My summer with gay furry fiction (and how I popped my visual novel cherry)

I've spent much of my summer with gay-themed furry fiction and it all started with reading Circles for the first time. For the uninitiated, Circles is a community-famous comic by Steve Domanski, Scott Fabianek and Andrew French - a slice-of-life story centered around a found family of six gay men (+ their expanded social circle) living in the same house, glimpsing into moments of their life through both good times and bad across a couple of years in the early 2000s. The first chapter was originally published online in 2001 and the following chapters appeared sporadically through the next several years due to various schedule slips. This might have been a blessing in disguise in the end: between each chapter both the art and writing grew in detail and nuance and by proxy the creators seemed to learn more about the characters themselves as time passed, their personalities growing deeper with each issue. The final five or so chapters were all released in bulk in 2015 in the form of a…