Zoo Pride Week 2025
Hello Zoos and Zoo friends! Happy zoo pride week 2025! It's a time for celebration. The zoos have made it another trip around the sun and look at that, we're still here, bigger and better than ever! I hope that you've got some fun things going on for the week, whether that's a great date planned out with your partner, or meeting up with some fellow zoos and just taking the excuse to have a bit of a party, or even just making something cool for the internet community to enjoy and engage with, this week is all about celebrating being zooey, because being zoosexual is awesome!
That's right, it's official. Being a zoo isn't just something you are, it's something that makes you cool as hell. And I can prove it!
Being a part of the zoo community makes you a better person. It's true! When you're someone that really engages with the community at large, and embraces the zooey side of yourself, you really get the chance to develop, and learn a lot, and open yourself up more to the world around you. It's not just me that thinks that either!
"I'd say the most important thing i got out of joining the zoo community is a place i can be myself with no filter and make friends that way. Its great to help people come to healthy terms with who they are and show them that they dont need to be different than that to have a crowd which they belong in, so long as they work to be the best version of themselves while there. Hiding a non harmful part of you is a heavy burden." - Fawnly
And it's so awesome that we all have a space together where we can have those kinds of connections. We've talked about it a lot here on the magazine, but being able to be yourself and speak to your zoosexuality with your whole chest is such a weight off of your shoulders. Being a part of a sexual minority can so often feel like you're carrying something that nobody else understands. Being able to be with other people like yourself, with the same struggles is so therapeutic. Not only does it let you relate with other people carrying the same load, but it also just lessens the weight altogether. It's so interesting. People new to the community talk a lot about how hard it is to be a zoo, but then if you talk to people with lots of zoo friends who are well connected, it's just a part of everyday life to them. Sure there's stuff we can improve on, but being a zoo no longer acts like an additional struggle in itself. Which is amazing!
But, I'm sure that's how most people expected this article to go, right? Being a zoo makes me feel connected to other zoos and that's nice, article written by Tarro yada yada. We aren't even close to done yet. Of course yes that's great, but there's actually so many more ways the zoo community helps people. For instance...
"Being a part of the community indeed did some changes with how outgoing I am. I got much more courage to come out to people and with being more and more out, I was able to even build my own safespaces across discord and telegram where me and other zoos can be themselves. Being in the community also showed me other people's life experiences which I didn't even think about and made me even more understanding of other's struggles. I even got ambitions of building larger spaces, although that needs some time to be done correctly. So far I'm happy with how it helped be be more connected with people, be it across the worldwide community, or the smaller local spaces I've built." -Kracc
Being a part of a community isn't just making a Twitter account and posting "dog" one time, it's a network of other people existing in proximity to each other. And within that proximity, you interact with others! We live in a very digital world right now, and it's very easy to just live your life with minimum interaction to other people, even within those online spaces. It's so cool having a space where you're excited to exist, and have those connections happen naturally. So many people joined the Discord server and slowly over time would send maybe one message here, and then another there, and over time they would participate more and more until eventually they say that they joined just to lurk but eventually wanted to be a part of the conversation. That's so cool! Being a part of a growing community like this can also encourage you to take on more responsibility, try new things, and learn how to facilitate teams! I think it's amazing that someone can learn about how to foster really awesome friend groups because they wanted to create zoo groups and then used those skills outside the community too.
Speaking of growing skills outside the community, isn't it awesome that the zoo community gives you a space to practice your craft in a super low stakes environment too?
"I had been a zoo lurker for a long time online, dodging discourse and keeping my head down. The crack in the door I needed was binging the first two seasons of Zooier Than Thou when I saw it had continued for more than a few episodes. Since then, the community link I found there, as well as having had a presence on zoo twitter, has allowed me to safely come out to people I'd been deathly afraid of finding out and given me the opportunity to have deeper relationships with other people who just so happened to also be zoos. Having a community space to let me breathe has since allowed my zoo art to flourish and allowed me to give back to the community using my skills." -Ryder
One of my favorite things about the zoo community is how positive a space it is for creators. I put out a shitty cover of a Macklemore song a year ago and I still have people from time to time messaging me to tell me how much they love it. Zoos in the community just love to see art representative of their experiences, and so are eager to promote and consume it. I mean, how awesome is it that someone can go from listening to a zoo podcast to helping to produce it, just because they have the time and energy to put into that same project? When you're making something for the zoo community, there's no stakes. No pressure. People are going to love it, you're going to find people that respond super positively, and you'll be able to find other people happy to talk with you about how to improve as well. I honestly think that the zoo community is one of the best possible spaces to learn a new artistic hobby in the world. There's just so much love here for anything like that. If you want to learn to write, to draw, to knit, whatever, you can do it within the community and find a ton of people eager to engage with you.
And when you do find people to engage with, guess what? It's not like you're uploading your content on YouTube and hoping you get views, you're getting engagement from real, tangible people. And then, if you really want to get crazy, you can even just talk with those people. You can make friends!
"When I think of the zoo community, I sometimes think about the gay scene in the US back in the 70s and 80s. The height of the gay panic and the AIDs epidemic coincided with the free-love and party culture of the decades, and LGBT people were forced underground, to meet, to connect, to enjoy who they were, away from a society that wasn't ready to accept them yet.
God, are we lucky - we don't have a deadly disease killing our number (I've heard tales that people at the time would have stacks of funeral memoriums) - but I imagine that, despite the risks, despite the stigma, they still met up for the same reason we do.
We were born this way. And we just want someone to talk to who's like us. Who'll tell us that it's okay.
I'm lucky. I haven't needed to be rescued from the shame the world forces onto some zoos. Not to say I've not been affected - the zoo community has been little flares of delight in my life. Convention meetups have been incredible, getting to be on zooey podcasts, writing directly for the community... and it seems that every friend I find that I can share this love with, we become so much closer.
But the zoo community has changed my friends. It has taught them that they're okay. That there's nothing wrong with them. And most of all - that they're loved. And in that way, it has changed me - it has meant those friends have been strong enough to reach out, to ask, to find new friendships. It has meant a larger community, that supports each other. That hugs, that shares, that spreads kindness.
This community has helped so many people find who they are, and love that part of themselves. And isn't that the highest goal of any community?"
- Spades Slick
Confidence is one thing, but it's a whole other to actually be able to meet and engage with people who are cool and awesome. But the best thing is when you can make friends with someone that already knows your deep dark secret, and the best part is, they have the same secret too. Friendships built with that level of immediate depth are just so much more immediately impactful. I love my non-zoo friends, don't get me wrong. But the wall I have to build around this one specific part of myself is still a wall in the way of our friendship, and my choices are either to just accept that, or to come out to them and hope for the best. Sometimes that works, and that's fantastic, but even then we're still talking about an experience they just don't understand. Unless they happen to be a zoo as well, and then it's a win win!
And the best part is, the zoo community is FULL of people that make for fantastic friends. The first interview in this magazine I ever did was with Toggle, the co-creator of Zooier Than Thou. He asked if we could delay the interview because he had a movie he wanted to watch and I was too awkward and embarrassed to try and reschedule, so I stayed up until 3AM just to START the conversation. Now, I consider him a friend and someone I'm always excited to see a message from. There are SO many people that I met through the community that I now consider extremely close. It's funny, we all interact through this lens of our "zoo-sonas" and you might think that causes us to get less close, but if anything it makes it so much more impactful when I get to make friends with someone awesome and then also they let me peek behind the mask every now and then.
But there's one more angle that I think the zoo community really makes people better, and it's maybe the most important way of all.
"Initially, my attraction to animals was simple. I found dogs appealing, and that was the extent of it. I started connecting with other zoosexuals mainly to explore explicit content. However, that led me to discover much more. I started listening to Zooier Than Thou and began forming friendships in online communities, which opened my eyes to animal rights. Now, I consider myself an animal activist. I’ve adopted a vegetarian lifestyle, and hope to one day make the jump to veganism. Even without an animal partner, I’ve learned a great deal about ethical training methods, and I can teach others in my life about how to be the best pet owner for their animals. This journey has deepened my empathy for animals and inspires me to advocate for their well-being. Not just for dogs, but for all the animals out there that share the world with us." -Anonymous
To me, This is such an impactful thing to get out of the zoo community. All the socializing stuff is great, don't get me wrong, but being able to show other humans why animals deserve love and respect is so cool. Animal rights and veganism are obviously topics that come up a lot in the normal zoo circles, but also I think it's great that as the community grows, and more people are enticed to join for whatever reasons they feel like they want to, they come to learn more about ethics and actually make life changes in positive directions. The fight for zoo rights is one thing, but the fight for animal rights is a whole other. Arguably, it's an even harder struggle considering there's no financial implications tied up in whether or not you're allowed to smooch your dog, but there absolutely are when it comes to whether or not we can mass slaughter animals to feed the McDonald's bottom line. If the zoo community can actively make the world a better place for animals out there, I'd say that's a pretty good sign we're doing something right!
I love being a zoo. I love the zoo community. I love this weird little corner of the internet that we've carved out for ourselves by tooth and nail, and I love being able to take those friendships and go out into the world to meet with real life other people who somehow already mean more to me than people I've known in real life for years.
This is my third year really celebrating zoo pride week, and it means so much more to me every year. I'm so proud of what we've done. I'm so happy that we can be such an amazing and supportive place for zoos from around the world, and I can't wait to see how we grow from here. In fifteen years when we have banks sponsoring zoo pride week and people online are complaining about zoo pride washing, I'm going to come back to this article and remind myself of where it all came from.
Happy zoo pride week, dear readers! Give your partners a pat for me, and then go and have some fun. You deserve it!
Article written by Tarro (July 2025)
Find Tarro at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo
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