Failing To Dunk On Furries
If you are highly online, you may from time to time have seen this oft-reposted photograph from a 2018 furry convention. Internet smartguys have tried to make a bit of a homophobic and kink-shaming meme of it, the evident “idea” being that there’s something risible about providing HIV testing to convention attendees:
This article by Soatak has more info if you were blessedly unaware, but much more to the point, it robustly defends the notion of HIV and other STD testing at conventions in general:
If you’re organizing any type of public event–be it a gaming, anime, steampunk, cyberpunk, or comic book convention, music concert, medieval or renaissance festival, and so on–you should consider doing what Midwest FurFest does.
This is obvious to most queer people, but might be counter-intuitive at first. So let me explain.
Any large gathering of people is likely to lead to adults hooking up. This is a fact of life, especially when alcohol is involved.
Having a convenient way to know your status onsite is a great way to allow consenting adults to make informed decisions about their sexual health, especially if they’re not generally promiscuous and aren’t in the habit of getting tested regularly.
Let me emphasize: the most sexually promiscuous adults are generally already in the habit of getting regularly tested, so the onsite STI testing doesn’t actually do much for them.
This only helps people who don’t regularly visit their health department or planned parenthood to know their status.
Therefore, free onsite STI testing is a damn good idea to protect the health of your community.
Even if you hold some weird disdain for the habitually sexually promiscuous (“sluts”), this service primarily benefits everyone else, since any ethical slut already knows their goddamn status as well as the status of anyone they’re fucking that night.
Any event that can afford to offer Free STI testing and doesn’t probably doesn’t care about adults making informed decisions about their sexual health.
Furry conventions are for furries, which are overwhelmingly LGBTQIA+ compared to the rest of the population. That one of our conventions can afford to take steps to protect the sexual health of its adult attendees is a damn good idea, even if it was limited to HIV at first.
Everyone should consider stealing this idea from us.
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