Advisory: Strong language and sexual themes


“Skinny in the closet”


I clutched my tickets tightly as I walked towards the doors of the convention center. I had always wanted to attend one of these conventions. Ever since I could remember I was always into skinnies. Actually, no, that’s a lie. I wouldn’t say ever since I could remember. I remember shortly after I got my first phone having freedom to surf the web all I wanted. Luckily for me, Ma was never tech-savvy and never cared enough to check my phone or my search history so I had all the privacy I wanted. I have no idea how, but eventually I came across this site called e732.net which was full of these creatures known as skinnies. I remember watching cartoons with these types of characters growing up. Some of the characters that I had seen on television were on the posts on this site, many of which were not very PG. Yeah, my introduction to the fandom was pretty unconventional. Lots of people make assumptions about skinnies, they say that we’re sexual freaks. 


Well, I mean, they’re not completely wrong, I am one of the many that live up to that stereotype. Hell, regular furry porn no longer does anything for me, but for the majority of people in the fandom being a skinny is a non-sexual thing. It’s all just about creating your own new persona, a new character that you can be in your own fictitious world. Not to be confused with otherkin, who actually believe that they are humans. Also, there are so many talented artists and writers. It’s just a hobby for many. Being a skinny is just about liking characters who happen to be human. 


Currently, I’m a college student attending a university here in Sacramento not too far from where I live with my family. I’m not the most social person in the world and don’t have many friends, but I’m pretty close to the few people that I do hang out with. Ruben is one of my best friends. Correction: he is my best friend actually. He is a tall, athletic border collie. I, on the other hand, am an armadillo and while I may not be as strong as or have Ruben’s physique, I do pride myself in being a good student. It doesn’t help that my thick-framed glasses make me look like a nerd. Anyway, he plays on the baseball team at our university, which isn’t very good to be honest. They’ve had their asses kicked by a lot of other teams that they’ve played against. Ruben is a fun guy to hang out with, I genuinely enjoy his company, but the one thing that really irks me about him is the fact that he feels like he has some sort of macho image that he constantly has to uphold. 


Everytime we go to bars together he always feels the need to get into competitions with complete strangers that he will never see again to see who can drink the most shots. He also likes to brag about his body count to me when I don’t remember asking. He’d always open with lines like “Hey man, guess who I just slept with over the weekend?” Obnoxious as he is, I still like hanging out with him and we usually hang out on weekends and play video games like Geiger, a post-apocalyptic video game that takes place in the future after a nuclear war. The whole point of the game is just about surviving an inhospitable wasteland filled with gangs of raiders and mutated creatures that had once been furries, but were now irradiated monsters that would kill anything that came across them. 


I heard knocking on my living room door and opened it. Ruben was standing in front of me, waving, “What’s up, Al?” He greeted me. Al is my nickname, it’s short for Alberto.


“Hey, come in, man,” I replied. “I just got a new game that we could play, it just came out not too long ago, I pre-ordered it a few months ago. Everybody and their mama are playing this shit right now.”


I pulled out a video game cover and showed it to him. “Hell yeah, that’s Claymore, I’ve heard lots of positive reviews online. I’m so down,” the border collie said excitedly. We went upstairs to my room where I inserted the disc into my gaming console and we both got comfortable. After the main menu popped up, I pressed start and we both had to make our own characters. We started by messing around with the character generator and made some of the ugliest abominations imaginable. After a few laughs, we started making the characters that we’d stick with. The game had a variety of different races you could be as well as different types of fighting styles. I went with a human mage build. My character was a young human with white skin, black hair, brown eyes, a really cool pair of steampunk goggles and I gave him a purple toga with brown leather boots. I looked at Ruben’s screen. I could see him contemplating heavily which race to choose. He looked at the human race character and experimented a little with the different skin tones and other traits, before defaulting to an Eagle character with green leather archer clothes. 


“I’ll go with an archer build,” he said. “Eagles have insanely good perception when it comes to their stats.” 


We started playing and had lots of fun. We fought lots of enemies, looted lots of treasure, died a few times to some tough bosses, and before we knew it hours had passed. We didn’t care though we had nothing else to do. After a while we reached a castle where we were met by a very tall monstrous polar bear, clad with knight’s armor. They swung with powerful strikes and both of us just barely managed to dodge. After a tough fight where we both dodged and rolled endlessly while attacking every now and then, we brought the bear’s hp down and a cutscene played where the bear began to shape shift and turned into a human woman, still wearing the same armor the bear had. Her dark skin and purple lipstick as well as hair contrasted with her shining silver armor. We had just run into Kassandra the Shapeshifting Knight, a human knight who had the ability to turn into any other animal and use their abilities to her advantage. 


“Bro, I bet there’s so much lewd art of her online,” Ruben interrupted my thoughts. 


“Huh?” I blurted out, confused for a second by his out of pocket statement. 


“You know what I mean,” he said. “I’m not into that skinnyfag stuff, but I bet there’s tons of guys online who simp for her.”


That was another thing I didn’t like about him. The fact that he also thought liking skinny stuff was “for pussies.” What would he think if he knew I, his best friend, was one of those “skinnyfags?” You’re like a brother to me, but honestly sometimes you act like a dick, Ruben. I had always kept the fact that I was a skinny a secret. Sometimes I had tried to kind of drop a hint, just to be met with his judgmentalness. I would agree with whatever point he made right after just to send the message that I wasn’t one of them. Another 30 minutes passed and it started getting late.


“Yo, I’ve been here for a hot minute now,” Ruben said to me. “I think I should start heading back home. Are you free next weekend? Same time?”


“Oh! Next weekend… nah, I plan on driving to the bay area… I’m going on a trip there. You know, camping and all that stuff.”


“Sounds cool, I was going to ask if you had room for one more, but I already made plans next weekend too, I totally forgot.”


“Well, it’s kind of gonna be a solo trip, you know… to connect with nature and shit. Just me and the wilderness.”


“Ah, I get you. No worries, man. Hope you have fun, send me some pictures if you can of anything interesting you find,” he said while motioning towards the front door, his paw on the doorknob.


Of course he’d say that. Besides being an athlete, Ruben also was really big on photography and especially photography about nature, although liminal spaces was also something he’d often talk about. He’d constantly send me images of liminal spaces involving abandoned buildings and go on about how cool they were. 


“For sure, man. That was pretty fun. I’ll see you later, man,” I finally said to him as he began to leave and started walking towards his car. 


The whole camping trip was a lie. For the first time in my life I had finally decided that I was going to go to a skinny convention. I had researched online and found out that there is an event center in San Francisco where skinnies attend by the hundreds yearly. Golden Gate Skinnycon was the name of it. I had booked a hotel and bought tickets to attend online. I had told my family that I would be vacationing in San Francisco, which I guess isn’t a lie and told them I’d bring them some sort of souvenir. Maybe something from Pier 39? The day came and I made my way there in my old Mazda. The way there was pretty boring. Two whole hours of driving on the freeway and when I got to the Golden Gate bridge, traffic was really bad. After being stuck there for a whole, I made my way to the convention center where I spent some more time trying to find a parking spot. After exiting my car I headed towards the entrance of the convention center. 


I could already see a few people wearing their skinsuits. It was kind of jarring to be honest. I had only seen them online in pictures, but to finally see them in person and so many of them too. Wow, some of them are really good, and up close you can see all the details and work that went into these. I used to think that skinsuits were way overpriced, but I guess the prices for these are more reasonable now. At the entrance I was met with a goat wearing a black polo shirt, a staff member, they scanned my ticket and gave me a bracelet so that I could enter. 


Upon passing the double doors I was met by an ocean of people everywhere, I could barely even hear my thoughts through all the conversations people were having. There were rows and rows of stands where people were selling different kinds of stuff. After some walking I came across a stand where I saw a whole bunch of art prints laid neatly on the table. 


“Hi, $15 for each one, buy more than one and I’ll lower that to $10 each,” a blue female ferret that was standing across from me said. 


“This is some really good stuff, are you the one who drew these?” I responded.


“Appreciate that, yep, all of this was made by me. I post all of my stuff online too and even take commissions for art sometimes,” she told me as she handed me a business card with her social media. 


“Thanks, I really like this one, I think I’ll take it,” I grabbed an art print of a male human with sunglasses wearing a really cool leather bomber jacket with a big number 8 sewn onto it. He had a pompadour haircut. A large sunset visible behind him. I gave her the money and started walking to other stands. 


Many of the other stands were pretty much the same. They also had artists that were selling their own prints. I also saw that others were run by skinsuit makers that were taking commissions on the spot and I assume would send the finished product by mail. Personally, I’m not big on the suits, I’m more into the art aspect. Talking about art, I realized looking at a map of the event that there was a section described as being for adults only. Curious, I decided to go over there where I was asked for my ID and was then let in. The place looked like a much smaller version of the main area and it had lots of booths as well. 


I was instantly shocked to see some stands with sex toys on them. I saw different things like pocket pussies and dildos, all in different shades of white, tan and black. I turned around to see others that were selling BDSM gear and others were selling mature art of a variety of characters. Some were prints of individual characters in pinup poses. Many characters were female, but there were some males in there. In addition to prints, some artists were selling full blown porn comics, which I flipped through. Nice. After looking around for a while, I was ready to go back to the main area and the moment I turned around I instantly bumped into someone and my face was on their chest. 


“Oh, sorry about that, I didn’t me-” I paused when I looked up to see a tall, fuzzy border collie looking down at me. “Ruben, what the hell are you doing here?”


I saw him turn beat red. “Uhhh, I don’t know, what are you doing here? I thought you said you were gonna go to San Francisco.”


“Change of plans…” I told him, trying to sound as confident as possible, trying to disguise my embarrassment. “What do you have there, by the way?” I asked him. 


He clutched the bag tightly and he quickly placed it behind his back. “Nothing,” he said, his cheeks beginning to blush even more. “Let’s go back to the main area, I heard there’s gonna be a dance off.” We both went over there where we left our bags on the ground and began to dance. It was super awkward to be honest and I couldn’t get over the fact that my friend, of all people, was at this convention with me. After the dance off and after browsing through some more stands we both decided to call it day and walked together awkwardly, mostly silent back to the parking lot. 


“Sooo… Al, you wanna play some more Claymore back in Sac next weekend?” he asked, obviously wanting to direct his attention to something else. 


“Sure… I should be free, why not?” I replied. 


We parted ways and I headed back to my Mazda. I opened my car door, got in and was ready to go back home. Before that though, I wanted to look at all the art prints and comics I bought. I opened my black bag up and peered inside. Wait, this isn’t my stuff. I pulled out an art print, it was a sexy pinup of a familiar character. She was at the beach and only had a purple bikini on. Wait, is this Kassandra from Claymore? Was this what Ruben was hiding from me?