Solidarity but also I'm leaving the ZDP team

You're walking through a furry convention, and you see someone sitting at a booth where they're selling little printed out magazines about Zoosexuality.
 
 
You're like, "Ha that's cool stuff, good luck!"
 
 
They're like, "Wanna sit here and sell some of these with me?"
 
 
Three years later you're like, "Alright man it's been fun, peace."
 
 
That's more or less the story here.
 
 
I'm sitting at a campfire right now, burning a lot of books. Tarro has said that they think of me (Alissa) as a cool librarian, and, this would not be a very good librarian trait of me, I guess. But I do burn books. Not for spite or to prove anything (usually). Usually it's just, a lot of pulp crap enters my life, and this is easier than putting it back into the shelf clutter out there in your used book shops and thrift stores. It's fun to rip books apart and see the loose pages, all of the typesetting laid bare.
 
 
In among the burning books this time are some notebooks with some zoo-themed writing. Call it some overdue opsec. Cleaning up. (Some of these must be 5 years old. Sheesh! Call it WAY overdue.)
 
 
I'm in kind of a reflective mood, at the moment. Two days ago (as of when I'm writing this), I told Tarro I'm stepping down as the editor-in-chief of Zooey Dot Pub.
 
 
Oh! Sorry by the way if you didn't know, I was the editor-in-chief of Zooey Dot Pub! I should've mentioned that part first, to like, do a setup/payoff thing, where like, you get to follow along with my journey of joining the team and then you learn about all of the exciting stuff we did together as a team and then you're all sad about me leaving the team but at the end we all learn a lesson. Well, oops. Uh.
 
 
Nah, I almost worry that the real story here would sound kinda boring.
 
 
I mean don't get me wrong, I could share about that time that someone posted a message in the Zooey Dot Pub Discord being like, "Anyone heard of this podcast?" and then linked a podcast episode where two lawyers were saying zoos are bad or something and laws against bestiality are good etc, and me and Tarro both started listening at the same time (me as I was going on a long walk, I dunno what Tarro was doing in their life, my inner sense of narrative says League of Legends but my heart wants it to not be true,) and anyways we were like, DID THESE PEOPLE GET A LOT OF THEIR INFORMATION ON ZOOS FROM ZOOEY DOT PUB? It seems like they did, right?? You wouldn't say stuff the way they're phrasing it unless OUR fluffy asses wrote it, I wouldn't THINK. And just commenting to each other on all of what we were hearing, what we thought, how we were reacting to it all. And then I got home, sat down, cracked my knuckles, and wrote an article that was basically like, "Dear Lawyers, fuck you and kiss my ass, you suck dicks badly I bet, go to hell." And then Tarro read it and was like uhhh this is not a good way to respond to this, we should definitely be more constructive. And I was like, really? And they were like, yes lmao, please, let's do a very different version of this. And so we tried again from scratch, this time I guess with goals of showing the ethical zoo side of the picture, and making good arguments instead of just tossing around insults, and together me and Tarro wrote an article that was a) way longer, b) way better. It's probably my favorite article on Zooey Dot Pub, I think we completely hit it out of the park on that one.
 
 
I could share about some of the viral ragebait pieces we put out that totally worked lmao. I genuinely just cannot seem to learn that so many people legitimately have no sense of sarcasm or media literacy, and take everything as someone else claiming an actual fact. "Zoosexuality Is Officially Recognized By The LGBTQIA+!" uh-huh tooooootally a real claim, ye angry throngs of Twitter-ites. lol. lmao. People were saying, in defense of ZDP on that one, "That article SHOULD have been uploaded with the 'comedy' tag, so that it was clear that it was satire. It was mistakenly put up without that tag, thus everyone's confusion." And, I'll come clean y'all, I uploaded that article without the comedy tag on purpose, because I was like, sitting there with my wine glass in hand, stone-faced serious, being like, "What is satire? What is satire if not putting up this article as though it's completely for-real? That is what satire is. If I live in a world where Eggshell's article titled 'Zoosexuality Is Officially Recognized By The LGBTQIA+!' needs a disclaimer that it isn't real, parody is dead." Turns out parody is dead lmao jkjk but anyways that article does totally have the comedy tag now, I don't remember if I was asked to add it and then I bitched whined and moaned and did it, or if Tarro or someone added it on there, but yeah it was like, alright teehee, we definitely got to have our fun here with this one, fine we can put the "just kidding" tag on it from here forth to clarify the record.
 
 
I could share about this time I was at a party and it was SO fun like I was just thriving and being my best self among awesome friends and having a great time but also it was Saturday or Sunday and there was still an article on deck that I needed to do some significant edits on or something like that, and I was saying to Fawnly "no I think the plan totally is that I'm going to crawl into that bunk bed over there for like 5 minutes, bang out those edits, and then that will be done and I can come back to party some more," and then later in the night they asked if I had ever done the editing-from-the-bunkbed thing and I was like "nnnno..." and then I messaged Tarro like "ngl this one might not get my attention today" and Tarro was like "naw don't worry about it I'm busy too let's just take this weekend off" and I was like PHEW, dog bless.
 
 
I dunno, I could share about a lot of stuff, I guess. It's not a small number of parks, libraries, and friends' homes that I walked into with a laptop and a notebook and got some ZDP work done while I was there.
 
 
The real story here today is scattered across a lot of minutia though. And it doesn't realllllly matter. It's not the note I wanna depart from here on.
 
 
Instead I'd just like to say, thanks, fellow animal likers :3
 
 
I like a ton of the stuff we got to do as a team.
 
 
Zoosexuality, and the community therearound, is such an incredible demonstration of the kinds of things that I am taken by. It's a celebration of the beauty of the animal life on this planet. It's waking up in the morning to a hot cloud of dog breath, and hearing a wagging tail thumping against the bedsheets. It's a masquerade; It's having something that ostensibly has to be a secret, and yet, getting out and meeting one another anyways. It's being the cool good guys fighting against a very often unjust world. It's transgressive stickers and iconography. And yeah, I'm very into it all; I feel like I kinda lucked out majorly, that "zoophile" was the quirky character trait randomly assigned to me by God or Ra or whoever when they were rolling up my character sheet; Zoophile, for me, is like, perfect, no notes.
 
 
I wanna give a special thanks to Ganymede, a non-zoo writer I've known for a long time, who I did a bunch of writing-in-the-same-room-together with many years before I ever got involved in the zoo scene, and who, I think I now will be returning to doing a bunch of writing-in-the-same-room-together with as I step away from the editor's desk here. I came out as zoo to Ganymede kinda midway through my time here at ZDP, and the whole thing was received super nonchalantly and positively, and, I have run SO many vibe checks past it, on different articles and just being like "Is this coming across right?" and also just yapping about the latest zoo drama with it. Ganymede is a gem of queer solidarity.
 
 
Tarro, it's been real 🤙 We write so differently and yet so similarly as well. There have been so many times I've been looking at a piece we have on deck, and been like, "Wait, which one of us added this joke?" because I genuinely just can't guess if it came from my brain or yours. I really liked those times xxxZoophileHater666xxx hacked your account, as much as I do KEEP TELLING YOU that you NEED to change your passy after that happens. I think writing is often seen as a lonely pursuit where a secret manuscript has to live in your encrypted hard drive for at least 5 years as you perfect it all by yourself, and, my goodness is it way more fun to get content DONE and SEEN on an ASAP basis, and to talk shop on your WIPs with a partner in crime. I look forward to seeing the stuff that you continue to do here in the zoo community, racc friend.
 
 
Big ups to the rest of the team too! The tech team and the mods! zoo gang zoo gang!
 
 
And uh, I'll still be alive, like, don't worry about me :3 Maybe I'll go back to posting some suspiciously accurate feral fics again under the old name from before all this. Or, if you're really that curious, I think what's probably actually next for me is just, unplugging for a while, getting more face-to-face time with the queer people, non-zoo and zoo, in my local area.
 
 
I um, uh, gosh I dunno what I want my last words as editor-in-chief here to be.
 
 
Can I just make animal noises?
 
 
I think let's just have it be animal noises, I think that seems about right.
 
 
Stick together out there fellow zoos, whether you're making friends out there with other two-legger zoops, or whether you're a lucky duck with no choice but to stick together with that Golden Retriever for another 5-30 minutes!
 
 
takes a really big breath
 
 
bark bark bark!
 
 
 
 
Article written by Alissa Dogchurch (May 2026)
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