homosexuality, furry, sexual-orientation, survey, bisexuality“The furry fandom is a fandom for fictional anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics.”
According to the study done by the University of California, “19–25% of the fandom members report homosexuality, 37–48% bisexuality, 30–51% heterosexual, and 3–8% other forms of alternative sexual relationships”. In comparison to the study done by National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, in the USA population “7 percent of women and 8 percent of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual”.
Are there any studies that explain why the furry fandom has such high rates of people declaring non-heterosexual orientation, in comparison to the average from USA, where the fandom seems to be most popular?
The same question cold be asked for musical fans or people who go to the ballet. Nothing in these activities causes homosexuality however either by culture or by nature these activities mainly appeal to homosexuals.
A large factor is culture. Straight men feel cultural pressure to act in a manly way. The quintessential furry activities such as snuggling, dressing up ect don’t fit well with that image. The gay community as a whole is also much more accepting and open to fetishes. As such the fear of people finding out is less for homosexuals and the bar for entry is much lower.
I’m afraid I can only speak from experience as a gay furry. I don’t know of any studies.
Because a lot of people seemed pretty displeased with my earlier answer I’m rewriting it here:
I have a few speculations that I’m basing my theory on:
Unfortunately this does not seem to be a very researched topic and my theory is mostly based on my experience from different forms of fandom and sex positive culture. My theory is as follows:
Neurodiversity is over-represented, compared to rest of society, in most kinds of fandom because it is often a culture where knowledge is higher valued than social skills. Along with neurodiversity and acceptance you get the higher number of HBT-persons in those fandoms. This I think is not special for furry fandom, what is special about furry fandom is that it is a fandom that is by a, not insignificant, number of the followers sexualized and people who accept one “abnormal” side of their sexuality is more likely to have several ways they diverge from the projected norm of society.
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