Making Furry Porn for Jesus

A.K.A. "The Fucky Verses of the Bible"

I spent over 5 hours last Friday night talking to a room of +250 people. We talked about my divorce before showing some of my sexually explicit gay furry paintings I created as a prayer. I then shared comics about my recovery as a sex addict, then had a brief Bible study before an analyst joined-impromptu to marry his objective and my subjective findings on erotic art featuring animal people. This is a completely normal occurrence. In fact, it’s my regular job.

You see, the last week I was at Eurofurence 2017, where I gave two illustrated lectures: “Making Art That Matters” and “Fursonas: Types and Stereotypes”. And like all my talks, I mention going to Christian schools for seventeen years of my life, while simultaneously navigating sex addiction recovery, while also participating in the furry fandom as a creative. The furry fandom is, with little exception, a sex-positive place, where just about any fetish or sexual expression is accepted so long as it is tactful and hurts no one. My first furry convention was in 2012, and with it brought a cataclysmic shift away from the sexually repressed climates of my childhood home, church families, and even my university. After a marriage and a divorce that wasn’t served well by secrecy surrounding sex and social stigmata (heh), I chose to make it my life’s mission to encourage more people to live lives of not only integrity but transparency. In a way, I’m not only a professional artist but a professional confessor. 

In the autumn of 2015, I had a phone call with my mother about a painting I posted online.

“Jonathan, is this goat performing an oral sex act?”

“Depends on your definition of sex, since he’s engaging in auto-fellatio, but yes, probably.”

“Jonathan, exactly how is that God-honoring?”

“I’m glad you asked, Mom—”

I’ll spare you the details of the painting and the conversation since they're already documented elsewhere. The result was that my mother, as well as other family members and childhood friends, expected that sexual content in artwork is always a sin, or at least some sort of deviation from God’s will as made evidenced by the Bible. But if we define “pornography” as “sexual content” (a terrible definition I’d never support), then the Bible itself contains quite a few passages of pornography.

After bringing this up, a furry artist named Scappo shot up his hand and asked for such a list. He and many others have doting relatives that may be disgusted by the furry art he produces while not acknowledging the sexually explicit verses they venerate.

All of Song of Solomon is pretty good, but here are two highlights:

My beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening;
my heart began to pound for him.

I arose to open for my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with flowing myrrh,
on the handles of the bolt.

Song of Solomon 5: 4-5 (NIV)

Still has that two-millennia awkwardness to it, but you can’t deny, even as an analogy, this is part of a very passionate and erotic poem!

Your stature is like that of the palm,
and your breasts like clusters of fruit.
I said, “I will climb the palm tree;
I will take hold of its fruit.

-S.o.S. 7:7-8, New International Version (NIV)

A friend in my graduating class had this reference as his personal Bible verse under his senior photo in the Yearbook. Perhaps this served as a self-fulfilling prophecy of his marriage some six years later.

— 

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Ezekiel 23:20, NIV

This excerpt from a graphic anthropomorphization (!) of the tribe of Judah illustrates God's chosen people losing their way, in an attempt to show the hubris of losing one’s ideologies and pursuing earthly gains. It’s supposed to be extreme because the losing one’s religion is extreme. Losing your religion is a kind of penetrative act. People thrust into personal freedoms after years of religious chastity can enter a dramatic losing and rediscovery of identity.  Rendering that in extreme detail does justice to the seriousness of the subject, which is now missed on a culture taught to fear sexuality in almost all forms. 

—

And not for strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
And rejoice in the wife of your youth.
As a loving hind and a graceful doe,
Let her breasts satisfy you at all times;

-Proverbs 5:18-19 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

It's okay to like a boob, Christians. Boobs are great. If you're married to a boob-haver, by all means, brothers and sisters in Christ, nom those baps in righteous earnest. This verse isn't about your wife's boobs any more than a big titted lizard is about. 

—

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. 31 One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children—as is the custom all over the earth. 32 Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.

That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” 35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.

Genesis 19:30-36

Most of us can’t understand the fear of our lineage dying out, the legacy of our ancestors resting squarely on whether on not we can “get it up” for our parents after getting them drunk. It’s an important detail to include. This was a normal-enough behaviour, in context, that not one but two daughters felt it was an acceptable course of action. 

But wait! There’s more weird fucky details:

So Judah told Onan, “Go and sleep with your brother’s widow; it’s the duty of a brother-in-law to keep your brother’s line alive.” But Onan knew that the child wouldn’t be his, so whenever he slept with his brother’s widow he spilled his semen on the ground so he wouldn’t produce a child for his brother. God was much offended by what he did and also took his life.

Genesis 38: 8-10 (The Message Translation)

Again, the subject matter itself doesn’t bug me all that much. If God explicitly stated to me while in some primitive culture to fuck my brother’s widow for him, and I explicitly disobey, I probably deserve to be smote. But in both of these cases, how do you expect to share that idea if it’s not explicitly stated? If something sexual happens, why would it be more valuable to hide that? And would the more soccer-mom Christians among us prefer that this part of the narrative was never mentioned just because sex and semen are icky? You may be surprised to learn that these limits on sexuality have little to do with God's will for you and more to do with the Victorian Era's take on sexuality, a cap still prevalent in America today. 

I recently left an online group chat specifically because certain Christians couldn’t handle the very idea of sexual content while also being too passive to confront me about it. And even though I’m back to regularly attending Church—as strange as that is if you know anything about me—I find the furry fandom to be a more welcoming place to hold discussions of transparency. That’s actually why I stopped going to Church for almost one year (the biggest pause in my life). With an art community that allows me to speak as much as I want about my beliefs and my interests, that also fosters diverse relationships to challenge me and accentuate my strengths, I had few Church-related needs that weren’t being met at a furry convention or art website.

Now I’m trying to take those good parts of the furry fandom and apply them to other cultures. If you’re still reading, I hope you’ll do the same in whatever cultures you came from. Next time you have overly religious Christian parents, ask them some questions about these verses and see where the discussion goes. You may be surprised.

Love,

-J

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Jonathan Vair Duncan, known as Stigmata in the furry fandom, is a freelance artist, rogue art therapist, public speaker, and educator. He identifies as mostly gay and probably Christian and hops between living in Switzerland and America.

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