Sometimes, when drug addicts finally get clean and kick their destructive habit they overcompensate, turn to God, and get really, really into religion. To a fault. In a sense, they are replacing one very unhealthy habit with another; that’s because these people have addictive personalities and something needs to fill the void in their soul. Something needs to give them meaning. A reason to wake up the next day. Whether that’s heroin or Jesus it doesn’t really matter. But sometimes the inverse of this can happen; someone who was formerly a pious person can turn their back on religion once they’ve been exposed to something else that provides a better high, movement in the “opposite direction”.
So goes the story of a fur I once knew, someone who long ago capped off a very turbulent year in my life in a manner that highlighted the protracted period I can only describe as my painfully long personal downfall.
This person didn’t segue from religion to hard drugs, to break the analogy I opened with. Rather than cocaine or smack his drug of choice was pornography, and in a sense I feel like that might have been my fault. I met him around 2007 while working in a very loosely IT-adjacent field because we were assigned to the same remote “department”, and since this was remote work he and I did not work together in person but did stay in touch via company email and, later and more importantly, instant messenger. He was able to glean from my online profile and some of the things I’d mention in passing that I had a fondness for dragons and medieval fantasy. In return I picked up on the fact that he was quite devout because one day out of the blue he rattled off some stuff about how dragons were represented in the Bible and how they were associated with Satan by way of the Book of Revelation.
I really got the impression that this person did not like me whatsoever because he was “a man of the cloth” and I was fascinated with dragons. In this polarizing context, these two things could not coexist with one another. Mind you, this was a (mostly) professional environment so it’s not like I was openly talking about furry stuff with him or any of the other people I worked with, that was something I did on my own private time away from my colleagues. But, I was stuck with this guy so I just sort of sucked it up and dealt with it. Strangely though, as time went on he seemed to warm up to me and was less abrasive about things like reminding me that dragons were always “the bad guys” in mythology because they’re associated with the devil or whatever. It got to the point where one day we exchanged personal email addresses and my dumb ass handed him my former “dracokon” Hotmail handle. I am assuming he Google searched that name to see what kind of stuff I got up to outside of work and I don’t think I need to tell you what he found.
He didn’t say anything about it at first, but I guess in hindsight he knew from the get-go given how his language in conversation with me changed subtly. A while later, after on and off small talk over MSN, he asked me what “furry” was. This was the point where I knew he was onto me so I just sort of threw out a broad explanation. He asked for some links to websites and I cannot remember what I sent him but I was just assuming he was about to start giving me another religious lecture. A while before this he had asked me what my mailing address was so I gave him my PO box and in one of the packages he sent there was one of those mass-produced “self help through Christ” books that I believe he got from his local church (there was a gaudy grandma-esque return address label on the inside cover of the book with the address of a church from his zip code) but also a polite handwritten letter and some superficial gifts like a little toy dinosaur and stuff. But, given the gesture of the book and whatnot I kinda guessed he was proselytizing.
Some more time passed and every once in a while he’d be the one bringing up the topic of dragons instead of me. Again, I was just being polite so I figured he was just trying to connect with me over something because I’ve always had the impression that people who are deeply religious do not have many friends or a social life outside of what they do on Sunday mornings. Imagine my surprise, then, when out of the blue he sends me a sketch over instant messenger of a dragon. Not a very good drawing – terrible, actually – but he told me he was going to use this dragon as his online avatar now. It was at this point the pieces started falling into place. He Googled my screenname and probably found my profile on FurAffinity, Yiffstar, hell even Fanfiction.net. The whole nine yards. And on those profiles he probably saw not just all of the smut I’d made up to that point (which in my defense wasn’t much in 2008) but also all of the things I’d added to my Favorites page and all of the artists I followed and, by proxy, all of the things on THEIR pages. He saw many, many iterations of Spyro the Dragon with his cock out as well as another similarly-colored dragon’s. My dragon.
This was a very sexually-repressed young man. I say “young” but he was my age; back in 2008 I was a hell of a lot younger than I am today. As I would soon come to learn he was so adamant about Christ because he was very deep in the closet. The joke about “being so deep in the closet you’re in Narnia” comes to mind in a very genuine sense. Now that he had a window into my personal life and saw that I had at least some interest in men I feel like he saw an opportunity to take his mask off around me. This was a mistake, but I did not realize this at the time.
He never really came out to me as “gay” per se, but outside of work our informal relationship did progress in a more “adult” direction. Conversations about dragons gradually adopted a more carnal stance. At some point, the palpable tension was too much to leave unaddressed. We started to occasionally roleplay with each other, and our relationship became a lot more intimate. He visited me at one point, drove down to the city where I was living at the time and was able to use the pull he had with the church he was still going to (but slowly abandoning) to find a local family that let him stay in their guest bedroom for a while. On some of the days I didn’t have university classes he and I would go out into town and just do whatever. Go to the bookstore. See a movie. Get lunch somewhere. Eventually he did have to return back home though, so we said our goodbyes in person and went back to keeping in touch over messenger.
A lot of things were happening concurrently at this point. He’d really gotten into this whole “pretending to be a dragon on the internet” thing, so much that because he didn’t have a lot in the way of hobbies he could afford to just buy commissions left and right. Outside of his relationship with me he didn’t have too many other friends in the furry fandom so a lot of these commissions featured our two dragons doing “things” together. Again, in hindsight I should’ve realized this was incredibly obsessive behavior but naturally I did not, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this journal. One of the things that did clue me in to something being “off” early on though, before he and I became intimate with things like roleplaying, is that when he started commissioning artwork of his dragon whenever he needed a partner for them he would use the fursona of somebody I used to know but had passed away (whom I had brought up in passing at some point in our conversations). It really rubbed me the wrong way because he did not know this person at all when they were alive, they had been dead for years before we met. I guess that person’s dragon was used as a stand-in because it was a “safe” character? As in, the person who it belonged to clearly wasn’t using it anymore so it was fair game to project onto? I don’t know, but my dragon did eventually take its place in all those commissions.
To say “nothing of substance happened after this point” is a poor but effective way of summarizing the couple of years that passed. We stayed in touch, stayed close, and things continued as usual. Despite our closeness, we were not dating or in any sort of committed relationship. In actuality, I was dating other people – women – in the city I lived in at the time. Things between he and I started to slowly wither as online friendships tend to do. But, 2011 was a difficult year for me. One bad stroke of luck after another. I’ve touched on it elsewhere on this website and I really don’t think itemizing out a laundry list of bad things will contribute anything of substance to this post but the short of it is that by the end of that year I was completely directionless. Looking for a new job. Looking for a place to stay as the roof that was currently over my head was no longer a guarantee.
“You can come stay with me,” he suggested, after I’d gotten into the intricate details of how fucked everything was in my life at that point in time.
I was apprehensive at the offer. This is something that, if I committed to it, would require me to move a substantial distance across the country. Not that I was exactly married to the place I’d been living, but my whole life was there. My support network, everything. I’d be jumping ship to a place that was completely unfamiliar to me. Rather that move there outright I decided to spend the remainder of 2011 where he lived as a sort of trial run. Just after Thanksgiving, I booked a flight.
He picked me up from the airport. We went back to his place. He had a roommate (straight) who mostly kept to himself; I knew that going into this. We had dinner, went out to get groceries, and I plopped my suitcase down in the living room. That first night I slept on the couch in the living room mostly out of a general sense of anxiety from being in an alien place and all of that. The second night though, I decided to join this person in his bed. You can probably guess from here what was about to happen. I think, in a very abstract sense, I also was cognizant of this. But, I guess in a way I just sort of felt like I was “along for the ride”. I’d mentioned earlier how aimless and futile everything in my life was feeling at that point. It was almost like I just didn’t have a choice in the matter.
Enthusiastic consent. That’s a term that I’m pretty sure existed in the early 2010’s but it was not as widespread as it is today. It means to very clearly and deliberately agree to sexual contact, in other words “the absence of ‘no’ does not automatically mean ‘yes’”. I didn’t say “no”. But, at no point did I actually say “yes” either. I’d prefer not to be sensationalist if I can avoid it, so I don’t really know how to define or describe what transpired that night. Just that, it was done out of a feeling of obligation; some kind of perverse and obtuse rationalization that I was a guest in someone’s house purely by their own good graces and that I had to “pay” for that hospitality somehow. He talked me out of my insistence that he use a condom, something that up to that point I’d been a real piece of shit about with everyone else I’d ever slept with.
I just sort of shut down and let it happen. I could not have possibly been a good lay that night; a Real Doll would’ve been more alive and “into it” than I was. The energy in that house was bad the entire rest of the time I was there, and the next night I went back to sleeping on the couch. Well, I say “sleeping” but really I was just laying there unable to sleep at all. I didn’t cry the night it happened, but I did every night after it and for a long while when I’d tucked my tail between my legs and retreated back to where I’d living prior. It was all so slimy, after one day of me turning cold and never leaving the living room he literally made a booty call with some other furry who lived in the area and invited him over. As I sat in the living room with his roommate who was awkwardly practicing his guitar the two of us could literally hear them fucking in the bedroom. Neither of us said anything about it, we didn’t want to acknowledge it for entirely separate but equally valid reasons. I’m sure he wasn’t using a condom with that guy either. An absolute feeling of fucking dread came over me. A weight was placed on my shoulders that would not be lifted for a good many years until I started seeing someone else and had to face my fears and go get tested.
The nurse called my name, and in the consultation room told me I was clean. God, someone whom I never had a relationship with up to that point but who the guy who fucked me had abandoned in order to live a life of hedonism, was with me in the clinic that day. That was a turning point for me. The person who put this fear in me was once devout but became godless when his addiction shifted from praise to pornography. I was godless, a pornographer from the start. But now we had traded places. The blossoming relationship that prompted me to finally get my bloodwork done fizzled out almost as quickly as it started, and with it I felt I had a new lease on life. Not long thereafter I would make the decision to cease my ways and return to a more upstanding and fulfilling life… but not before screwing up a million other things first.
Those are stories for another day however.
After that fateful visit ended that person and I stopped talking altogether. Bizarrely, he became something of a minor celebrity in the furry fandom in the years that followed. He abandoned the dragon he allegedly loved so much and adopted a new face and name, met some guy, and I have no idea whatever became of him. We haven’t spoken to each other since that night, a decade and a half ago. Maybe I’ll share some other memories of him in the future. I’ve thought about how things panned out and what my role in all of this is. At the end of the day I just sort of came to the conclusion that forgiveness and humility and whatnot really aren’t something that are in my wheelhouse or even my responsibility to dispense. I’m not the one who will be judging his soul, but I know the guy who will and that’s between the two of them.
Until next time.