A Queer Non-Binary Furry Asks Texas Leaders What’s Up
Are they welcome in the state even a little?
How did a gay nonbinary furry like me end up in Texas?
How could a person who strongly supports LGBTQ rights and vehemently opposes the Republican Party decide to leave the safety of blue Massachusetts to move to deep red country?
Let me start with my upbringing. I’m from Gardner, Massachusetts, a former furniture-factory giant of the northeast with a population hovering around 20,000. It was pretty much the last gasp of civilization driving out west from Boston on Route 2 before hitting the Connecticut River. The town was sleepy, to say the least.
I couldn’t come out of the closet until after I graduated from high school…
… despite having a supportive mother. My classmates were that homophobic. And it’s not even like this was ancient history; I entered middle school in 2007 and high school in 2010. I was bullied relentlessly for being gay, especially in middle school, despite having absolutely no clue that I was anything other than straight as an arrow. And I still internalize this sometimes, usually resulting in anxiety attacks.
Things got better after graduation, but not by a whole lot. Mount Wachusett Community College did have a gay-straight alliance club, but there were never more than 5 or 6 members. I did get my first boyfriend, but that relationship didn’t even last a week; he only really wanted to use me for sex, and I simply wasn’t ready for that yet.
For the next 2 years, I didn’t put myself out there.
I’d look at porn online sometimes, but that was really it. I was all alone, trapped in the middle of white-bread, suburban hell, wondering if I’d ever get the chance to bolt from that sleepy town. And then in late 2016, I had an important awakening.
* The last time rhetoric like this was rife, the “Moral Majority” let AIDS wipe most of the LGBTQ community out because “it was killing the right people.” *
I found out that I was a furry. Now, one can say so much about the furry fandom that you could film an entire movie about it (And somebody by the name of Ash Coyote did), but to keep things simple, it’s a subculture where people create anthropomorphic animal characters, get art of them or even cosplay as them. It’s a very important queer subculture; it’s a place where people are free to explore their sexualities and gender identities. I created a feminine red fox character I named Jameson Oliver Foxworthy, or Jamie for short, and this character has become an online persona and pseudonym for me.
After having a short relationship with a British fur named of Sooty Sapphire, a lion, I ended up falling in love with the man who I’d eventually marry. His name was Ash Cinder, and he was a coywolf; a half-wolf, half-coyote hybrid. I also found out he was in Texas, though he assured me San Antonio, where he lived, wasn’t an ass-backward hellhole like much of the rest of the state.
At this point, you should know that in addition to being queer, I’m also on the autism spectrum.
I struggled horribly in school, and had to be in an individualized education plan, or IEP most of the time. As open-minded as my mother was about my sexuality, she was extremely overprotective, even once I was well into adulthood. She and I kept butting heads about my capabilities, and eventually, I made the decision to leave Gardner and go live with Ash. In San Antonio.
In Texas.
I was so determined to get the hell out of Gardner that I moved during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. August 28th, 2020, was the day I boarded a flight out of Logan Airport to Charlotte, North Carolina and on to San Antonio. We were all still not able to do very much, and we got stuck living in a crappy apartment for the first year, but that didn’t matter; we were together.
After we both got vaccinated, we started doing things together in the outside world. In 2021, I was able to start seeing what my adopted city was truly like, and boy howdy, I fell in love. Despite being in the middle of Texas, San Antonio doesn’t really feel like a Texan city. If it weren’t for the highways having frontage roads and turnarounds, a staple of The Lone Star State, it’d be easily mistaken for a city further west in the US.
San Antonio also has a pretty nice LGBT scene …
… although not quite as big as Dallas’s. And the city has done a generally decent job making me feel welcome. The people in San Antonio are so kind; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten compliments about my real name at work. So, San Antonio feels like home to me… I haven’t lived here for very long, but it feels like home…
However, San Antonio still resides within Texas.
And the people who run this state love nothing more than sending the LGBTQ community the reminder, “You think your Democrat-run city will save you? You in Texas, boy, and dontchu forget it!”
The state government in Austin has really fallen off the deep end. This state literally gutted the 14th Amendment so they could ban abortion in the year 2021, setting the precedent that the Constitution does not protect you from neighbors who’d like to abridge your rights. And the person who wrote that law, Jonathan Mitchell, said he’d love it if we could go back to the days when states treated queer people like rapists and pedophiles. He wants to lock queer people up for being queer.
Because, you know, Texas should be allowed to be a “Christian” state.
Mitchell isn’t the only Texas state official who’s been openly queerphobic. In the autumn of 2021, Governor Greg Abbott announced his attention to start punishing school districts whose libraries have books discussing LGBTQ topics or having LGBTQ characters, calling them “pornography.”
Shortly into 2022, Attorney General Ken Paxton decided letting trans minors transition was “child abuse” and directed CPS to go after their parents. Abbott gleefully signed off on it.
Then in March, Paxton decided to threaten an Austin school district with legal action for having a Pride Week. Because it’s apparently obscene to acknowledge the existence of queer people. And to cap it all off, Senator John Cornyn made known, during the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, that he thinks Texas should be allowed to deny same-sex couples from getting married. Because something about “states’ rights” and something about “religious freedom”.
State officials are making really clear which Texans deserve to be listened to and which ones do not.
In 2022, queerphobia has been getting worse and worse and worse.
We’re barely into spring, and the American right has successfully brought 1980’s queerphobic hate speech back from the grave. Thanks to the rhetoric around Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the American right is now just casually calling any queer person and any person who supports LGBTQ rights a “groomer.”
For those who don’t know, “groomer” is just a softer way of saying “pedophile.”
The last time rhetoric like this was rife, the “Moral Majority” let AIDS wipe most of the LGBTQ community out because “it was killing the right people.” The last time rhetoric like this was rife, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case that states were free to lock up queer people. The Chief Justice called gay sex “a crime not fit to be named.”
And of course, the last time rhetoric like this was rife, coming out of the closet came with serious consequences, threatening your relationships, your job or even your life. And the American right wants to take us back to these bad old days.
Given how queerphobic the Texas GOP has become, armed with utterly evil “Ok, Groomer” rhetoric, there’s no telling what shock and awe they might throw at LGBTQ Texans next. Since it’s now gospel on the right that LGBTQ people are child predators, what’s to stop state GOP leaders from truly cracking down? Will they ban us from open society? Will they shut down our gayborhoods? Will they attempt to start having us arrested for who we are?
I’m legitimately scared this abyss has no bottom.
Which brings me to this question. Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, etc., I have a question for you. Am I, a queer and non-binary furry from Massachusetts, even welcome in the state of Texas? Is my kind welcome in these parts? Is there a place for me here without hiding who I am? Or do you want to use your vested power to make life so hostile for me that I either scramble for the closet, try to move back in with my mother, or take my own life?
I honestly think you want me to leave because my queerness is “California-ing your Texas,” but I’m open to being proven wrong. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
