I've been going to cons for a few years now. I'd been aching to go since I was 16, but never worked up the confidence, courage, or motivation to bother to until a good friend of mine convinced me to go to BLFC in 2017. Something in them was calling to me (Besides the porn, I mean), but even after I started going it took me a long while to process.
Furry cons, in my lived experience in the suburban/urban Midwest, have a very unique social cohesion/openness to them that's otherwise been impossible for me to find in America. Everyone has a loose, open social connection. I've met lifelong friends just passing someone in the hallway and complimenting their outfit, or recognizing a piece of art they'd done, or in one case, just groping them because they asked me to. Randomly hugging people at a party. Wandering over to us in a hallway at 4am and asking a random trivia question. Accidentally beaming me in the head with an inflatable burger. I've traded countless pleasant exchanges with people and it's been more or less effortless.
I grew up in the suburbs, where I was isolated and spread out enough that the concept of "passing people in the street on foot and interacting positively with them" wasn't even a possibility to consider. Streets are dangerous, don't go far from home, don't talk to strangers even other kids. Don't bother people. They'll try to hurt you. Don't go to the "bad" part of town at all. Any time I did go out, it was an empty, lifeless world of shut doors and speeding deadly cars. I moved around later in life, spending time in more dense places, especially the proper city I've been living in for almost a year.
This con highlighted more clearly than ever the extreme lack of socialization people in America, especially adults, are forced into. By design of cities and suburbs, by the othering and fearmongering from a thousand different influences, by the almost total lack of public spaces, by the forced isolation into competitive environments where people are there only by what is ultimately a threat of violence, from school to work to the DMV. When was the last time you saw someone hug someone so hard they lifted right off their feet for a minute straight at the bank? Ever leaned your head on the shoulder of a co-worker 15 minutes after you met them? Ever seen a bunch of strangers sit down and get coffee and end up curled up against one another like sleeping macaques in a tree?
A coherent, mutually accepting, extremely open community is something that humans evolved to live in. Without it, people's social abilities atrophy. They become dissocialized, paranoid of others, fearful. I can honestly say I would not be much of a socially functional person without cons. I sure wasn't before them. The amount of genuine love and affection and casual platonic and romantic intimacy and just quiet, surrounding comfort of being in a place where people are both there for each other and there for each other feels so natural and so needed. A part of my mind feels whole and satisfied that I didn't even realize was starved.
I've only been back in the city for a day. A security camera speaker crackled on and yelled at me to leave as I walked down a sidewalk in front of a random house. I saw someone power-walking down the street, focusing all their energy on avoiding acknowledging the existence of anyone near them. People who don't even glance at a wave or a greeting, or just stare with wide, blank eyes like an alerted guard dog.
I just... hurt. For them, for myself, for all of us raised in this paranoid, selfish, unnatural world spread micron-thin in a billion little fiefdoms. It shouldn't be this way. It doesn't have to be. And cons helped me realize, in some little places and little times, it isn't.
