Elf Sternberg

I think part of the problem is that there is no person or organization which really acts as a true "historian of furrydom". Personally, I've been around since 2003 or so, and I think that's probably considered a long memory, though I don't really know. And though I would probably find such a history fascinating, the only real, tangible impression of what things were in fact like in the 90s that I can ever recall coming across is actually the infamous Vanity Fair article. I am passingly familiar with the Burned Furs, and old enough to remember the tail end of when we were still the SomethingAwful target du jour, before half of 4chan were closet furries, but that's it; really, other than the vague narrative of every "what is a furry" article out there, I really don't know how the fandom came to be or what the goals of the original cohort were. And I think most of the ersatz leaders now - the guys who run websites, or who are "furry celebrities" as it were - weren't around in the period you're talking about either, which only further serves to remove that period from the collective consciousness.

So that's one aspect of it. We young furs don't know what the furry ethos was back then because there's either no one around to tell us or no one who is around is interested in doing so. I take it from your tone that it was altogether less self-loathing, though. That would be nice.