As an artist, I have always, since I set out on my journey of creativity almost 19 years ago, created work that featured anthropomorphic animals. When I was a child, I was sent to bed after story time with a head full of rats and moles and badgers, panthers bears and tigers or rabbits in blue coats who were always getting into some sort of trouble. The cartoons I was raised on in the early 90s almost all predominantly featured anthropomorphic hero’s. And the theme followed me into my online years. I was fascinated by online content that dealt with anthropomorphic animals. So it made sense then that at 13 when I began drawing, that these creatures would be a large part of my focus.
With all of this, however, something grew along side of it. From my earliest memories Christianity was present. The ideas of a benevolent God, ever watching, protecting, judging and controlling, was impressed on me. The first pre-school I was enrolled in was faith based, then the kinder and then the actual school. I was enrolled in private Christian education from the time I was in day care, until I graduated a Christian high school in 2009. Peppered throughout that was an endless river of Christian camps, youth groups, Wednesday services and Sunday services. My home life was dominated by Christian faith as well. Every question, every problem, every shred of information given through the guise and concave mirror of religion. So on one hand, I had the world of story and fantasy, animals who could talk, wear clothing, walk about and do things any person would, often informed by their species or habitat and on the other I had the feeling of responsibility for eternity. It was never enough to fill hand made field guides with drawings of birds, it was never enough that I knew the birds by their songs, never enough that I could identify almost any insect I saw. There was always the question of my “salvation” my “soul”. These questions were asked of me at an absurd age, it’s difficult to impress the severity, especially to those who never really experienced the sort of tactics that were employed against us at the institutions of religion I and my schoolmates attended. An entire facility full of adults, telling children stories of hell in a manner so severe they would cry or yell while imparting this life or death information. It is an impressionable time in life to say the least. If the stories of animal folk and talking animals has stuck with me to this day, its easy to understand how these endless, daily conditioning sermons might have stayed too, nestled up among beds of clover where mischievous rabbits might play.
As I grew older, I went through a bout of devout Christianity, I look back on this phase less now as an honest attempt at reaching out for a new soul, a new way of life, a new start, and more as a crushed spirit finally collapsing under years of tactics and unbearable guilt and stress. Amidst all the animal people and nature obsession and Christian dommculting, there was another part of myself, that I was exhaustedly wrestling with, I was coming to terms with the fact that I was homosexual. It was an agonizing thing. I spent so much of my youth angry and hurt and invisible.
Religion fell apart the year I turned 17, which coincidentally, was the year I decided I wanted to be an artist. This was a time where I wanted to devote a large portion of myself to creating images. I was always an artist, but this was a determination to explore that, and at 17 a desire to tack that title on to my personality. By 20 I was involved with church activities again, but in a more honest way. This period I look back on with some sadness, as i feel it truly was my soul, empty, afraid and completely wrecked trying for one last reach. I was still closeted but was coming to terms with my sexuality internally. The strange thing was that I found, what was for me, a safe avenue free from guilt and conditioned trauma to explore my sexuality.
Art.
And what did I draw? What did I spend my time imagining? Anthropomorphic animals. Suddenly these animal fellows were exploring this side of myself I was far too afraid to explore physically myself. I could draw them with one another, loving one another, touching one another. Ill never forget the first one I drew nude, Ill never forget the first pair I drew fucking. It was wild, free and mine. It was secret and powerful. And I loved it.
Religion for me ended the day my best friend died, I think that’s truly when the concept of God died in my soul. I was recovering from a wreck, a genital surgery, the loss of my grandmother and the loss of my friend and those feelings I thought were there, simply left. I had always felt cut off, alone and unseen, but now I was all these things and my heart was completely broken.
Time moved on and through support and my creative outlet I got by. I went back to work, devoted myself to my craft. I ended up showing my work, drawings of rat headed men wearing jockstraps, at a local bar. From there I was invited by studio owners to show at an art market, from there I was invited to show at a studio, and after some time I was showing in several galleries around the city. I made it into zines, had Pulitzer winning journalists buying my work at auction, and in the mix I inevitably found the furry fandom. I was featured on tumblrs front page and before I knew it a slew of furries were in my notifications. I didn’t know at the time, but many of my favorite artists turned out to be furry. And the idea of it all both scared and thrilled me. After a few years i was in the thick of it. And have been ever since.
Through tumblr I met a man, we talked, we shared art, we shared our stories and after some of the most bone rattling fear I’ve ever overcome. I agreed to a long distance relationship, my first relationship at 27. We met up eventually. I lost my virginity to him. We met again. And again. And after a year, i put everything on the line and came out to my parents. We had a plan to escape if it went badly. I was packed. And he was ready to travel. It wasn’t without its barbs, but my family was accepting, and loving. And after awhile I moved away with my partner. Both of us under the spell of anthropomorphic animals. I married him two summers later. I’m writing this from our bed actually, but my religious side, rather my spiritual side seemed to never quite fade through all of it. There was always this pull. These feelings I didn’t understand. I sought therapy for it, and was medicated for a time. But though I learned to deal with the traumas of it. I never lost the love for the internal place. The place I thought God was. I would read books on philosophy and nature based thinking that scratched some itches. The ideas of interconnectedness, the ideas of story telling as self healing etc. but there was something moving in the shadows, and at this point I only feel it polite to introduce him.
His name is Benjamin.
He is what some might call an alter ego, a persona, or a fursona. Benjamin is a lot like me, he’s in his early thirties, not very tall, not very thin. He is male, and gay. But benjamin is not a human, benjamin is a rat. He stands on two legs most of the time. He wears cloths most of the time. He can speak and drive a car. He has sex, and quit smoking etc etc. Benjamin showed up when I was in my early 20s as a self portrait I painted. Instead of painting my head on my body, I simply painted the head of a rat. There was something that happened there, I’m not entirely sure what, but I can guess. It spawned an all consuming obsession with rats. I latched onto it like nothing I ever had. Every drawing was of rats or rat men. All of them in some way being me. I named him Ben after the smallest tribe of Israel, during that time my heavy Christian roots were still very much showing. But something drastically changed once I met him. My creative mind was no longer trying simply to improve and impress. Now I had this impish rat man doing all sorts of things in my head. He was different from me at first. He smoked, so i began smoking, he wore boots and so I wore boots. Before I knew it I had begun changing not only my outward appearance but my personality, to be more like this rat! This idea had sprung up so powerfully that I was literally changing how I behaved to be more like him because I was so enamored with him..…or so it seemed at the time.
I no longer see it the same way now. I am a gay man in his early thirties, happily married. Living in my own place, still creating paintings in between my career hours. I consider myself adjusted, adequately happy and centered. And for the first time in many many years, perhaps the first time in my life, I also feel spiritually whole. I think it started that night I drew myself as the rat.
I’d like to go forward from the perspective of how I view what transpired during that time now. When I painted myself as a rat, I broke some spell, I was able to see myself for the first time. I was autonomous, I was not within the parameters of any “plan of salvation” because I was no longer a man, nor was I an animal. I painted what I now view as “ a portrait of my new soul”. When I painted Ben back then, he felt like a “character” he felt like a persona. I now think that what transpired between us was much more than an artist pursuing the story of a “character” When I started painting the rats, I started behaving more like what I felt the human equivalent of a rat might act like. Through this rat, I was teaching myself to shuffle off the awkward, sheltered Christian version of myself I had been squashed into. I was able to interact with ideas about myself from an almost third party perspective.
At the time it all felt like costume. Which of course it was. Your first attempts at anything feel impostor. But after a time, when the ideas about rats and how much I felt I related to them did not fade, the costume became daily attire. The paintings became less “character” and more honest, very naked expression. It was my religious burden, my homosexuality, my health issues, what I wanted to be, who I thought I was, what I found beautiful, what made me uncomfortable and what I longed for coming across in my art, and it was all art of this rat Benjamin. I was showing his mostly naked body at galleries. I was sexually excited by him. I was protective of him. He opened up opportunities for me, allowed me to meet new people, explore my own ideas and self. In many ways I see it now that I was deeply in love with him. I don’t believe now that the obsession and passion stems from some traumatized part of myself. I may have stumbled onto it all in a strange way, trauma may have caused me to take the turns in the maze that lead me to it, however, falling into it, was seperate from the trauma. I now see that I was not having “ideas” i was not creating a “character” I was not just escaping, I was conversing, openly for the first time in my life...with myself, with my own soul.
In a brief summation, I see Ben now as the manifestation of that inner world that all my fascinations, emotions, longings, inspiration and “self identity” spring from. He is my soul. The me that is not my morals or family ties, not the thing that keeps me and my husband together, or something to pray to or feel guilt over if I go a week without thinking of him. He is the part of me that is excited over the rain in the desert, the part of me that gets goosebumps from music. The part of me that jumps out of bed to write down a painting idea. The part of me that fell in love with Beatrix potter. The part of me that is never satisfied and always wants more to see, touch, taste and hear. It doesn’t quite do it justice to try and describe it all in words because its nebulous at best. But he is spirit.
Awhile ago I began asking myself what that meant, how could I explore it? What about the other animal folk bumping about in my head? Who were they? Who exactly is Ben? Through clumsy experimentation and a lot of trial and error. I have begun the creative process of communing with Ben and these other animal folk as if they were spirit in the understood idea of spirit.
I wont go too into detail about it all, but through a blend of meditation and contemplative creativity and a dose of diy scrapped together occult practice, I’ve begun my own rituals involving Benjamin and a few of his friends (such as 57 the badger) that help to center myself, speak with them, pull them into me, give myself to them and draw down an inspiration both for creative em devours and life. I bring Ben offerings at his altar, things we of course symbiotically enjoy, wine, nicotine gum, chamomile flowers etc. Through dance, acting and envisioning, I am able to take on their personas (fursuits work great for this act of communion) and these moments of connection to them have opened me up to new ideas, new emotional paths, and new lessons. Envisioning the breaths they take, the temperature of their bodies, the smell of them, helps capture intimate details of their physicality and story easily missed. Burning incense associated with them, lighting colored candles for acts and purpose, collecting their preferred plants, flowers, colors, stones etc. are all small ways to draw the fur over my body and become them, (they are me after all). Magic and craft, are the attempts to reach in and converse with him, with myself, and it is all a set of tools too make the outside world just quiet enough, that I can hear the faint “ch ch” of his teeth, or feel the brush of his whiskers..then taking that “vision” that “energy” and putting that directly into an act of creation. There is a power in it, there is a healing in it, and there is something to it all that fills that void, fills it to overflowing. I don’t have a name for it all, don’t fully understand it nor can I adequately explain it. But it is mine. To have a “god” that is my own spirit, who did not “die for me” as I previously understood in my old faith, but dies “with” me, day by day, is a far more frantic and passionate affair, we are all the time and energy one another have. If I do not, than it shall not be. And this gets me up many mornings, and gets my pencils and paints moving a lot more often these days.
This rat has opened a path to a new soul. The one that was always within me. From my earliest memories. That new soul, was there among the tales of Beatrix potter, the wind in the willows, 90s cartoons, fandoms and art. It was there under the endless weight of a forced religion and he survived. He was there with me in my invisibility. And is here with me now in an age of visibility. I have my name, and I have named soul Benjamin Rat.
