Close All Tabs - How the Furry Fandom Says Goodbye

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Furries are often known for wearing full-body animal suits at conventions — but the characters they inhabit, called “fursonas,” are much more than costumes. They’re deeply personal expressions of identity and creativity. So when someone in the furry fandom dies, how does the community say goodbye? In this episode, Morgan explores a virtual memorial created by a furry named Changa Husky, where mourners gather in VR to remember those they’ve lost — and the fursonas they leave behind. Editor's note: In this episode, we refer to some individuals only by their “fursona” names. We’ve chosen to use these names because members of the furry community are frequently subject to harassment, bullying, and doxxing, and many participants use online handles to maintain their safety and privacy. Guests:  Changa Husky, furry Vtuber and video producer Patch O’Furr, founder and writer, Dogpatch Press Further reading:  Who runs the internet? Furries — Dylan Reeve, The Spinoff  Remembering Mark Merlino (1952-2024), a founder and soul of furry fandom — Patch O’Furr, Dogpatch Press  The Fandom: A Furry Documentary — Ash Coyote, YouTube Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Heads up — 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. Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts, and also helps edit the show. Sound design by Chris Egusa and Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Egusa. Additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support for a Key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply, select plans only.

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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? I'm Changa Husky.

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. 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 of friend. 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 Afrendas, adorned with photos, candles, flowers, and offerings of the departed's favorite foods. This isn't a holiday for morning, but for celebrating. Changa shows me how this virtual world is dotted with altars, each one with a framed photo, candles, and a place.

They're all dedicated to the fursonas of people who have passed away. Fersona 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. Furies 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.

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, 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 in friends. Through the lens of like an anthropomorphic creature, it's very much a medium. It's like a medium of expression.

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. His persona was a mustalit, a pine martin. It's 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. This pine martin was named Cy Sable, also known as Mark Merlino.

He passed away a year ago, and he was Changa's life partner. 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 polychule. Mark Berlino 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. Mark and Rodney, the founders of the first furry convention, were 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. 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 furies to people outside of the fandom. And that means grieving for furies 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 furies goes down, 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 their identity. 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. We'll come back to Changa and the furry family of Frunda. 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? Look, I may be chronically online, but I'm still an outsider when it comes to this fandom. So to explain furies, I reached out to someone who's actually

part of the community. I'm Patch. I go by Patch O Fur online. Patch runs the furry news site Dog Patch 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. So I showed up and, 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 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 the 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. The otter that Patchmet 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. 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 we're talking about expressing identity. So furry is queer as, you know, so is musical theater or disco or. or other things that are attached to the queer community. You know, 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. 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.

I mean, people like in this community can have a lot of social anxiety. I mean, we are a very neurodiverse 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. Because, I mean, let's be 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, 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 or even just yourself. in ways that are actually kind of therapeutic. 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 a 1994 Disney animated movie, Lion King.

There's always 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. But it was Lion King for you. Lion King. This was the early 90s at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. It was dangerous to be openly gay, especially in Kansas, where Changel lived at the time.

He found Salas 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. And this is how I knew Mark was a keeper. He dropped everything, drove to Kansas, and helped me move cross-country. 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-skilled hair, is a base for a lot of the fandom.

Since the 80s, the prancing-skilled hair has hosted monthly furry park. 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. They're over there doing their vows, and I just lean over the rodney going, wait, wait, are they trans? They're trans. It's like, yeah, yeah.

It's like, did we just have a trans wedding in our backyard? He's like, yeah, like, okay, cool. And that was like, oh, God, that was more than a decade ago. The Prancing Skelterre 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 fur suit.

Another way people can be remembered is they can just have their costume displayed. I know that there are people who have their costume 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, you know, 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. 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 to pass away and wanted to honor their memory somehow. Chanka said that Mark was obsessed with a Disney Pixar movie Coco, which is about spirits returning home on the Day of the Dead. In 2018, Mark built an a friend a 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. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity.

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And for this one, we're jumping back into VR. The furry family Afrenda. 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 Afronda. Did he like meatballs subs?

Yeah, actually, he did. We only have so much limited space. I mean, all of this has to be downloaded and rendered on people's video cards. I know Mark had built that small friend at this real-life in-person convention. But can you tell me about this move to VR? At the time, of course, we're all locked in in 2020. And this platform, VR chat, had existed already. And then I saw on Twitter at the time people posting pictures from

this virtual convention, frality. And what I went in there 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. It was like fur-suiting only, well, I won't say cheaper. Good Lord, the amount of computer upgrades and technology

just to keep up in here. But it's like wearing a fur suit without suffocating. You know, hell, I had my midlife crisis and went canine. That's when Mark had an idea. Instead of building a single physical effrona, 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 furies. He started adding offenders for each furry listed as deceased on Wikifur. And it just kind of blew up from there. Now it was 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 great.

It's not as bad as it was in 2020. 2020 was traumatic. It really changed things when you were 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. The original furry family of frienda 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 of frienda got a makeover with the help of a Mexican furry convention called Confurore. The event is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, but during the pandemic lockdown, it was entirely on VR chat, and they wanted to host part of it in the furry family of Frenda.

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. I'm not from the culture that this celebration comes from, but they helped immensely. I'm glad it's the kind of culture that was shareable, you know? It's because it's a beautiful way of healing 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 the 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. In the five years since Changa built it, the furry family of Frenda 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 skill-tare household during the pandemic lockdowns. And then again, when Mark got sick. Let's talk about that in a new tab. Remembering Cy Stable.

When he went sick, I mean, both me and Rodney were like breaking. Let's be real. 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 go-fund me to cover his medical bills.

People who would attended prancing-skilled hair parties or crashed in their sofa when they were kicked out for being gay, showed up to help with Mark's hospice care. 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, says a lot. That is community. That is, you know, the found family. And those who couldn't help out in person kept him company in VR. We were bringing in, you know, had a tablet for Mark where he could talk over discounts.

court with various friends that he'd gotten to know on VR. And so he was able from his deathbed to 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. Mark passed away in his home at the prancing skilled hair. last February. Changa and Rodney knew that Mark didn't want a traditional, somber funeral.

Remember that bit about Furry's building the tech industry as we know it? Changi and Rodney incorporated that into Mark's funeral too. We were both kind of agreement that it should be a big blowout 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, Ferality decided to help us with some resources.

And they built a VR portal so that people could show up and give their respects virtually. Ferrality is the virtual reality convention that initially got Mark and Changa into using VR chat. 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 event, in person. Usually conventions, but in this case, a funeral.

They rented out the equipment, and we had to scout out how good the internet was, because our requirements, a little off the beaten path normally. So the physical funeral was beamed into a virtual room that Ferralti 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. We did have also several hundred people actually at the event. And there was that level of chaos, that technical chaos, that just keeps me focused.

Like, okay, 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 talking. trained for. 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 Cy, some of his stuff he shot. So there's like all this mix of kind of like technology and retro technology and art and and of course junk food.

We actually had fur suitors. People got into fur suit too. I mean, it doesn't sound like any funeral I've ever seen or been to. Oh, that's probably the case. Yeah, it was like a mini party convention. 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 effrenda?

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 for the effrenda was just, oh, oh, that was a painful upload. I never prepared for that. But it was kind of fitting that, you know, he would end up getting

put into the thing that he, no, he spurned on. It was like the project that he put on to me. I have to keep that torch going for him. 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 been 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, Ferralti 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 persona in VR. 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 want 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. Instead of these public tributes, Changa has his own way of honoring Mark's memory. And, of course, it involves virtual reality. 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 know, where they slide in, you know, except it's a werewolf.

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. And the first one I worked on was from the bird cage. is that iconic scene on the park bench with the boat going by in the harbor and that was the moment where Robin Williams and Nathan Lane's characters

are sitting down and it's kind of the I'm 50 whatever and you're my family. You're the only person I want to spend the rest of my life with. It is iconic queer media. 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. The birdcage scene in Changa's music video is just a few seconds long. It has Changa's big, gray husky persona 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-sinks 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 persona, the must-a-lid called Sy Sable,

perched on the bench next to Changa. I just hope he could see it wherever he is. I don't think they have YouTube. 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's son.

Our producer is Maya Kueva. Chris Agusa is our senior editor. Jen Cheen is KQED's Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Chris Agusa and Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Agusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Mahasanaanod and Alana Walker.

Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from Be Wrong Who and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQEE 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, dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron Red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at Close Off. tabs at kQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at close all tabs pod or drop it on Discord. We're in the close all tabs channel at discord.g.g slash KQED. And if you're enjoying the show, give us a rating on

Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee. You're guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only.

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