I met my first Crusty in person last night.

You never expect this kind of thing. You're sitting around with a group of friends, talking and laughing, and -- well, yes, alcohol is involved, but no one is getting smashed -- and someone who apparently has a desperate need to confess just throws it right out there on the table, where it lands with a nearly audible thump. The revelation slogs its way through eight or ten sets of booze-swamped subconscious synapses and a handful of conversations stumble to a halt. After a brief pause, one person has it together enough to say something, and that something usually comes out sounding like, "Uh, whut?"

Then the revelation is repeated: "Umm, my lobster suit is, um, it's too long for me, and my tail kinda drags, and I can't find anyone who can alter it for me... ?"

We're a fairly tolerant crowd, so no one gets up to leave or makes quiet gagging noises, as would probably have happened if someone had admitted to owning the entire discography plus some bootlegs of Flux Of Pink Indians. We're polite like that. Many of us are Southern, and our mommas raised us right.

I have a reputation as a jaded motherfucker, so I cover by taking another sip. Sometimes you just have to maintain.

I mention Flux Of Pink Indians because, being elderly, I remember that "Crusty" used to mean something else. There was once a musical movement way back in the nineties whose adherents were called crusties. "Crusty" was aboveground briefly, just long enough to get the term significantly muddled by the ignorant music-scene covering press. (This reportedly incited the infamous Crusty-Grebo Riot in a toilet somewhere in Grimsby where one person sustained a bruise and one other tried very hard but was eventually dragged away by his mother.) Crusties embodied the stereotype of increasing one's social consciousness while eschewing all forms of personal hygiene -- a stereotype previously pinned on hippies, pole-sitting hermits, and cash-poor stage magicians -- in this incarnation flavored by an agreed-upon infatuation with heavy-metal anarcho-punk bands. The term "militant vegan metalheads" sticks in the mind.

Speaking of militant vegans, and just to mention something else that falls outside the generous limits of my tolerance, I once terminated the haranguing of a (presumed) woman in a restaurant, after overhearing her (?) assaulted by the self-righteous sentence, "Well I don't eat anything with eyes!", by leaning in and injecting, "Don't listen. The eyes are the best part."

I'm familiar with Furries -- people who identify strongly with a particular animal with whom they feel they share traits. Among cultures that put less emphasis on which constellation of stars the sun would have risen in four thousand years before the exact day of your birth, people had totems animals (for instance) instead of Zodiac signs. Your animal was occasionally shared by your family or tribe, or perhaps you chose your own, or it chose you, or one was chosen for you by someone who at least had the chance to examine your developing personality and pick something appropriate. I find this setup a tad more likely than having such things governed by the moment of one's birth and the ludicrously tiny gravitic tug of distant planets that is completely mathematically overwhelmed by the larger gravitic tug that changes with the size of your delivering doctor's last meal or brand of catcher's mitt or whatever. I'm prepared to give someone who claims to be a Zebra the same amount of leeway I give someone who claims to be a Libra. At least.

Furries often feel more themselves, more personally powerful, when dressed as their animal selves. Joe Average finds this a bit weird, but Libras are probably just jealous because they don't have an outfit. Also, we associate people in animal suits with horribly preachy children's television programming, so we'd really rather not see that sort of thing in public unless we're allowed to carry guns. Sorry, Furries. Blame Barney the Singing Purple Dinosaur and the New Zoo Revue.

And then there's the "yiffy" stuff, about which the less said, the better. As far as I know, there's no yiffy musical movement that the term can be confused with, but if there is, it should certainly consider remaining underground as well. If you're a Furry and looking for respect, keep the yiffy stuff in the bedroom. Or kennel. Or crate. Or what have you. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but if people aren't a part of your kink, they're just going to think "New Zoo Revue blooper reels." Until people are open-minded enough to give you a dedicated section at the adult video stores like they've done for scat, golden showers, and latex, you're stuck with postage-stamp-sized video segments on the internet. Besides, there's no Zodiac porn either. Until then, suck it up.

And then there are Crusties.

Here are some things I learned last night. You've gotten the hint already from the lobster suit that "Crusty" might be derived from "crustacean," but "Crusty" actually includes identification with any sort of animal with an exoskeleton. "Buggy" was considered in the early days apparently but was discarded for reasons of ambiguity. Other debates have been waged over whether the term should apply just to anthropoarthropods, as opposed to including shelled gastropods, bivalves, and other armored creatures. Saurians and reptiles (tortoises, for instance) have already been excluded from the Crusty subset as they are already welcome in more mainstream Furry society.

Say it out loud with me: “Mainstream Furry Society.”

The tendency to yiffy (or "clicky", as it is termed among the Crusty subset) is quite a bit less prevalent, given the mating habits of crustaceans, who, like many Internet-based subcultures, rarely meet one another during sex. Insectile sex habits are also a bit difficult to model anthropomorphically, given the requirement of finding a dozen or so drones to assist or finding someone who is willing to let you eat his head while he finishes up, and trapezes to simulate mating while flying require quite a bit of amateur engineering and/or long complicated explanations to the paramedics when they arrive.

In any case, what distinguishes a Crusty from a Furry is not just a layer of metaphorical armor, personality-wise, but the fact that that armor is worn on the skin (for non-mollusks) and only shed (for non-mollusks) when it is time to grow or transform. Personal growth and personal transformation (as well as personal armor) tend to be dominant factors in variant forms of Crusty identity.

So it's a little esoteric. Almost everything is.

Laurie the Lobster admitted to finding her Crusty nature when she was issued the lobster suit to wear for a conference sponsored by the Arthritis and Rheumatism Institute. ("Why a lobster?" "It's red, it's angry, it's an arthropod ... Maybe it's all they could come up with?") Lori managed to hold onto the suit by dint of being the only one on her team who was remotely willing to wear it in the first place, and she has learned to treasure the suit as a nearly-sanctioned mode of Crusty expression -- at least when the Arthritis & Rheumatism circus is in town.

Crusties feel the need to band together for mutual support because the creatures with which they identify are hardly ever anthropomorphized in popular culture, and when they are, they are rarely depicted with favorable traits. The old Disney movie versions of Robin Hood and The Jungle Book and -- in fact, just about any classic Disney animated feature -- after school and Saturday morning cartoons, funny talking animal comics.... There's just not much there to work with. Arthropods and shelled gastropods just aren't cuddly enough to appeal to children. (Zorak, from the old Space Ghost cartoon, was originally strictly a villain, but could now go either way after his resurrection in Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast. Still not cuddly, nor much of a role model.)

The Little Mermaid, Spongebob Squarepants, Antz, A Bug's Life… All of these are very recent and whatever pro-Crusty depictions are in them are assumed to be partly influenced by a hard-working Crusty underground lobby group in Hollywood.

But the punch line, the absolute punch line to yesterday evening, was another woman at our table saying, "Really?! What a coincidence! I'm a whelk!"