My Sexually Expressive Tee Shirt
May 25th, 2026
There’s one tee shirt I keep in the back of my drawer. It only gets pulled out for the hottest days of the year, trips to the sauna, or sweaty room parties. It looks like this:
I always bristle with embarrassment putting it on. But I keep it around because I truly love it, and the reaction from peers (furry or otherwise) has always been completely positive. Sometimes people even point out the individual animals and tell me which one is their favorite.
I bought this at Anthrocon 2023, while doing Sunday shopping in the dealer’s den with my friend Cass. We were hanging around Gabshiba’s booth looking at the variety of cheeky innuendo products. I was driving myself up a wall with how much I wanted to buy this shirt, but couldn’t — or, wouldn’t — in a million years. Why, though? After this whole weekend of everyone around me being able to wear something like that, and enjoy it, why not me?
I spent some time staring at the ceiling of the convention center, the smooth concrete floors, and the sea of con attendees doing their final-day shopping all around me. Cass and I moved along from that booth and at the end of that row of vendors, we split off until the rest of our group would meet up later in the afternoon.
I immediately turned around and went back to buy the shirt.
I even put it on while I was still at the convention center. I felt slightly hysterical knowing what I looked like to other people, but not getting any double-takes or death glares. Running into friends the rest of that day, everyone had something nice to say about it. Mostly about it being hot or funny, but I remember one person saying something along the lines of, “it didn’t expect you to be into that, but it makes sense.”
In 2017, I was an art school freshman who had jumped into transitioning the summer before moving away for college. I was starting the next chapter of my life as new as can be: different place, new people, new name and pronouns, and yet-indeterminate sexuality. Everything was up in the air, and I was anxious to figure out what I would become.
The first people I became friends with were trans furries, almost purely by coincidence. You just sit at the same table with someone for breakfast because you happen to know their name, and the rest of your life starts forming from there. My friend Claire was very open about being a furry, along with her interest in fatfur and tftg art. Somehow, the person I may have had the most in common with at that school, became the first friend I ever talked about porn or sex with in a completely open way. She was also the first person I ever met who used FurAffinity. I’ll never forget the autumn morning she and I were sitting in the cafeteria of our school, talking about furry art, when she turned her laptop over to me and said, “Do you know Greenendorf? I feel like you would like his stuff.”
Illegal Wrestling Move by Greenendorf, via Furaffinity
This completely broke 19-year-old-kid me’s brain in half. I think this was the first time I had seen a drawing of a male character, and felt an authentic, heart-pounding, sweat-inducing, “I need him” response. I remember that I could instantly imagine the sensation and smell of his thick fur, the smooth athletic fabric stretched over his body, and even the weight of the paw pressing into my head. My childhood obsession with sonic characters shot to the surface, connecting with unprecedented levels of testosterone and oxytocin. The reaction was a feverish haze of sexual excitement, cute aggression, and closeted bashfulness. It felt like lightning had run through my body, and just left me flushed, embarrassed, and confused.
Before this, I didn’t really have a preference for men, women, or anything. I’m still apathetic when it comes to my sexuality; today, if pressed, I’ll call myself bisexual because there isn’t a gender I would say no to. At the time, I was in a relationship with a person who identified as male, but would later experiment a lot with their gender. Despite transitioning with the intent to live as a guy, I wasn’t super into being a dude and being part of male… ”culture”, I guess. All this to say, I didn’t really feel much of anything about anything, and that lack of desire made me feel out of touch with the world of queer adults, especially gay men. Oh, and this: at this point I knew I had a preference for fat characters in drawn porn. I felt like it was something I should keep to myself for the rest of my life. At one point, I tried to deny myself the ability to look at art of fat characters so I could eventually turn “normal”. It did not work, and just resulted in many years of unnecessary repression.
That morning, though, the world briefly been cleaved open, and possibilities I couldn’t even imagine were being shown to me in a hot, bright flash. When I read Cruising Utopia for the first time, I thought about this moment. Internally, it had solidified something very important for me: This is what I like, this is who I want to be with, this may even be what I want to be. I now had a direction that desire could actually form in. I felt oriented in my gender, something like euphoria and a call to action — I a part of my identity came to exist in that moment.
And I kept it to myself.
It would be another half a decade until I reached a point in my personal life where I could talk about furry porn with others like that again. Despite being surrounded by queer weirdo punks in college, any time I drew something that I “actually liked”, the room could tell, and was that cool with it. I stuck closely to my core friend group there because they were the only folks I knew were really on the same page as I was. Many years and a move across states later, I started attending conventions for the first time. At Midwest Furfest in 2022, everything started coming to the surface again. Suddenly, I was in a real-world space where people are drawing, wearing, and joking about references to things you thought only you knew about. Everyone around you is flaunting the exact opposite of coolness and social status, but you’ve never wanted to have what they have so badly.
Now that I actually live in a city with a huge Furry community and friend group, the person I am is forming in the way I wish it had back in 2017. My self-image, presentation, and social life all feel more in line with each other than ever. As I write about this, I’m trying really hard not to just say “furry porn is my gender identity”. To the untrained ear, that sounds deeply unhealthy and concerning. But I can’t deny that it’s been one of the only things that actually makes me feel attached to or identified with anything. I think if you’re anything like me, and had a similar experience of ‘putting it all together’ while looking at a piece of beautiful, sensual, furry art, you’ll know what I mean.
The moral of this story is that sometimes buying a horny novelty item is the thing that gets you out of one of your many closets. I hope that whatever sexually expressive tee shirt, or other identity-forming item that comes into your life, is modestly priced and machine washable.