s smiling from under his gray mustache. And he’s wearing a baseball cap with two fluffy auburn ears sticking out of it.
Changa Husky: His fursona was a mustelid, a pine martin, a kind of tree weasel, and he was, well, very much the weasel persona. They have to be a little fearless, you know, tiny little carnivore.
Morgan Sung: This pine martin was named Sy Sable, also known as Mark Merlino. He passed away a year ago, and he was Changa’s life partner.
Changa Husky: This project was his idea. So it was beautiful but painful that I had to add him in here. I was with him for close to 30 years before he passed. I mean, many marriages do not last that long. And here we are a polycule.
Morgan Sung: Mark Merlino and Mark’s other partner, Rodney O’Reilly, are known as the grandfathers of the furry fandom. Their house, where Changa also lives, has been a home base for the fandom for decades.
Changa Husky: Mark and Rodney, the founders of the first furry convention, were a bisexual couple, openly. And they started the convention in 1989, which was not the greatest time period to be very openly queer. Let’s be real, much less running a convention. And that became a safe space for a lot of people.
Morgan Sung: Now outsiders might only know the subculture as a weird kink for dressing up as animals. And because of that stigma, a lot of furries aren’t open about being furries to people outside of the fandom. And that means grieving, for furries, might look a little different. Even if someone wasn’t open about being a furry to the rest of the world, the furry community remembers that person’s fursona as much as their real-life presence.
And then there’s the fandom’s technical aptitude. There’s a long running joke online that if a plane full of furries goes down, then Silicon Valley will crumble because furries built the modern IT industry. The furry fandom evolved with the internet and since the 80s, furries have always been pioneers of emerging tech. They’ve incorporated it into their costuming and conventions and even memorials. So what does a furry funeral look like? What does it mean to memorialize an aspect of someone’s life that may not have been part of their bodily form, but was still a part of the identity?
Morgan Sung: This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Morgan Sung: We’ll come back to Changa and the Furry Family Ofrenda. But first, we need to understand this fandom. You know how this goes: we open a new tab. What does it mean to be a furry?
Morgan Sung: Look, I may be chronically online, but I’m still an outsider when it comes to this fandom. So to explain furries, I reached out to someone who’s actually part of the community.
Patch O’Furr: I’m Patch. I go by Patch O’Furr online.
Morgan Sung: Patch runs the furry news site, Dogpatch Press. The site covers furry conventions, the furry economy, and has even investigated furry crimes. But before all that, Patch was brand new to San Francisco and exploring the city’s nightlife. Back in 2012, he stumbled across a furry party at a gay bar within walking distance of his apartment. Out of curiosity, he stopped by.
Patch O’Furr: So I showed up and um you know I’m walking down a dark street and here’s this club in front of me with you know some muffled beats and some light coming in through the cracks and uh I walk up to the door and there’s like this beckoning werewolf paw pulling me in. And I walked into this just magical experience. It was being transported to another dimension. I went over towards the dance floor.
This was a famous dive bar with like a little postage stamp of a dance floor and I was kind of lurking on the edge and then I saw this amazing sight. There was this six foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain and it just gave me this urge to ask him to dance. And, you know, this is a cartoon character and it’s very loud. So we’re using kind of body language and he just pulls me in and we’re dancing. And I’m just sort of like, wow, this is a cartoon character, but I can actually hug him. And right there I decided I have to be one of these characters.
Morgan Sung: The otter that Patch met was wearing a “fur suit.” Picture something like a mascot at a theme park. Some people build their own fur suits, which is pretty labor intensive and requires a lot of technical sewing skills. Others commission their fur suits from artists, but that can cost upwards of a couple thousand dollars. Patch ended up finding his fur suit on an auction site. There was one dog suit, a husky to be specific, that jumped out at him. He won the bid, and it arrived just in time for a local furry convention. Patch decided to debut the character that weekend.
Patch O’Furr: And there at the hotel when I put it on, it was a very strange feeling for the first 30 minutes. You’re completely immersed. There’s no skin, your senses are sort of muffled, you have tunnel vision. But then, you start to feel this connection with the people who are around you. They’re seeing you as somebody who’s different and kind of magical, and it’s a very addictive feeling. You know, it’s getting out of yourself, but it’s also making a new version of yourself. You can kind of be reborn with this one life that you’re given. And it’s really special to be able to do that and be validated by everybody else who’s doing that.
There’s a strong overlap between queer communities and furry communities. And it’s not necessarily that furry is an identity itself. The more accurate definition is um we’re talking about expressing identity. So furry is queer as, you know, so is musical theater or disco or other things that are attached to the queer community, you now, drag. Drag is not always practiced by queer people, but it’s very strongly allied. So the same is true with furries. So they are adopting a fursona so they can be themselves more.
Morgan Sung: Changa, the husky we talked to earlier, pointed out that there are also a lot of neurodivergent people who gravitate toward the furry fandom. Putting on a fursona can be like masking.
Changa Husky: I mean, people like in this community can have a lot of social anxiety. Um, I mean we are a very neurodiverse, uh, community. We’re very queer, we’re very neurodiverse. And so this community, people will like put on these masks to like actually tell more truth about themselves. Cause I mean let’s be real, real, everybody out there in the real world is always wearing a mask. You’ve got your work persona. You have who you are at the grocery store or at church or what have you, um, you know even to family members and being able to put on say, I don’t know, a doggy persona and just explore that way and be seen that way is a way of interacting with friends and family, um or even just yourself in ways that are actually kind of therapeutic.
Morgan Sung: So for a lot of furries, the fandom has provided a space to be queer and neurodivergent without judgment. Changa actually found the fandom after watching Lion King. Yes, that’s the 1994 Disney animated movie, Lion King.
Changa Husky: There’s always um like a piece of media that was the inflection point for a lot of furries. Classically, it was Disney’s Robin Hood, you know, something about those foxes. Let’s be real.
Morgan Sung: But it was Lion King for you.
Changa Husky: Lion King.
Morgan Sung: This was the early 90s at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. It was dangerous to be openly gay, especially in Kansas, where Changa lived at the time. He found solace online in animation role-playing discussion boards. And that’s where he met Mark, who was also obsessed with Disney animation. They hit it off and started talking on the phone. After visiting Mark in California once, Changa decided to move.
Changa Husky: And this is how I knew Mark was a keeper. He dropped everything, drove to Kansas and helped me move cross country.
Morgan Sung: Mark and Rodney had an extra room, so Changa ended up moving in and, over time, joined this queer furry polycule. Their house, which is known as the Prancing Skilltaire, is a base for a lot of the fandom. Since the 80s, the Prancing Skilltaire has hosted monthly furry parties, furry convention staff meetings, and other furry get-togethers. They’ve also taken in young queer people who were kicked out of their homes, and once even hosted an impromptu wedding.
Changa Husky: They’re over there doing their vows. And I just leaned over to Rodney going, “wait, wait. Are they trans? They’re trans.” And it’s like, “yeah, yeah.” It’s, like, “did we just have a trans wedding in our backyard?” He’s like, “yeah.” Like, huh, okay, cool. Um and that was like, oh God, that was more than a decade ago.
Morgan Sung: The Prancing Skilltaire is just one hub for the furry community. The fandom has evolved into a widespread, thriving subculture, and as furries have passed on over the decades, the community has come up with unique ways to honor them. Some choose to pass their costume on to a loved one after they die, and let the character they embodied live a second life. Patch said that this also celebrates the artist who made the fursuit.
Patch O’Furr: Another way people can be remembered is they can just have their costume displayed. I know that there are people who have their costumes placed on like a dummy and it’s kept in a certain place in their house. So you can go and say hi to the person again and just have that experience of them having a presence, a physical presence still. There’s also ways that people set up having their costume worn by friends at special occasions, maybe once a year, just so they’re present again.
Morgan Sung: That idea of coming back to visit the living really stuck with Mark Merlino, too. He had seen a lot of his peers in the fandom age and pass away, and wanted to honor their memory somehow. Changa said that Mark was obsessed with the Disney Pixar movie Coco, which is about spirits returning home on the day of the dead. In 2018, Mark built an ofrenda display at PAWCon, a furry convention that happened to take place during the holiday. It was just a small room at the event with a single decorated table, but people loved it. They left notes and offerings and photos. So the next year, Mark built another one. He wanted to make it an annual tradition.
But then in 2020, the pandemic shut down conventions. It shut down everything else too. Life moved to the internet and so did grieving. That’s a new tab, but first a quick break. Okay, we’re back. Time to open a new tab. And for this one, we’re jumping back into VR. The Furry Family Ofrenda. You made it in one piece? We’re back in VR chat, in this world that Changa and Mark built with the Aztec pyramid, candles, and altars. Right now, Changa is showing me how users can leave offerings. He’s placing a virtual meatball sub on Mark’s ofronda.
Morgan Sung: Did he like meatball subs?
Changa Husky: Uh, yeah, actually he did. Um, we only have so much limited space. Um, I mean, all of this has to be downloaded and rendered on people’s, um, video cards.
Morgan Sung: I know Mark had built that small a friend at this real life in person convention. But can you tell me about this move to VR?
Changa Husky: At the time, of course, we’re all locked in in 2020. And this platform, VRChat, had existed already. And then I saw on Twitter at the time people posting pictures from this virtual convention, Furality. And when I went in there it was like, “this is the vibe of a real convention.” This was the real community that I knew.
And there was something amazing about slipping on an avatar like this and actually seeing yourself the way you would internally think about yourself. Well, it’s like fursuiting only, well, I won’t say cheaper, good lord, the amount of computer upgrades and technology just keep up in here. But it’s, like, wearing a fursuit without suffocating. Hell, I had my midlife crisis and went canine.
Morgan Sung: That’s when Mark had an idea. Instead of building a single physical ofrenda, why not build a VR world where each furry could have their own? He didn’t have the technical skills to make it happen, but Changa did. So, Changa started digging through a site called WikiFur, which is like Wikipedia for furries. He started adding ofrendas for each furry listed as deceased on WikiFur.
Changa Husky: And it just kind of blew up from there. Now it’s just more of a matter of trying to keep up as people pass. Which is, oh god, well I would really hope people would kind of stop doing that. That would be, that would be great. It’s not as bad as it was in 2020. 2020 was traumatic. You’re really changing when you’re sitting there counting the dead within your own community. And this actually gave a lot of people a space to kind of mourn, given that we weren’t able to really, like, be together in person.
Morgan Sung: The original Furry Family Ofrenda was pretty basic. Changa had to work with pre-made assets and none of them were made for the Day of the Dead. It definitely wasn’t culturally accurate. In 2021, the Furry Family Ofrenda got a makeover with the help of a Mexican furry convention called Confuror. The event is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, but during the pandemic lockdown, it was entirely on VRChat, and they wanted to host part of it in the Furry Family Ofrenda. The event organizers hired Mexican artists to design new 3D assets for the space so that it could look more like a real Day of the Dead festival.
Changa Husky: I’m not from the culture that this celebration came comes from, but they helped immensely. I’m glad it’s the kind of culture that that was shareable, you know, it’s because it’s a beautiful way of dealing with mourning. Because I mean a lot of mourning is like sitting around crying and I know Mark preferred the idea of like joyfully talking about people that passed and remembering them, you know bring out the food celebrate, talk, and all that. And it was really wonderful to be able to bring a piece of that into a virtual space.
Morgan Sung: In the five years since Changa built it, the Furry Family Ofrenda has memorialized countless furries. Some of the altars feature photos of people’s real faces, but many of them honor their fursona too, which may not be acknowledged in any real-life memorials. You don’t need a whole VR setup. You can access it from any computer or mobile app. That’s why it’s become an important gathering spot for the community. That connection to the larger community became really important to the Prancing Skilltaire household during the pandemic lockdowns. And then again, when Mark got sick. Let’s talk about that in a new tab. Remembering Sy Sable.
Changa Husky: When he went sick, I mean, both me and Rodney were like breaking. Let’s be real.
Morgan Sung: Mark had a stroke in December 2023, but was stable enough to come home in time for Christmas. Then he got sicker during that holiday week. After seven hospitals, an ICU stay, and a stint in a rehab center, Mark was diagnosed with stage four terminal liver cancer. That news shook the furry community. Once word got out, furries put together a GoFundMe to cover his medical bills. People who had attended Prancing Skilltaire parties or crashed on their sofa when they were kicked out for being gay, showed up to help with Mark’s hospice care.
Changa Husky: So there was a lot of outpouring of love. And I mean, when you have, you know, young, like early 20-year-old kid showing up at your door with a covered dish while, you know, your partner’s hospicing, it says a lot. That is community. That is, you know, the found family.
Morgan Sung: And those who couldn’t help out in person kept him company in VR.
Changa Husky: We were bringing in, you know, had a tablet for Mark, where he could talk over Discord with various friends that he’d gotten to know on VR. And so he was able, from his deathbed, to, you now, have conversations with various friends that we were scheduling. He could, essentially on a tablet, get to talk with people who are still presenting themselves with avatars and the way they saw themselves and the way he saw them.
Morgan Sung: Mark passed away in his home at the Prancing Skilltaire last February. Changa and Rodney knew that Mark didn’t want a traditional somber funeral. Remember that bit about furries building the tech industry as we know it? Changa and Rodney incorporated that into Mark’s funeral too.
Changa Husky: We were both kind of agreement that it should be a big blow-out party. We would celebrate him and so we rented out a hall and given the virtual reality community that both he and I were involved in and close to the staff, the convention Furality decided to help us with some resources and they built a VR portal so that people could show up and give their respects virtually.
Morgan Sung: Furality is the virtual reality convention that initially got Mark and Changa into using VRChat. A VR portal is a massive screen that acts as a window between the real world and VR for people who can’t make it to events in person. Usually conventions, but in this case, a funeral.
Changa Husky: They rented out the equipment and we had to scout out how good the internet was because our requirements, just a little off the beaten path of normally.
Morgan Sung: So the physical funeral was beamed into a virtual room that Furality had built for the event. Meanwhile, that virtual room was beamed into the funeral. People took turns speaking about Mark. They either spoke from the real life podium or from a huge screen that displayed the VR portal.
Changa Husky: We did have also several hundred people actually at the event, and there was that level of chaos that um, technical chaos that just keeps me focused. Like, “okay, we need to string cable.” Really what it came down to is it really felt like every other community social convention sort of situation that we’d been trained for, that like we essentially took all the stuff we would have done setting up at a hotel for a convention, just really concentrated in a hurry, in a hall.
We had drawing pads where people were sketching, little tribute sort of things. I brought in a little portable TV from the 80s, and it was playing media that was related to Sy, some of his stuff he’d shot. So there’s like all this mix of kind of like technology, retro technology, art, and of course junk food. We actually had fursuiters. People got into fursuit too.
Morgan Sung: I mean, it doesn’t sound like any funeral I’ve ever seen or been to.
Changa Husky: Oh, that’s probably the case. Yeah, it was like a mini party convention.
Morgan Sung: I mean, aside from huge technical feat, which is very cool, it also sounds like it was a real community event. What was it like to add him to the ofrenda?
Changa Husky: That was painful, that was by myself. I did not grieve at the memorial, I was just too busy, I kept myself distracted. But adding him to the ofrenda was just, oh, oh, that’s was a painful upload. I never prepared for that, but it was kind of fitting that he would end up getting put into the thing that he, well he spurned on. It was like the project that he put on to me, and now I have to keep that torch going for him.
Morgan Sung: Changa actually hasn’t visited Mark’s altar much since uploading it. He says he’s been avoiding it. This interview, where he showed me around, was one of the first times he’s back. Like his funeral itself, many of the memorials and tributes honoring Mark are really for the greater furry community to pay their respects. Changa said he struggles to grieve at these community spaces. Like last year, Furality wanted to honor Mark during the convention’s closing ceremony. So they asked Changa for a photo of Mark’s VR avatar. Since there weren’t any good ones available, Changa had to put on Mark’s fursona in VR.
Changa Husky: I had to get into his avatar with a photographer and kind of do a shoot. And that was painful. You know, it’s like, I really wanted to get that over with. Yeah, well, yeah, get slipping into your dead partner’s body, essentially. But it was a beautiful tribute when they actually did it. It was lovely.
Morgan Sung: Instead of these public tributes, Changa has his own way of honoring Mark’s memory. And of course, it involves virtual reality.
Changa Husky: I’m a good video editor and I was doing a whole bunch of very nostalgic stuff with modern music, you know, where I’m like putting people in original like movie footage — doing that scene from Risky Business, you now where they slide in, except it’s a werewolf.
Morgan Sung: Changa and his friends record the footage using tracking rigs. They dance and lip sync to the music, and then Changa composites their fursonas over movie scenes.
Changa Husky: And the first one I worked on was from The Birdcage. It’s that iconic scene on the park bench with the boat going by the harbor. And that was the moment where Robin Williams and Nathan Lane’s characters are sitting down and it’s kind of the, you know, “I’m 50 whatever and you’re my family. You’re the only person I wanna spend the rest of my life with.” It is iconic queer media.
Robin Williams: What does it matter? Take it all. I’m 50 years old. There’s only one place in the world I call home, and it’s because you’re there.
Morgan Sung: The birdcage scene in Changa’s music video is just a few seconds long. It has Changa as big, gray, husky fursona sitting on the bench, dressed in red pinstripe pants and rose-tinted glasses. It’s just like the outfit Nathan Lane wore in the movie. Changa lip syncs a line from the song, and then the music video shifts to another movie. But before the scene flashes by, you might catch a glimpse of Mark’s fursana, the mustelid called Sy Sable perched on the bench next to Changa.
Changa Husky: I just hope he could see it wherever he is. I don’t think they have YouTube.
Morgan Sung: By the way, the Close All Tabs team is taking a break to touch grass, so we won’t have an episode next week. But we’ll be back with another deep dive and many more tabs in two weeks. For now, it’s time to close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Chris Egusa and Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer.
Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. I
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Thanks for listening.
