Furry Footnote In Flaunt

Flaunt COVER-471x614Fred Patten and furry fandom got a mention in the November issue of Flaunt, a high-end glossy fashion magazine that sells for $15.95 a copy.

Blogger “Patch O’Furr” at Dogpatch Press paged through their special Nine Lives issue that profiles cats and the Haute Monde, including furless sphinx cats and trendy Cat Cafés around the world, to find —

…Amidst all the cats, mentions in tiny type on page 81 of Mary E. Lowd as a furry fiction writer specializing in “cats in space”; “furry fandom founder” Fred Patten about what furry fandom is really like – Anthrocon, and furry conventions and other meetings around the world like Zillercon, an annual winter furry skiing event at a lodge in the Austrian or Swiss Alps (Patten says that most furry fans prefer to identify with feral animals, but they have cats as pets); and a profile of Dennis Avner (“Stalking Cat”), who had himself transformed surgically into a big cat (tiger).

Apparently the coverage passed muster with Patch, who has a long memory for any slighting description of furry fandom by mainstream media and demonstrates it by reciting half a dozen examples, like the one from Vanity Fair that reported furry cons are about “fans in fursuits having nonstop sex together.”

Just a suggestion, but people who want their corner of fandom treated with more respect don’t help themselves by giving a signal boost to ancient material. The whiff of resentment encourages the idea there’s some reason not to ignore the report.

5 thoughts on “Furry Footnote In Flaunt

  1. Gee whiz. Do these folks know that during a Mets baseball game broadcast within the last few years, near-Hall of Fame first baseman Keith Hernandez went into a long account of sharing the team hotel (in Pittsburgh, if memory serves), with a furry convention? Hernandez and his fellow anniuncers, the great Gary Cohen and Ron Darling (the latter a former pitcher and also a national broadcaster), were a bit mystified by the phenomenon–and this from fellas who during a slow game, have enlivened their conversation with discussions of classic cartoons, the Universal monster movies, and all sorts of literature….!

    Speaking of cartoons, I’ve always kind of wondered why Fred Patten left me out of his wonderful history of Japanese animation in America. Fred devoted a section–perhaps oddly!–to the early articles covering the medium, and I was among the pioneers there. (Heck, it doesn’t seem like much now, but it was a big deal when Howard Zimmerman gave me the go-ahead to do a feature on the new season of Saturday morning animation, back in the late 1970s. The first history of fantasy animation on TV followed for Irv Karchmar and Mike Stein over at FANTASTIC FILMS… And I wrote the first major article on STARBLAZERS (SPACE CRUISER YAMATO) for the American press (which I’m pleased the fans of that series still get a kick out of!)

    The omission was particular hurtful, because I had enjoyed Patten’s articles since I was a kid, and Fred had become a neat figure for those of us in New York who followed animation. I can remember how excited animation historian Jerry Beck was when he came back from one of his first trips to Los Angles in the late ’70s and exclaimed how different tbe West Coast scene was, saying something lkke, Jim, there’s older adults into this stuff!

    Forgive my ramble here, but I sort of have reached the age during the last few hears where it’s kind of nice to be remembered for whatever contributions one may have made–recently, or years ago! 😉

    Perhaps, in the revised edition….

  2. S-f fandom ran into something like this in the 1950s, with newspaper coverage of early s-f conventions that implied (but did not quite say) that s-f fans were all flying saucer nuts who thought that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were real people.

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