Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (22 page)

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the middle and twirled to a point on each side. He wears a cowboy hat,

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a bib-front collar shirt, and his jeans are tucked into knee boots.

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His DD-cup wife, a former stripper, spills from a leather bustier and

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matching thong. Her long auburn hair is hidden beneath a black leather

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headstall with a blonde plume that flows to the top of her matching

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tail. No doubt both are made from real horse hair.

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John’s Calafin and Dennis’s Clygar Silverhooves fursuit heads. Note the stripes;

Clygar is half Clydesdale and half Tiger. Photo by Lori Ballard.

I discovered earlier through a simple Google search that Sherifox is

far more than a pony-play kinkster and bio-horse lover. She’s posted all

over the Internet, every orifice exposed and turn-on explicitly stated.

proof

She performs in low-budget XXX porn videos sold on 50plusMILFs.

com. On another website she sells her panties and gives away images

of her feet in everything from peek-a-boo white platform boots to dirty

tennis shoes. Her pay-per-view site promises to show more, whatever

that may be.

As Foxy slides faux fetlocks and hooves over Sherifox’s hands, she

starts shuffling her feet back and forth and literally chomps at the bit.

Meanwhile, three furries in neoprene dive suits cluster around a

table covered with the large, furry heads of a bottlenose dolphin, a

Clydesdale, a killer whale, and three dragons. The matching bodies

hang limp from a bondage rack like giant unstuffed toys.

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John, the youngest of the furs, hardly looks a day over eighteen even

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though he’s twenty-eight. He has a smooth, rosy complexion and curly

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brown hair, and wears wire-rimmed glasses. He speaks with the precise

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articulation of a precocious child loved by teachers and despised by

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bullies.

“Primarily, I’m a bottlenose dolphin. I’m also a dragon and some-

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times a tiger. I growl,” he says, deepening his voice for effect. “Dennis

is a Clydesdale sometimes,” he adds, pointing to a much older mus-

tached man standing nearby. “But he is actually a killer whale most of

the time.”

Dolphin/dragon/tiger John and whale/Clydesdale Dennis are a cou-

ple. They are also into pony play, with Dennis being the horse, Sleipnir,

again, a Clydesdale. The last of the trio, Dragon Takumori Softwing, is

their roommate and pet.

In the BDSM world, human pets are fashionable. Pets typically never

have sex with their masters. They just enjoy being dominated. Furry

BDSMers take it further; their pets pretend to be actual animals. A

furry BDSMer pet might walk on all fours, bark, and sleep in a dog

crate.

Dragon Takumori doesn’t look like someone who could be domi-

nated. He’s stout in a beer-drinking-brawl kind of way and is an assis-

tant manager of an auto parts store. He says he’s always loved dragons.

The tattooed scales on his arms and visible beneath his buzz-cut hair

testify to the depth of his obsession.

The men share a house in Mulberry, a speck of a town surrounded

by towering phosphate mounds east of Tampa.

I am about to broach the furry-sex question when they share that

their extended furry family also includes Dragon Takumori’s teenager

proof

sister, who is a black-and-white hamster. His graying mother is a sa-

ber-toothed snow leopard. She came along for their presentation and

stands quietly aside. She nods her head hello as they mention her, con-

tinually smiling like a proud mom. “We’re making a suit for her,” John

says. “She’s doing it so she can spend more time with her son.”

The teenage-sister hamster and mom leopard added to their furry

mix are hard to digest. This implies they aren’t fur fetishists, but we are

in a fetish dungeon.

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The men explain that, similar to Ponygirl Lyndsey, they feel they

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have an animal inside them. But unlike the human ponies, they don’t

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forget they are humans when in costume. “It’s a mixture of human and

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animal,” John says. “I still have a rational side but act in more animal

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ways, with stronger instincts.”

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“Everyone has one inside of themselves,” says Dragon Takumori.

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“They just have to find it.”

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“Some people feel they have more than one,” John adds as the

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buxom world champion Ponygirl Sherifox whinnies loudly behind him.

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Ignoring her, he looks toward his pet dragon and says, “He’s a dragon

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in a human’s body. He’s not someone who will mind you. He has three

dragon suits. Taku is his playful side. Agthorn is more like a grumpy old

man and Solaris with wings is . . .” Sherifox, now closer, interrupts with

another whinny as she high-steps across the floor. John merely grins,

repressing a laugh or perhaps a dolphin chomp.

John’s fascination with bottlenose dolphins began as a child, when

his family, living in California, went on vacation to SeaWorld. “In some

ways I indentified with them,” John says. “A dolphin plays; it’s mis-

chievous and tends to get into trouble at times. I can also be a little bit

proud of myself.”

He claims he once swallowed a dead fish at SeaWorld after a dolphin

refused to eat it. He jokes that on another occasion, a dolphin made a

naughty advance toward him.

In the human world, John works in retail at Clear Channel and

still likes playing with LEGOS. He writes anthropomorphic fiction

and claims to have copyrighted two sci-fi universes. He hooked up

with Dennis and Takumori in Texas. Together, they moved to central

Florida.

I tip-toe back to the sensitive subject of fur fetish by mentioning

the
CSI:
Crime
Scene
Investigation
episode “Fur and Loathing,” which depicted a murder victim as a kinky furry. They get defensive. “Many

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in the community were upset by that because it is not a fair representa-

tion of furries,” John says. “It is not about sex.”

Dennis acknowledges there are furries into it for the kinky sex, but

that they are a “very small percentage.” These three furs say they aren’t

part of that subset, which is still confusing because, again, they are

showing off their fursuits in a fetish dungeon.

John says their fetish is BDSM. They are furries and pony players

because they feel connected to an animal’s nature, or in the case of

the dragon, the characteristics created by a writer since dragons are

completely imaginary. Dolphin John stresses that their two lifestyles

couldn’t mix if only because their BDSM roles are opposite their furry

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animal natures, which they call “fursonas.” “In the BDSM lifestyle, I’m

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the dominant. When we’re in fur, it’s actually the opposite,” John says.

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“When I’m a dolphin, he’s a killer whale. He’s my natural predator!”

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For the moment, I somewhat comprehend. It’s not until later, when

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I find John’s online references to Dennis as his “herm orca mate” and

his “mistress, at least in the furry side of things,” that cognitive disso-

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nance sets in again.

Trying to understand the attraction to an object that’s fictional is

a challenge in itself, but in the context of the online world, it’s even

harder to know where fantasy begins or ends.

The men go on to share some of the benefits of being a furry, such as

anonymity. Behind the mask of fur, they can act like children and show

affection in ways they would be too embarrassed to do otherwise. “In

fursuit, I can lie with him and snuggle for two or three hours and watch

TV,” John says.

Dragon Takumori says, “If I go out and shoot archery in my back-

yard, my neighbors might think that’s weird. But I can go out and do it

in my fursuit and my neighbors just laugh.”

The men claim that in costume they are physically stronger and have

the instincts of the animals they dress as. Dennis recalls pulling a heavy

cart as Sleipnir in a pony play competition underneath a blazing Texas

sun. Out of tack he says he couldn’t have pulled that much weight, that

far.

No contests or hunts today. The three are here to show and tell.

Their presentation is heavy on the mechanics of fursuit-making. As

they go through the minutiae, I study the lifeless creatures hanging

behind them. The cetaphins, as the water mammal characters are called

in furry world, aren’t remotely anatomically correct. For one, they are

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covered in fur. The finned, fursuit bodies have human legs, arms, and

six-pack abs.

Fursuits cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even a modest one

will typically set a fur back a grand. This furry family has started mak-

ing their own, spending nights gluing tiny fake dragon scales by the

blue light of the television.

Bridled Enthusiasm

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Their presentation gives way to the pony shows. Ponygirl Lyndsey per-

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forms her cart-pulling routine to Paul Simon’s “One Trick Pony.”

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“See how he dances, See how he loops from side to side,” Paul Simon

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sings as Lyndsey does 360s with the cart. “See how he prances, The way

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his hooves just seem to glide.”

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By the time Lyndsey takes her final bow on one knee, she gleams

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with sweat and has a little trouble standing up.

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Finally, it’s time for the much-anticipated grand finale performance

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by the reigning World Pony Play Champions. Sherifox prances out on

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proof

Foxy tries to guide a blind-

folded Ponygirl Sherifox

over a hurdle that she

doesn’t know exists. What

could go wrong? Photo by

Lori Ballard.

her bare tiptoes, arms arched in front of her, hoofed hands tilted to-

ward the floor like the feet of a carousel pony. Her shoulders are back,

her head high, and her long blond plume and tail wave with each step.

Foxy tells the audience he’s going to show a variety of pony moves.

Then he subtly flicks the reins launching Sherifox, huffing and snort-

ing, into what’s supposed to be a high-stepping gait but is more like a

majorette’s pointed-toe march.

As for a breed, Sherifox seems more a spirited Mustang than a Royal

Lipizzaner. She gives all the snorts and sounds of a horse being made

to do something it doesn’t want to do. But for all her horsey bluster,

there’s slack in the reins, and Foxy doesn’t look the least bit worried

that she will balk at a command or head for the barn. He lightly pulls

and she marches in reverse, mimicking the showy move of a bio-horse

backing up. Then she bounces forward again. He puts her on a lunge

line, and she gallops around him in circles. She weaves through orange

pylons. She ends the routine with a bow, bending one knee while keep-

ing the other straight before her.

The small audience applauds.

Sherifox stays in pony character, huffing and restless beside Foxy

as he talks to the audience in his Sam Elliott cowboy voice that makes

even the most inane comment sound profound. “Those of you with a