Jack Newhorse

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Jack Newhorse, drawn as an emcee. Art by Littlest Siggy.
Jack Newhorse with his former name (Tom Howling) as a human. Art by Marci McAdam.

Jack Newhorse (formerly Tom Howling, né Tom Geller; born in 1968) is a furry who lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has been involved in the fandom since 1998 and is the President ("Voorzitter") of the Dutch furry nonprofit, Stichting Otterdam, which runs the occasional dance event Otterdance.

Fandom involvement[edit]

Jack became involved in the furry fandom in late 1998 and was active in Bay Area Furry events before moving to Oberlin, Ohio in the late 2000s, and then to The Netherlands in 2016. He is the founder of the furry nightclub Otterdance, an occasional furry dance party in Rotterdam, and is the president ("Voorzitter") and co-founder of Stichting Otterdam.

As a child, Jack had a special affinity for dolphins, and was deeply affected by the anthropomorphic characters in The Chronicles of Narnia. He first encountered the furry community in a room party at the 1993 WorldCon in San Francisco (ConFrancisco), but didn't get involved until reading the August 26 1998 cover story in the alternative newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, titled Furries.

He sought out the Bay Area furry clan. He started going to furry coffee, a furmeet held at the Internet cafe CyberCafes in Sunnyvale, California, joined various online discussion groups, and participated in the first Further Confusion in January 1999.

Fursona[edit]

In 2015 he created Jack Newhorse as an "After Dark" (AD, sex-oriented) character, and he eventually adopted it as his main fursona. Before that, his fursona didn't have a specific W:genotype, although he's been portrayed as a wolf, fox, and mouse. He took the name Tom Howling with no specific species in mind, thinking instead that many animals howl in one way or another. He's occasionally appeared under other names, most notably Veggie Fried Mouse, but only temporarily.

From 2009 to 2016 he commissioned several badges that depict him as a human, which he feels to be a member of the animal community on par with all others.

Mundane biography[edit]

Tom grew up in Westchester County, New York, USA. Growing up, he focused mostly on theater, writing, and music, spending three summers at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and three at other music camps.

He eventually went to Oberlin Conservatory and University Of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music, from which he graduated cum laude with a B.Mus in Composition in 1991.

He worked for six months at the World Esperanto Association in Rotterdam before returning to his newly adopted city of San Francisco, where he lived there until early 2009 when he moved back to Oberlin, Ohio. He returned to Rotterdam in 2016 and became a Dutch citizen in 2022.

He is a freelance writer and video journalist and has also worked in print publication, public relations, real estate, and nonprofit administration. As a writer he counted among his clients The San Francisco Chronicle, Apple Inc., and The Chemical Heritage Foundation. He's created over 20 instructional video series for LinkedIn Learning on topics including writing and web development[1].

Convention attendance[edit]

This list only covers those through 2017 for which he has a printed program, as is shown in a video recorded on 25 December 2023 [2].

References[edit]

  1. LinkedIn Learning's instructor page on LinkedIn (requires login). Retrieved ?.
  2. Special: Furry convention programs (until 2017), YouTube.

External links[edit]

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