The Dark Underside of the Zoo Community

When I was younger, people used to tell me all kinds of things about gay folks. Especially if those people were trying to persuade me not to be gay. I heard all the time about the *devious* gay lifestyle. The way that everyone in the gay community was a drug addict with no respect for their self, or their body. I was told many times by many people that while the act of being gay itself might be defensible, the things that come along with the gayness were the proof of how sinful the lifestyle was. It's a trope in storytelling that the teenager living in the country becomes gay and decides to move to the city and that was something I heard all the time. Every previous gay person in the small town where I was from fled to the urban center somewhat near by, and then fell off the face of the earth, no doubt in the midst of some kind of drug fueled satanist orgy, if they aren't already dead from overdose or all the sexual diseases that come from the gay lifestyle.
 
 
And I mean, technically speaking, these things aren't all lies.
 
 
There are certainly queer people that do drugs. I've not only known plenty, but I've been one of them in the past! And, there are certainly queer people that do live a promiscuous lifestyle, with multiple partners, sexual or romantic or both. Hooking up is just more of a thing amongst queer folks. Queers do also tend to be more likely to live in the city. They're also more likely to have a negative relationship with their families. In my experience at least anyway.
 
 
My point is this. You could argue that all of those stereotypes are technically true to some extent. But does that mean that bigotry is good and correct and that we should stand against queerness in all aspects?
 
 
Anyway, let's take a litle tangent, and then we'll come back to this a bit later. Let's quickly talk about some gay history!
 
 
What is gay culture? Obviously there are lots of gays and therefore also lots of 
different ways that gay people are. But, at the same time there absolutely was and is a specific kind of culture that tends to be seen as gay culture. Leather and harnesses  and dark clubs and this and that. Nowadays that's definitely shifted a little bit, but that was the thing back in the early 70s and 80s when the gay rights movement was 
really taking shape.
 
 
In fact, one of the most popular gay artists of the mid 1900s was a man that went by the alias Tom of Finland, and he was extremely well known for being someone who was willing to draw homosexuality in a way that was very honest. I can't share any of his art here because wow he loved drawing very explicit stuff. But good 'ol Tommy LOVED his kink. He loved his leather. He loved drawing control in various aspects. He drew a lot of cops and soldiers and such, and clearly adored a man in uniform.
 
 
Tom of Finland is a beloved gay icon, and someone that did SO much for the early queer movement. His art is featured in both museums and bath houses to this day. I think he's so brave for being so open about his attraction in a time where it was extremely illegal to do so. But let's be real here for a second. What he did was draw a lot of porn of his niche and that happened to be something that resonated with people. He wasn't out there getting into politics, or delivering massive speeches or anything. He was drawing porn.
 
 
And that's great! He clearly made art that was really important to people, at a time that they needed it. But also, it was used CONSTANTLY by people who were against the gay rights movement to show that all gay people were just deviants and perverts. It's easy to point at his art and say "well, this is just big buff guys in leather getting down with each other. That isn't very culturally significant, or inspirational." In fact, when mainstream news used to cover topics like bath houses or cruising culture, they'd frequently do so with his art to convey it. He was giving the enemies the ammunition they were trying to use to shoot us with. Isn't that... bad?
 
 
Wouldn't it be crazy if instead of resolving either of these topics, we instead switch to a third topic? Let's talk about fetishism.
 
 
As zoosexuals, we have stereotypes about us as well. That we're all animal rapists. That the animals in our lives are just sex toys. That we don't really care about them, or what they want, we only care about ourselves. It's similar to the criticisms thrown towards gay people, although the flavor is just a little different. And I think it's really frustrating sometimes because it's not like zoos are amazing at creating a united front against that notion. Arguably the biggest zoo space on the internet currently is the ZooVille forum, which is a site notorious for hosting all kinds of abusive or, at the very least, questionable content on it. As a zoo on twitter I get people messaging me somewhat frequently asking if I want to trade content, or if I know of anywhere they can meet people with animals that they can have sex with. All of those things are varying degrees of bad. Objectively bad.
 
 
Still, I can't help but wonder about where that comes from in people. I mean, surely most people know that it's weird and inappropriate for you to DM someone and ask if they have any videos of themselves having sex with their partner. I feel like that's a pretty clear social faux pau. And yet, it does happen. I'm sure that rationally people understand how weird it is to join a zoo chat marked clearly as SFW with their name "DogDickLuvr" and their pfp a genital close up, right?
 
 
So why are they doing it here? Is it because zoophiles are all sex obsessed freaks? Is it because the stereotypes were right and everyone that loves animals is just a fetishist in secret?
 
 
Let's get to the point here. I think that there's a really interesting phenomenon to be observed when it comes to sexuality in the zoo community. When I was young and hearing all these terrible things about gay people, it wasn't just from straight people in my life. Even other gay people would enforce those same stereotypes to me. When I moved away from my small town to the urban center near me, and made friends with folks that did drugs and slept around a lot, I was warned by those same people about how there are some people in the local queer community who did MORE drugs and were MORE promiscuous, filled with all kinds of diseases, who had no respect for their selves or their bodies. I was warned by my gay friends that plenty of gay people fall into degenerate lifestyles, and it was something I had to avoid.
 
 
And again, it's not like they're completely wrong. There ARE queer people that overdose and die, or bug chase and end up really hurting themselves. Those things are, again, true. But also, I want to be queer! And when I think about being queer, it's not always standing on my porch waving a rainbow flag and screaming "I love people of my gender!" I would argue that's a much less queer experience than having sex with someone of your gender instead. That's the part that I'm here for, and the flag and pride and what not are the things that we do in order to be able to do that first part safely. Being gay is being attracted to people of your gender. Being bisexual is being attracted people of either gender. That doesn't mean that that's the full gay experience encompassed, but at the same time I think it's worth understanding that the thing that actually makes me different is the sexual attraction, and when I talk with other people of similar attractions, that's the thing that I know we both have in common.
 
 
And of course, when I joined the zoo community, I got very similar "bewares". When I finally started making friends with other zoos, I was told over and over that there are some zoos that are "good", and the rest are "bad", and that there was no middle ground. I mean sure, we were all in a group dedicated to sharing porn because that's what you do in many zoo groups. Everyone talks about how hot dogs are and swaps their favorite pictures and videos. But you need to do it while saying a prayer and outcrying your ethical frameworks to let everyone around you know that you are in fact one of the good ones.
 
 
I think this is all stupid. Like, just incredibly dumb. And it's really frustrating to see this pattern repeat itself over and over again.
 
 
Let's make something clear before diving into my point. There are bad zoos out there. There are people that rape animals for fun, and want to cause pain, and who do not care about animals at all. That is not okay in any way. But also, there are gay people that do the same to humans, who are psychopaths, who just want to bring misery into the world. And there are also straight people like that too. Evil is something that just exists in people, it doesn't matter who they are. Trying to say that one group is evil because there are some evil people in it is
 
pointless, since you could say the same about every group of people.
With that said, I think we in the zoo community are way too quick to try and label everything we don't like as abusive, and everyone we don't like as abusers. And, I think we're way too quick to try and put up walls and fences around "ethical" zoos vs "unethical" zoos.
 
 
I don't think it's wrong for someone to just really like porn. I don't think it's wrong for people to try and create porn, or share it with their friends, or social media at large. I think there's honest value in accounts that are just interested in being in places where horny zoos can come to drop a load off, so to speak. I don't think anything about that is inherently immoral.
 
 
I think that trying to ignore the sex in our sexuality is only going to make it seem like our sexuality isn't something worth fighting for. And I don't know about everyone else reading this, but for me I do think that it's only going to hurt us if we try and pretend that the sex part is something that doesn't exist in the eyes of the greater mainstream. Especially because we need to be honest about where we are as a movement right now.
 
 
It's a lot easier to be a gay activist today than it was in the 1930s. In most places in the world anyway. I can go out onto my porch and scream about how much I love kissing people of my gender and while I might get a noise complaint, I'm not going to get arrested for that belief. Queer activism is still important, we don't live in a perfect world, and that's been made even more clear in the last year or two. But, saying "I stand with gay people and believe in their right to get married" means something totally different when you say it today compared to if you said it back in the day.
 
 
I think as a movement ourselves, we're coming at it from the perspective of post-liberation. We see the progress gay rights have made and we want to get to the point where we can do the fun part, without the hard part. But long before people were saying that they believe in gay marriage, they were meeting up in dingy clubs and bath houses to do drugs and have sex and share gay porn, which at the time was all incredibly illegal and seen as super immoral.
 
 
I don't think the gays at the time doing that instead of marching or organizing were bad people for doing so. In fact, I consider the fact that they engaged with their sexuality in any capacity to be an act of bravery. And yet, if you look at it from the outside, people would use the gays doing those things as evidence of their bigotry, and the basis for their beliefs. Does that mean that being that kind of gay was morally wrong? When you're being oppressed, existence is a form of resistance. But I think within the zoo community we're looking to chastise those people for existing in "bad" spaces rather than trying to adapt to places that we're more approving of.
 
 
The issue with that, is that it doesn't really look at the situation realistically. First of all, people need to know that other alternatives exist. ZooVille is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than other spaces, including our own ZDPM. If you Google "bestiality chat" or "zoophilia chat", you're getting 90% just straight up porn sites, and then ZooVille, which at the very least is something that has a social element to it. And if you're a zoo just looking to find other people like you, that's your default option. And if your experience with the zoo community is just ZooVille, it makes total sense why you'd think that that's just what the zoo community is, and that's how zoos in general are. It makes way more sense why someone would DM me asking to trade zoo pictures if most of their conversations with zoos has been while sharing zoo pictures with each other.
 
 
The other thing to consider is that most more ethically minded spaces don't really have great options for giving people a place to express their sexuality in a more practical sense. Most of the really horny chats I know of are small and private. If you're someone new to the community, there's a good chance you're reaching out because you want to explore the sexuality part of this all. Most people find the community through porn, it's just a fact. And if you're looking between a SFW chat that's fun but heavily moderated, and a place with few restrictions, it's not hard to see why someone might pick that second option. Especially because when people are first dipping their toes in, they're not necessarily making an account that represents them as a person. If you have an account you're making just as a throwaway because either you don't know what to expect, or you maybe do know what to expect but you're looking for an account to use specifically while directly engaging with your sexuality, you're not as likely to care about presenting other aspects of yourself. Why would you spend time talking about how much you love and respect animals when you're on the account you sign into just to jack off and then switch back? Just because an account posts only porn, doesn't mean that the person that runs it doesn't care about other causes. That's just not necessarily what they care to have their footprint on the internet as.
 
 
I guess, to wrap things up here, I just want to ask people to have a little bit more openness, and be willing to allow for a bit more nuance when it comes to engaging with the supposed "dark undercurrent of the zoo community." Because not only do I think that perpetuating the negative stereotypes other people tell about us makes everything just feel more dingy and toxic, but also because making judgments of people just because they happen to be in a different place than you doesn't lead to a better community. It just leads to a smaller one. If we want to build a community that's safe, strong and animal first, we need to let people in and show them why all this matters, not push them away because their initial impressions don't match our purity test.
 
 
I wanna end off this already long article with a bit of a story. The other day, I has someone reach out to me with a username that was essentially knotgooner69, and they messaged me to ask me if I knew of any chill zoo spaces that weren't so focused on porn all the time. We got talking, and I ended up asking them why it was that that was their name. They said the reason they picked it is because they thought it would be funny. They figured that zoos would see it and find it to be a joke and have a bit of a laugh. Since then, he's joined the Zooey Dot Pub Matrix server (under a different name), and I've seen him in there a bunch chatting with folks in a chill safe for work space. He's far from the only one I've seen make this change. We've just gotta give people the faith and room to learn and grow. Because who knows, maybe in 40 years we'll be building up museums dedicated to knotgooner69 and the way that they culturally contributed to the freedoms we'll have by then.
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (June 2026) 
 
 
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